THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE (PT. I)
An 'Opportunity' for Writers
by: Todd Steven Burroughs
The New Negroes had arrived! There they are, he and she: the vanguard of new political and social movements! See them proudly stride, and fight!
And write.
Because the artistic movement now known as the Harlem Renaissance, the time roughly between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression, was underway.
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The late Dorothy West remembered very clearly how her literary career started: she left Boston University for New York City after reading her aunt's copy of The Crisis, the organ of the NAACP and the premier Black socio-political and literary medium of its time. She also remembers when she submitted "The Typewriter," her short story, to the literary contest sponsored by Opportunity, another prominent Black political-social magazine which was also the organ of the National Urban League. "The Typewriter" tied with a Zora Neale Hurston submission for second place in Opportunity's literary contest at the height of the Renaissance.
The Opportunity literary contest signaled a new day for Black writing: a day in which national "mass" Black magazines would provide forums for new Black creative writers, introducing them to both Black and White Americans.
Scholar Gary Wintz writes that before the Harlem Renaissance, Black creative writers "published initial work primarily in White magazines, and their initial literary contacts were generally with White writers and editors." (I'm assuming Wintz is referring only to 20th century "mass" magazines, because such a view omits the pioneering Black magazines and newspapers of the 19th century that published a variety of different types of writing.)
The late great historian-short story author John Henrik Clarke writes that The Crisis and Opportunity were "the major magazine outlets for new Black writers in the 1920s and 1930s."
These Black magazines were written for an artistic and intellectual elite, in comparison to the mostly regional Black newspapers published for the masses. These organs of respected national Black organizations carried status in both Black and White communities--a fact not lost on the artists and the publications' editors.
Between 1923, the year Opportunity premiered (as an outgrowth of The Urban League Bulletin), and 1927, the year in which the contests were suspended or drastically changed, both magazines did more to define the scope and shape of the Harlem Renaissance than any other public medium except for Alain Locke's 1925 anthology "The New Negro."
Locke, a Howard University professor, got the opportunity to author the book after a Writer's Guild meeting held the previous year was organized by Black leaders, including Opportunity editor Charles Spurgeon Johnson.
The official purpose of the March 1924 meeting was to celebrate the publishing of Crisis literary editor Jessie Fauset's novel, "There Is Confusion." The unofficial purpose of the get-together was to introduce leading White literary editors, including editors of Survey Graphic, a prestigious white magazine, to young Black artists such as poet Countee Cullen who either had been or would soon be published in Opportunity.
The meeting went well. Graphic was interested in publishing a special edition on Harlem. Johnson asked Locke to edit it. It was titled "Harlem: The Mecca of the New Negro." Locke's book came out of the issue, and Opportunity's commitment to Black arts came out of the meeting.
The Crisis produced "special issues" and literary contests at the same time as Opportunity. Both magazines, write scholars Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Mayberry Johnson, were "discreetly silent over the other's respective efforts," even though they, for the most part, shared the same contestants.
But the contestants weren't the only shared element. It could also be said the contests were held for the same purpose: helping to foster and create a literature that could be seen by the world at large as coming from a strong, proud race.
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