Lecture 10 Notes

The New Negro

The War Years

• There was some debate among the black community regarding their involvement in World War I.  This was best symbolized by the split between A. Phillip Randolph and the “establishment” which included W. E. B. Du Bois, the NAACP, and Urban League.
• Over 400,000 blacks served in the army in WWI, half of them in Europe and more than 40,000 of them in combat.  They had been placed in segregated units, under the command of white officers who often held them in contempt.
• The black troops had endured these humiliations in the belief that their service would earn them the gratitude of the nation, and thus increased freedoms.
• 1917 saw racial disturbances in Houston, Philadelphia, and East St. Louis, where 49 people, 39 of them African American, were killed.

1919 - The Pivotal Year

• In the years immediately following WWI, no meeting of a national organization of African Americans neglected to register its protest against the failure of the U.S. to grant them first class citizenship.
• In July 1919, the NAACP meeting in Cleveland adopted resolutions expressing its great concern of the status of blacks.  In the following months, the National Equal Rights League, the National Race Congress, and the National Baptist Convention declared themselves in favor a more complete integration of African Americans into American life.
• The NAACP was the most forceful and they confronted the continuing practice of lynching.  In 1921, they convinced Rep. L. C. Dyer of Missouri to introduce in the House a bill “to assure to persons within the jurisdiction of every state the equal protection of the laws, and to punish the crime of lynching.”  The bill passed the House but failed in the Senate.  (The Senate repeatedly turned down anti-lynching bills, and never passed one.)
• By 1919, the racial climate had become rather savage at the same time African Americans sought integration and freedom from terrorist activities in the South, as lynching was increasing during the period.
• In the North, black factory workers faced widespread layoffs as returning white veterans displaced them from their jobs.
• Black soldiers were disillusioned when they returned to find a society still unwilling to grant them any significant opportunities for advancement.
• Chicanos, too, were aggravated to learn that their importation by northern industrial companies turned to deportation after the war ended.  Even in a city as close to Notre Dame as Whiting, Indiana, had imported Mexicans to work in war plants.  They had been promised that they could stay, but that promise was rescinded.
• Rural black migrants found northern communities hostile to their presence, as whites became convinced that African American workers with lower wage demands were hurting them economically.
• There were a number of clashes between these contending forces, with the most prominent being the Chicago race riot of 1919.  Beginning on July 27, the riots lasted for several days and ended only after some 6000 National Guard troops were deployed to re-establish order.  Violence occurred throughout the city, but was concentrated in the city's so-called Black Belt.  In its aftermath, 38 people were killed, 537 injured, and approximately 1000 left homeless.
• After the riot, Governor Lowden appointed a commission to study the causes of the outbreak and the general status of race relations in Chicago.  The study found a sharply delineated black ghetto, separated from the white community by a high though unofficial wall of segregation and discrimination.  Within this "wall," 250,000 blacks maintained a community life that, on the surface at least, seemed virtually independent of white Chicago.  They had their own civic and social institutions, congregated in their own churches, operated their own business, and ran their own political machine.  In short, the black ghetto was a breeding ground for the New Negro.

The New Negro

• The New Negro refused to accept political strictures and felt deserving of equal rights after the war.
• There was a flowering of African American culture in northern urban centers despite the evil eye cast upon newcomers by older, established blacks.
• Nearly half a million blacks migrated from the rural South to industrial cities in the North, a process known as the Great Migration.
• The move north was one for economic and political advancement.  Most moved for greater economic prospects.  Labor agents were sent from northern industries to entice blacks to move.  Agents provided workers with offers of free transportation and instant employment.  Many moved based primarily on the desire to live in an area they believed was free of racial prejudice.
• The NAACP urged blacks to fight back, to defend themselves, and to demand government protection.
• In the summer of 1919, 120 people died in racial outbreaks (not including lynching) in the space of three months.

Collateral Issues

• The immediate post-war period was marked by the suppression of radicals and socialists, known as the Red Scare and marked by aggressive action by the Attorney General.
• WWI had been the most unpopular war in US history, being highly contested and debated both before and after the US entered.  More than 1500 people were arrested in 1918 for the crime of criticizing the government.  Immigrants, especially Irish-Americans and Jews, were targeted because of their pre-war animosities.  Germans, of course, were the most targeted.
• The war ended sooner than almost anyone had anticipated, and without warning or planning, the country was thrust into economic reconversion.  Inflation wiped out the modest wage gains workers had achieved during the war.  By 1919, inflation was out of control.  Workers were worried about job security. 
• Employers began to disregard unions, something they couldn’t do during the war because of government controls.  There were 3600 strikes in 1919, involving 4 million people.

Harlem Renaissance

• A discussion of the Renaissance encompasses much of what we’ve discussed in regards to the early twentieth-century African American experience, including the New Negro, class dimensions w/i the black community, and white philanthropy and direction.
• Renaissance is generally known as the flowering of African American culture.
• Centered in Harlem, New York City, it lasted roughly between 1919 and 1926.
• Largely directed by Alaine Locke, Charles Johnson (Urban League), and W. E. B. Du Bois (NAACP).
• Johnson had been part of the commission that had studied the Chicago riots.  He really believed that the races were harmed by their inability to see past race and not recognize their shared economic oppression.  He acknowledged that whites were determined to keep blacks out of jobs, labor unions, and political circles -- out of the North and fearful for his life in the South.  Blacks were being “put in their place.”  The New Negro whom we evidenced last week was facing opposition for his newfound assertiveness.
• Johnson thought it foolish to fight whites directly because it was mere folly.  He believed there was only one area alone, perhaps because of its very implausibility, which had not been proscribed.  No exclusionary rules had been laid down regarding a place in the arts.  Each book, play, poem, or artistic work would be a weapon against preconceived notions of black inferiority.
• In the Renaissance we see something of a marriage between Du Bois and Washington.  Although these two guys are usually pitted against one another, they really were more similar than we usually assume:  both sought to uplift the race; both agreed that education was the key to uplift; both agreed that there were relatively few able people to lead blacks to a higher level.  Their difference was in their means.  The Urban League and the NAACP more or less represented the different thinking of the two men.  But their real difference was in the areas of the nature of education and political agitation.
• Charles Johnson was cognizant of the two prevailing ideologies surrounding African-American uplift, and he offered a marriage of the two.  He defining the "talented tenth" as those who could produce great artistic works.  Coupling that with a recognition that political advancement would be made as a result of their labor in a seemingly distinct field, Johnson sought to bring about his true goal -- racial uplift, political advancement, and assimilation.
• The Harlem Renaissance was essentially an effort at racial progress in an area left open for them largely by neglect, the arts.  Some have called it "civil rights by copyright."

Direction

• Works produced in the Renaissance were directed in the sense that they were done to represent the best of African American life and culture.
• Johnson and others did not want work that depicted the lives of black folk as they really lived; rather, the intent was to show the abilities blacks had in achieving the standards set by western art.
• We are familiar with artists such as Langston Hughes, Charles McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, but they came later in the story.  We are less familiar with the earlier artists such as Jessie Fauset or Jean Toomer.
• The Renaissance tempered the fire of the New Negro and directed it toward the arts.
• Johnson was smart, but he could not have recognized the increasingly commercialism that would come to dominate the arts.  One example of this is Paul Robeson.
• Also, film became increasingly pre-eminent, and blacks weren't part of the scene.  Recorded music became more profitable than producing live plays, and consequently whites benefited from black performers' labors.

African American Response

• Since the late 19th century, the politics of respectability had dominated African American attempts for equality -- "we can get our rights if we show that we deserve them."  This had been the source of much of the consternation between the black middle and working classes.
• The Harlem Renaissance was essentially another expression of the politics of respectability -- we must show that we have "developed" intellectually and artistically and so deserve equality.
• This led to a debate between an "authentic" and a "middle class / assimilationist" view of African American history.
• Later, moral suasion was added to the list of tactics -- "we've been abused so badly we need relief."
• The problem was essentially accepting the terms of the debate as laid out by whites -- that blacks somehow either need to qualify for equality, or that they needed to suffer so badly that whites deigned to grant them protection.

Native Americans

• Native Americans also fell victims of accepting the terms of the debate.
• Rather than the arts, their avenue was sports.  Beginning in the late 19th century, Native American schools like Carlisle (Jim Thorpe) and Haskell sought to dispel racial stereotypes and fight discrimination by playing sports.  The idea was that if they could compete openly against whites and win playing by the rules, whites would come to respect them as equals.
• This was very similar to the situation for African Americans.  Each group found an area that was not closed off to them and worked to uplift their race through participation.
• We can point to specific success stories like Jim Thorpe or Billy Mills, both victorious in Olympic competition, but stereotypes held; the same held true for African Americans, despite the successes of Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, etc.