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JESUS

FOR EMMITT TILL

The Harlem Renaissance in Perspective

By Marsha Lewis

While most history books assert that the Harlem Renaissance began in 1900, it is my opinion that the Harlem Renaissance began on a slave ship. Men, women and children; crammed into every available space; denied adequate room, food or breathing space. For the entire voyage, (those that survived such ruthless circumstances) were kept hostage; subjected to rape and torture, and other revolting acts. Some even jumped overboard, choosing death over slavery.

Those survivors were bought, sold, and worked under harsh conditions, while they were considered 3/5ths of a person. This went on for over 400 years. During these trying times for blacks, they struggled to hold on to the oral tradition they brought with them from the motherland, while risking their life, to learn how to read and write their master’s language, English. Although a law was passed in 1832, prohibiting blacks to learn how to read and write, blacks not only dared to learn how to read and write, but they wrote books, essays and journals, some of which have become prominent works of literature. Thus, over time, through risk-taking, and strife, emerged the Harlem Renaissance.

Slavery’s technical end was in the year 1865, but the persecution of blacks never quite came to an end. In fact, between the years 1884 and 1900, the number of black persons lynched in the United States was 1,678. The barbaric practice of lynching was still common enough during the Harlem Renaissance. Lynching and white hostility seemed so unyielding, that George S. Schuyler mused sarcastically in his 1927 short story, “Lynching For Profit” that white southern leaders could simply start regulating a cottage industry of lynching, down to selling tickets (which actually did occur in Waco Texas, in 1919). As that sadistic “Red Summer of 1919” erupted, hundreds of blacks were killed in dozens of race riots. Millions of Blacks were trapped in the corrupt systems of sharecropping, tenant farming, and wage slavery.

The Harlem Renaissance’s birth signified a direct social protest. Langston Hughes proclaimed, “We younger Negro Artists who create now, intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.” The Renaissance artiste created works that were free of apologetics, free of the inhibiting morality of another period. Negro artists of the 1920s were interested in demonstrating their humanity, in altering images of themselves that they knew were false. They felt free within themselves; they shared a sense of liberation from the confining standards of the past; but in the expression of their renewed self-respect and self-dependence, they were singular artists who used their own models of expression. The Harlem Renaissance strived to end the minstrel shows, public humiliation, and allow my people to freely express themselves.

In light of the fact that the Harlem Renaissance began 45 years after slavery legally ended in America, the amount of writers and artists that surfaced is baffling: Langston Hughes, ‘Dream Deferred’; Countee Cullen, ‘Yet Do I Marvel’; Angelina W. Grimke, ‘The Black Finger’; Jessica Redmon Faust, ‘Dead Fires’; James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Marion Vera Cuthbert, The Progress of Afro-American Women; Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells; Anne Spencer, ‘Black Man O’ Mine’; Arna Bontemps, ‘A Black Man Talks of Reaping’; Jean Toomer, Cane; Marcus Garvey, The Black Star Line, W. E. B. DuBois, Educator; Wallace Thurman, Writer and Editor; Sterling Brown, Writer and Poet; Rudolph Fisher, Doctor and Writer, Nella Larsen, Novelist; George Schuyler, Journalist and Writer; Gwendolyn Bennett, ’To A Dark Girl’; Helene Johnson, Poet; Georgia Douglas Johnson, Poet, James Baldwin, Novelist; Marita O. Bonner, Writer and Teacher; William Count Basie, Musician; Josephine Baker, Performer; Benny Carter, Musician; Carrie W. Clifford, Women’s Rights Activist; Clarissa M. Scott Delany, Social Worker and Poet; Charlotte H. Brown, The Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum; Alice Dunbar Nelson, Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina Weld Grimke, Negro Caravan; W.C. Handy, Musician; Palmer Hayden, Painter; Fletcher Henderson, The Fletcher Henderson Quartet; Billie Holiday, ‘Strange Fruit’, Ferd “Jelly Roll” Morton, Musician; Alain Leroy Locke, Educator and Arts Advocate; Ma Rainey, Singer; A. Philip Randolph, Civil Rights Leader; Paul Robeson, Actor and Performer; Agusta Savage, Sculptor and Educator; Addison Scurlock, Scurlock Photographic Studios, Bessie Smith, Performer; Anne Bethel Spencer, Poet; Wallace Thurman, Novelist; James Van Der Zee, Photographer; Sarah Breedlove AKA MADAM C.J. WALKER, Inventor; Fats Waller, Musician; Ethel Waters, Singer; Meta Warrick Fuller, Sculptor; Sargent Claude Johnson, Artist; Palmer Hayden, Artist; Dox Thrash, Printmaker; Aaron Douglas, Painter; Lois Mailou Jones, Painter; Walter Francis White, Civil Rights Advocate; Louis Armstrong, Musician; James Weldon Johnson, ‘Lift Every Voice And Sing’; Esther Popel, ‘Flag Salute’, among many, many others.

The Harlem Renaissance, named by Alain Locke, meant “rebirth.” Despite what critics believe, or how it may appear, there is no such thing as “the period after the Harlem Renaissance.” Much of what is Black expression continues today. Some are in it to for fame, (50 CENT) while others are in to infiltrate (EMINEM.) Some want to awaken us (TUPAC) while others are in it to destroy. (NELLY)

The Renaissance has expanded to include many kinds of writing: Sonya Sanchez, Terry McMillan, Nicki Giovanni, August Wilson, Charles Johnson, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Dorothy West, Rita Dove, Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, and even myself.
In the realm of entertainment: Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones, Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Public Enemy, India Airie, Stevie Wonder, Tupac, Dead Prez, X-Plane, Hugh Masekela, Carlos Santana, Celia Cruz, Miriam Makeba, Gregory Hines, Alvin Ailey, Savion Glover. In the realm of art: Pat Ward Williams, Houston Conwill, Allison Saar, Martha Jackson-Jarvis, Maren Hassinger, Martin Puryear, Robert Colescott, among so many more. They were all lead by those before us.

Black historian Dr. John Henrik Clarke once said,
"The events which transpired five thousand years ago; Five years ago or five minutes ago, have determined
what will happen five minutes from now; five years
From now or five thousand years from now.
All history is a current event."

Some current artists are misled, but who am I to judge? I can only hope that while Nelly’s sliding the credit card down the crack of a black woman’s behind, that one of our ancestors taps him on the shoulder, and reminds him…how we got here.

Black expression reflects the disappointments, fears, angers, and frustrations produced by America’s failure to fulfill its promises of freedom, and equality. It’s failure to see black people as more than 3/5 ths of a person. Its failure to simply show us what Aretha sang about:
R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

BEFORE THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

While there were African American authors before The Harlem Renaissance, few were published until a group of creative souls gathered in Harlem, New York to share their hopes, dreams and frustrations. These artists weren't just writers, but painters, dancers, singers, and musicians -- all drawn together by a common desire to share, create, and produce. Harlem became a center point for these talented African Americans to gather and voice their ideas during a time when slavery was over with, but oppression and segregation prevented blacks from having the same opportunities as white citizens. African Americans found themselves leaving the rural South and heading to the cities for more advantages, yet equality was denied to them because of racial prejudices.Claude McKay was one of the first African Americans to get published, but others quickly followed, including Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Writers weren't the only African Americans to get discovered during the Harlem Renaissance, however. Famous musicians such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington also got their start during this movement.The Harlem Renaissance opened the door for gifted African Americans to express themselves. It began in the early 1920s and ended in the early 1930s when the famous leaders of the time left Harlem. Their path, however, lead the way for future African Americans who followed in their footsteps.

In the time before the Harlem Renaissance, being a professional artist was not a choice for black Americans. Jim Crow laws in the South separated blacks from the main stream of American life. The Ku Klux Klan and other violently oppressive white groups extended the separation. The traditions of a segregated and largely rural agrarian culture that had experienced slavery had a distinctive and rich grass-roots oral tradition, music, and religion.1
At the turn of the twentieth century the Great Migration of blacks to Northern urban areas began. This process encouraged rural blacks of the South to make the move to Northern cities with the hope of higher pay and improved living conditions. The North symbolized freedom from the social order and political restrictions of the South.
The area known as Harlem in New York City was an upper middle class neighborhood in the late nineteenth century. As Southern blacks moved into the area, a power struggle developed between white and black capital. Whites deserted Harlem and prices of property fell. Blacks bought up the properties. By the 1920’s, the two square mile area between Eighth Avenue (West) and Fifth Avenue(East), and 125th Street North to 145th Street held 200,000 blacks.2
During World War I black soldiers in Europe witnessed the appreciation of jazz, original black American music, and an interest in African cultures from the poetry of African and Caribbean poets living in Europe. The war had created a demand for workers. The term “New Negro” evolved which described proud and independent blacks living in Northern cities. The “New Negro” emerged from within the black community, in contrast to the white stereotyped literary image of the comic and pathetic plantation black. Alain Locke is acknowledged as the leading black philosopher who asked blacks to recognize their African heritage as “New Negroes”.3
Alain Locke
Alain Locke was probably the foremost spokesman for artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He was highly educated as a philosopher at Harvard University, and the first black American Rhodes Scholar (1907-1910). He chaired the Philosophy Department at Howard University. His theories of black art encouraged black artists to recognize and incorporate their African heritage within their work. He powerfully wrote and lectured that African artistic heritage was at the center of the black experience. African art had made a contribution to modern art in Europe, and it should have an even deeper, and more historical meaning to black artists in America. Locke felt that black artists needed to be liberated, free to express their heritage.
Alain Locke was one of the organizers of the patronage system that provided a white audience and financial support for black artists. This controversial system, designed to make Harlem the center of black art in America, became the main paradox of the Harlem Renaissance: on the one hand it permitted freedom from the past injustices and stereotypes to assert one’s self with a new racial identity, and on the other hand financial support came from white philanthropists like The Harmon Foundation. The economic concerns of the Great Depression in 1929 turned much of the white financial support away.4
During this era many powerful black personalities influenced the shaping of the Harlem Renaissance: integrationists W.E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson were opposed by the separatist views of Marcus Garvey.
W.E.B. DuBois
Many consider William Edward Burghardt DuBois the greatest black intellect and activist of the early twentieth century. W.E.B. DuBois achieved many degrees, from Fisk University (A.B.) and Harvard University (A.B., M.A. and Ph.D.), as well as study and travel in Europe. He taught at many universities and published Souls of Black Folk in order to awaken black and white American to race problems. He was founder of the Niagara movement which revealed his belief in black social equality and activism. This put him in opposition to the more conservative rural ideas of Booker T. Washington, and led to the organizing of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, His contributions to the Harlem Renaissance were many.
DuBois began a black theater group in Harlem known as the Krigwa Players, began The Crisis, the magazine of the N.A.A.C.P., and edited by DuBois. It offered young black writers a vehicle for their ideas. Some considered W.E.B. DuBois an elitist intellectual, especially his opponents Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington. James Weldon Johnson, executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., at the time, defended DuBois’ intellect and talent. In his later years DuBois became a member of the American Communist party, left the United States, became a citizen of Ghana and died there in 1963.5
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson’s accomplishments and versatility ranged from diplomat, author, songwriter, lawyer, educator to civil rights advocate and mentor to black writers and artists. He received his Bachelor’s degree at Atlanta University, studied law and became the first Black American to be admitted to the Florida bar. With his brother J. Rosamond Johnson, he wrote lyrics for many songs—(’’Under the Bamboo Tree” which came to be known as the “Negro National Anthem”: “Lift Every Voice and Sing”). Not satisfied with the popular musical theater, he joined the Republican party and became United States consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua.
One of his greatest successes occurred when he became Secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. James Weldon Johnson expanded the N.A.A.C.P. with his diplomatic and tactful personality as well as his abilities as a public speaker and organizer. These qualities led to Johnson’s influence in encouraging the House of Representatives to pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill (1921). In addition to his writing and publishing, he felt that the quality of greatness of people would be evaluated through their art and literature. As a result he influenced the Julius Rosenwald Fund to give fellowships to Blacks in the arts. James Weldon Johnson was granted one that permitted him to write a history of Black New York: Black Manhattan.
After his death in 1939 plans were made to erect a memorial, designed by the black artist Richmond Barthé, at the beginning of Harlem (110th Street entrance to Central Park). Metal was not available for the monument, since it was the beginning of World War II, and the memorial couldn’t be built. The funds that had been collected were used by Johnson’s friend Care Van Vechten to found the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University.6
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey, unlike W.E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson, wanted nothing to do with white America. His goal was to instill self-help and racial pride through African Nationalism. He believed that blacks could not develop and grow in a white man’s country, which led to his “Back to Africa” movement. Born in Jamaica, Garvey was not permitted to work there after he participated in a printers’ strike. He went to England where he studied and worked for an African-Egyptian publisher.
When he returned to Jamaica, Garvey organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association, with the goal of reclaiming Africa for all blacks of the world. Marcus Garvey corresponded with Booker T. Washington, because he wanted to establish a school in Jamaica like Tuskegee Institute. Booker T. Washington invited Garvey to the United States, but when Garvey arrived Booker T. Washington was dead and his successor Robert Russa Morgan did not agree with Garvey’s plan for African Nationalism.
Marcus Garvey decided that Harlem was the place to establish his Universal Negro Improvement Association since there were so many blacks from the Caribbean there. He begun the newspaper, Negro World and denounced any white involvement in his ventures. He urged blacks to do for themselves, and criticized the N.A.A.C.P. as an interracial organization. His appeal was to the black working class, which gave millions to the U.N.I.A. Black intellectuals derided his movement. Garvey was confirmed as the Provisional President-General of Africa and organizer of the African Orthodox Church which had a black Holy Trinity, Madonna and Christ of Sorrow. His dynamic personality and colorful presence caused many blacks to give up their life savings for his causes. At meetings and parades he wore a purple and gold uniform with a feathered helmet. His black Cross nurses dressed in white; his African Motor Corps, African Legion and Black Eagle Flying Corps wore green, black and red uniforms. Garvey founded the Black Star Line, a shipping company, that was to compete with white shipping lines and transport blacks to Africa. All of his plans fell apart due to poor money management, inadequate subordinates and lack of backing from influential American blacks. He was found guilty of mail fraud, due to improper collection of money for his shipping company, and spent two years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Garvey returned to Jamaica for a few years, and then he moved to London, where he continued his work to regain Africa for blacks until his death in 1940.7
Leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, who espoused the concepts of the new Negro, encouraged black visual artists, as well as writers, to come to Harlem from across the country. Artists were guided to a new image and ethnic identity that emphasized the influence of African art, and the folk art of black Americans.
Five black artists, one woman and four men, among others contributed to the new tradition that affirmed a personal and racial identity during the Harlem Renaissance: Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, Palmer Hayden, William Johnson, and James Lessesne Wells.
Aaron Douglas (1899Ð1979)
Aaron Douglas is recognized as the best well known painter of the Harlem Renaissance. He was born in Kansas, received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Kansas, and taught in Kansas City high schools for two years.
In 1924 Aaron Douglas came to Harlem where he met the German artist Winold Reiss, a white artist, who encouraged young black artists to look at African art for its elements of design. Douglas explored African art in his painting, which brought him into contact with Alain Locke and W.E.B. DuBois. Locke and DuBois, both committed to the exploration of African aesthetics, gave Aaron Douglas numerous opportunities to further his career in art.
Douglas’ illustrations were often found in The Crisis magazine, as well as in numerous other publications such as: Opportunity, Theater Arts Monthly and Vanity Fair. Alain Locke used Douglas’ illustrations between the chapters of his famous anthology of black writers, The New Negro, in 1925. Locke who wanted a “Negro School of Art” in Harlem called Douglas a “pioneering Africanist”.
His fame and reputation spread to Nashville (Fisk University) and Chicago where Douglas painted historical murals and paintings that related pride in black history. Douglas created a series of paintings for James Weldon Johnson’s book of poetry: God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Each of his paintings was done in a flat, hard-edge style that used themes from Negro spirituals, the Bible and African and black American customs. Rectangles, squares, triangles and circles were the dominant shapes he used in his paintings, as they are found in African art and Cubism of European artists. All of Douglas’ paintings utilize the black American figure almost as a silhouetted form which can be seen in the mural he painted for the 135th Street branch of The New York Public Library (Schomburg Center). The mural is known as Aspects of Negro Life.
Aaron Douglas joined the faculty of Fisk University in the late 1930’s where he stayed until his death in 1979. Aaron Douglas is remembered most for having been the leader in the use of African inspired themes during the Harlem Renaissance.8
Meta Warrick Fuller (1877Ð1968)
Even though Meta Fuller never lived in Harlem, she espoused the concepts of the Harlem Renaissance through her sculpture. She utilized African folktales and themes as her motifs in clay, plaster and bronze. Her parents encouraged her interest in art as a child in Philadelphia. She attended the Philadelphia College of Art on a scholarship, and from there went to Paris to continue her study in art. She experienced financial problems and racial discrimination. The renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin became her strongest influence when she worked with him in Paris.
When she returned to the United States she opened a studio in Philadelphia. In 1907 Meta Fuller was commissioned to sculpt black figures for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition. A fire in 1910 destroyed all of her sculpture she had brought back from Paris, as well as her current work. She married Dr. Solomon Fuller, psychiatrist and neurologist, and had three sons.
Meta Fuller created a sculpture in bronze in 1914 known as Ethiopia Awakening. It was to become a symbol of Alain Locke’s “New Negro” for it captured the spirit of the soon to come Harlem Renaissance. The sculpture was of a woman separated into two parts: the lower bound as a mummy with the head of a beautiful African woman with the headdress of an ancient queen of Egypt. The sculpture expressed womanhood and black Africa. W.E.B. DuBois asked her to produce a sculpture for the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in New York. She created one of a black boy and girl.
Framingham, Massachusetts became her home after 1929 where she continued her work in sculpture, exhibited and taught students. She was praised for her sculpture which includes one named Talking Skull. It shows an African man kneeling in front of a skull. Her sculptural themes were highly emotional reflecting Meta Fuller’s concern with life and death. Her work was shown in The Harlem Foundation exhibitions and she later became a juror for their exhibitions in New York.9
Palmer Hayden (1890Ð1973)
Palmer Hayden, his real name was Peyton Hedgeman, was born in Wide Water, Virginia. He attended Cooper Union in New York where he studied art. Soon after he studied at Boothbay Art Colony in Maine. While he attended Cooper Union he worked as a janitor. In 1926 he won the Gold Award in the first Harmon Foundation art competition. The next year he went to Paris to paint where he lived until 1932.
He was, along with Aaron Douglas, one of the black artists of the Harlem Renaissance to use themes in his work taken from African art and black folklore. His painting Fétiche et Fleurs is a still life that includes a Fang mask from Gabon along with a Bakuba raffia cloth from the Congo (now known as Zaire). The use of African objects in a traditional still life painting was original and unique at the time.
Palmer Hayden painted many works that borrowed from popular images. of black culture. Some criticized him for exaggerating black features, and painting scenes of everyday black life. Hayden defended his painting; that he was referring to the tragedy and comedy of a black life-style. The Janitor Who Paints was an autobiographical painting since Hayden was a janitor and handyman for The Harmon Foundation.
His interest in folklore is seen in the series of paintings he did that depicted the talk of the hero John Henry. Hayden’s paintings are regarded as symbols of the changes in black culture that were occurring during and following the Harlem Renaissance. Many rural blacks had come North in the hopes of finding a better life in the city. He portrayed the struggle with a positive affection.10
William Johnson (1901Ð1970)
William Johnson was born in Florence, South Carolina. He came to Harlem in 1918, and became a student at the National Academy of Design. His interest in art began in his childhood through newspaper cartoons. In 1926 he traveled to Paris where he studied the European painters of the time: Paul Cézanne, Chaim Soutine, Georges Rouault and Vincent Van Gogh. He admired the expressionistic styles that he saw and applied them to his own paintings. The Harmon Foundation awarded him a Gold Medal in 1929 for his Self Portrait.
William Johnson traveled to Denmark where he married Holcha Krake, a potter. There he painted many landscapes that reminded him of his childhood in the rural South. He and his wife traveled to North Africa in 1932 where he studied the arts and crafts of the area. The time he spent in Africa was to influence changes in his painting style when he returned to Harlem.
He painted scenes of Harlem in a flat, geometric style. His style of painting continued to change and he became interested in black subjects and black Christianity. He painted a series of religious paintings that had all black subjects interpreted in flat shapes and brilliant color: Nativity, Descent from the Cross, Jesus and the Three Mary’s, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.
William Johnson traveled back and forth between Harlem and Denmark. He continued painting scenes that dealt with the social and political life of Harlem as well as black heroes and historical figures. Johnson died in New York in 1970, having spent his life portraying the black experience.11
James Lesesne Wells (1902)
James Lesesne Wells was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1902. His childhood was deeply influenced by his parents. His father was a Baptist minister in Florida. As a child, James Wells expressed his artistic abilities by stenciling designs along the lower walls of his father’s church’s prayer meeting room. James Wells was to use black religious themes from bible stories, sermons and hymns throughout his artistic career in teaching, painting and printmaking.
He graduated from the Florida Normal and Industrial Institute on a scholarship. James Wells received another scholarship to attend Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, but he wanted to work for awhile to supplement his scholarship. This led him, like many other black Americans after World War I, to find work and a better life in Harlem. James Wells worked as a porter on the Hudson River Day Line. In his free time he sketched scenes along the banks of the Hudson River, and copied paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He went to Lincoln University for two years, and left to return to New York for professional art training. At Teachers College, Columbia University James Wells began his study in printmaking with woodcuts and linoleum, block printing. During this time, the late 1920’s, publishing of books, magazines, journals and reviews was booming. Illustrations were needed, and Wells provided many, especially for the two leading black magazines of the time: The Crisis and Opportunity. He combined an Egyptian theme with the modern art deco style in his 1928 block print Ethiopia at the Bar of Justice. James Wells became a prolific and skilled printmaker.
In 1929 he began his art teaching career at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The Harmon Foundation awarded him a Gold Medal in 1930. His dedication to printmaking techniques and processes were developed in lithographs, etchings, and engravings. His themes became predominantly mythological and religious printed in vibrant colors. Wells social messages, into his eighties, deal with topics such as violence, ambition, seduction and the emergence of Third World nations: Phoenix Ascending, The Vamp, Emerging Continent and Salome.12


Art Activities
General Objectives:
To relate and apply the art produced by five selected artists of the Harlem Renaissance discussed above to art activities in the classroom.
In order to have art students more fully understand the themes, styles and art processes the five selected artists of the Harlem Renaissance utilized in their work, they will view and discuss examples of each of the artist’s work compiled by the teacher: the artists, and questions for students to complete. Following this students will complete and art project that demonstrates the artist’s unique use of African and black American themes as well as design elements and medium (media).
Specific Objectives and Strategies
I. Aaron Douglas—Painter
A. View examples of his paintings: Aaron Douglas. Study for God’s Trombones, Aspects of Negro Life (a series).
B. Discuss and answer questions:
1. What themes did Douglas use in his paintings?
2. What style of painting did Douglas utilize?
3. What medium did he use?
C. Art Process: Apply themes, style and medium to art process.
1. African and black American history and religion.
2. Geometric shapes, hard edge, silhouetted figure, light and dark values of color.
3. Paint in tempera, watercolor, or oil.
II. Meta Warrick Fuller—sculptress
A. View examples of her sculpture: Meta Warrick Fuller. Ethiopia Awakening, Talking Skull.
B. Discuss and answer questions:
1. What themes did Fuller use in her sculpture?
2. What style of sculpture did Fuller utilize?
3. What medium did she use?
C. Art Process: Apply themes, style and medium, to art process.
1. African folktales and themes, figure of African and black American men, women, and children.
2. Emotional expressionistic human figures, life and death concerns.
3. Sculpt in plaster, bronze and clay. (Clay is most accessible.)
III. Palmer Hayden—Painter
A. View examples of his paintings: Palmer Hayden. Fétiche et Fleurs, The Janitor Who Paints, His Hammer in His Hand (from the John Henry series).
B. Discuss and answer questions:
1. What themes did Hayden use in his paintings?
2. What style of painting did Hayden utilize?
3. What medium did he use?
C. Art Process: Apply themes, style and medium to art process.
1. African art, black American folklore, everyday black life.
2. Realistic, exaggerated features, comedy and tragedy of black life.
3. Paint in tempera, watercolor or oil.
IV. William Johnson—Painter
A. View examples of his paintings: William Johnson. Self Portrait, Jesus and the Three Mary’s, Café.
B. Discuss and answer questions
1. What themes did Johnson use in his paintings?
2. What style of painting did Johnson utilize?
3. What medium did he use?
C. Art Process: Apply themes, style and medium to art process.
1. Scenes of Harlem, black subjects, black Christianity, black historical figures.
2. Expressionistic, flat geometric, brilliant color.
3. Paint in tempera, watercolor or oil.
V. James Lesesne Wells—Printmaker and Painter
A. View examples of his prints (woodcuts and linoleum block prints): James Lesesne Wells. Ethiopia at the Bar of Justice, Phoenix Ascending, The Vamp.
B. Discuss and answer questions:
1. What themes did Wells use in his prints?
2. What style of printmaking did Wells utilize?
3. what medium did he use?
C. Art Process: Apply, themes, style and medium to art process.
1. Egyptian, African, myths, religious and social messages.
2. High contrast of light and dark, linear, brilliant color.
3. Create linoleum blocks and/of woodcuts and print with inks.


Notes
1. David Driskell, David Levering Lewis and Deborah Willis Ryan, Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1987), p.15.
2. Bruce Kellner (ed.), The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era (New York: Metheun, Inc., 1984), p.xv
3. Nathan Irving Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p.56.
4. Langeston Hughes and Milton Meltzer, A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1956), p.272.
5. Kellner, pp.105-107.
6. Ibid., 197-200.
7. Hughes and Meltzer, pp.270-271.
8. Driskell, Lewis and Ryan, pp.110-112, 129-131.
9. Ibid., pp.107-109.
10. Ibid., pp.131-134.
11. Ibid., pp.134-136, 153-154.
12. Richard Powell and Jock Reynolds, James Lesesne Wells: Sixty Years in Art (Washington, D.C.: Washington Project for the Arts, 1986 Exhibition Catalogue—The Studio Museum in Harlem), pp.7-11, 34-35.


Bibliography
Bontemps, Arna. 100 Years of Negro Freedom. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1961.
Bontemps, Arna (ed.). The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1972.
Butcher, Margaret Just. The Negro in American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967.
Chapter 10 is a discussion of The Negro Artist in American Art.
Chase, Ina Corrine. The Story of the American Negro. New York: Friendship Press, 1936.
Dover, Cedric. American Negro Art, Greenwich, Ct.: New York Graphic Society. 1969.
Many plates of black American artists from mid 18th century until late 1960’s.
Driskell, David, David Levering Lewis and Deborah Willis Ryan. Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, 1987.
A marvelous source with many full color plates published for exhibition on Harlem Renaissance.
Driskell, David. Two Centuries of Black. American Art. Los Angeles and New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.
Survey of black American artists and craftsmen for exhibition in 1979 with many color plates as well as biographies of artists.
Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Hughes, Langston and Milton Meltzer. A Pictorial History of the of the Negro in America. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1956.
Picture historical of black Americans from Africa to mid-1950’s.
Johnson, James Weldon. Black Manhattan. 1930 Reprint. New York: Atheneum, 1972.
Kellner, Bruce (ed.). The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era. New York: Metheun, Inc., 1984.
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem was in Vogue. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
Osofsky, Gilbert. Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers’ 1966.
Porter, James A. Modern Negro Art. Reprint. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969.
Powell, Richard and Jock Reynolds. James Lesesne Wells: Sixty Years in Art. Washington, D.C.: Washington Project for the Arts, 1986.
(Exhibition Catalogue-The Studio Museum in Harlem, N.Y.)
20th Century Afro-American Culture. Curriculum Units by Fellows of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. 1978. Volume II.


Materials for Classroom Use
“A Duke Named Ellington” PBS, July 18 and July 25, 1988; tape, 120 min.
(Parts 1 and 2 on the life and music of Duke Ellington).
Slides—Examples of art done by visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance: Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, Palmer Hayden, William Johnson and James Lesesne Wells.
(figure available in print form)
(figure available in print form)
I. Aaron Douglas. Study for God’s Trombones. 1926. Tempera on board, 21-1/2" x 17-1/2". From Levering Lewis.
(figure available in print form)


II. Metu Warrick Fuller. Ethiopia Awakening. 1914. Bronze, 67" x 16" x 20". From Levering Lewis.
(figure available in print form)
III. Palmer Hayden. The Janitor Who Paints. 1939-40. Oil on canvas. 39-1/8" x 33". From Levering Lewis.
(figure available in print form)
IV. William Johnson. Café. 1939-40. Oil on board, 36-1/2" x 28-3/8". From Levering Lewis.
(figure available in print form)
V. James Lesesne Wells. The Vamp. 1983. Color linoleum cuts 5" x 6-3/4". From Powell and Reynolds.


During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the European Renaissance became famous for the thinkers, writers, artists, and musicians it produced. During the 1920s, a movement in the United States created its own share of leaders in these fields.
Where did this other Renaissance take place, and why?
The sprawling Harlem neighborhood at the northern end of New York City might not have seemed the most likely place for a political and cultural flowering in the early twentieth century, but a variety of factors set the stage for the black community to thrive.
The political writings and activism of such leaders as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon raised national awareness of the issues and problems facing black Americans. A steady flow of blacks from the South broadened the community in Harlem, which developed its own theaters, record companies, and publishing houses.
And the separation of Harlem from other white parts of the city created a closely-knit group of artists who included their black heritage in the works they wrote, composed, and painted.

William H. Johnson

William H. Johnson(1901-1970)William H. Johnson was one of the foremost African American artists of his generation. He lived and worked in New York, France and Denmark, and his style and subject matter were as wide ranging as his travels. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he was strongly influenced by the Expressionists."....Johnson extended [the] inquiry into [his] ancestry and self to his art, as seen in several fascinating self-portraits...""...Johnson's intense colors and expressive painting technique catapult his self image into a modern aesthetic, one riddled with formal dichotomies and underlying emotions. Light years ahead of those somber self-portraits that lined the halls of the National Academy of Design and other American institutions, this introspective view....illustrates the talent behind the artist's demand for greater respect and recognition...."Richard J. Powell, 'A Painter in the World: 1930-1938', Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson.

About Lynching

Robert L. Zangrando
Lynching is the practice whereby a mob--usually several dozen or several hundred persons--takes the law into its own hands in order to injure and kill a person accused of some wrongdoing. The alleged offense can range from a serious crime like theft or murder to a mere violation of local customs and sensibilities. The issue of the victim's guilt is usually secondary, since the mob serves as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. Due process yields to momentary passions and expedient objectives.
Vigilantism, or summary justice, has a long history, but the term lynch law originated during the American Revolution with Col. Charles Lynch and his Virginia associates, who responded to unsettled times by making their own rules for confronting Tories and criminal elements. "Lynching" found an easy acceptance as the nation expanded. Raw frontier conditions encouraged swift punishment for real, imagined, or anticipated criminal behavior. Historically, social control has been an essential aspect of mob rule.
Opponents of slavery in pre-Civil War America and cattle rustlers, gamblers, horse thieves, and other "desperadoes" in the South and Old West were nineteenth-century targets. From the 1880s onward, however, mob violence increasingly reflected white America's contempt for various racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. African-Americans especially, and sometimes Native Americans, Latinos, Jews, Asian immigrants, and European newcomers, felt the mob's fury. In an era when racist theories prompted "true Americans" to assert their imagined superiority through imperialist ventures, mob violence became the domestic means of asserting white dominance. Occasionally, this complemented the profit motive, when the lynching of a successful black farmer or immigrant merchant opened new economic opportunities for local whites and simultaneously reaffirmed everyone's "place" in the social hierarchy. Sometimes lynching was aimed at unpopular ideas: labor union organizers, political radicals, critics of America's role in World War I, and civil rights advocates were targets.
African-Americans suffered grievously under lynch law. With the close of Reconstruction in the late 1870s, southern whites were determined to end northern and black participation in the region's affairs, and northerners exhibited a growing indifference toward the civil rights of black Americans. Taking its cue from this intersectional white harmony, the federal government abandoned its oversight of constitutional protections. Southern and border states responded with the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s, and white mobs flourished. With blacks barred from voting, public office, and jury service, officials felt no obligation to respect minority interests or safeguard minority lives. In addition to lynchings of individuals, dozens of race riots--with blacks as victims--scarred the national landscape from Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921.
Between 1882 (when reliable statistics were first collected) and 1968 (when the classic forms of lynching had disappeared), 4,743 persons died of lynching, 3,446 of them black men and women. Mississippi (539 black victims, 42 white) led this grim parade of death, followed by Georgia (492, 39), Texas (352, 141), Louisiana (335, 56), and Alabama (299, 48). From 1882 to 1901, the annual number nationally usually exceeded 100; 1892 had a record 230 deaths (161 black, 69 white). Although lynchings declined somewhat in the twentieth century, there were still 97 in 1908 (89 black, 8 white), 83 in the racially troubled postwar year of 1919 (76, 7, plus some 25 race riots), 30 in 1926 (23, 7), and 28 in 1933 (24, 4).
Statistics do not tell the entire story, however. These were recorded lynchings; others were never reported beyond the community involved. Furthermore, mobs used especially sadistic tactics when blacks were the prime targets. By the 1890s lynchers increasingly employed burning, torture, and dismemberment to prolong suffering and excite a "festive atmosphere" among the killers and onlookers. White families brought small children to watch, newspapers sometimes carried advance notices, railroad agents sold excursion tickets to announced lynching sites, and mobs cut off black victims' fingers, toes, ears, or genitalia as souvenirs. Nor was it necessarily the handiwork of a local rabble; not infrequently, the mob was encouraged or led by people prominent in the area's political and business circles. Lynching had become a ritual of interracial social control and recreation rather than simply a punishment for crime.
See also: Walter White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929); Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (1980).
Excerpted from a longer article in The Reader’s Companion to American History. Ed. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Co.

John F. Callahan
Lynching did not come out of nowhere. Its actual and symbolic grounding in history and literature goes back to slavery and slavery's defining persons of African descent as property. During slavery there were numerous public punishments of slaves, none of which were preceded by trials or any other semblance of civil or judicial processes. Justice depended solely upon the slaveholder. Executions, whippings, brandings, and other forms of severe punishment, including sometimes the public separation of families, were meted out by authority or at the command of the master or his representative. Often, slaves from the plantation and, sometimes, nearby plantations were assembled and made to witness the punishment as an example of the master's absolute authority to wield the power of life and death over each and every slave. Underlying this action was the idea that black slaves were not truly human beings or, if human, certainly not equal or endowed with any right to life or liberty beyond what their owners saw fit to grant.
After emancipation, despite the efforts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments and federal Reconstruction legislation, white Southerners sought ways, legal and extralegal, to assert a white supremacy so extreme as to justify meting out ritual death to black persons without any formal legal process. The rise of lynching as a specific race ritual of terror coincided with the systematic passage of state laws disenfranchising black voters and decreeing separate but equal civil and social facilities. This Jim Crow way of life, law, and custom was given implicit national endorsement by the Supreme Court in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson "separate but equal" decision.
In its random quality, lynching was arguably as bad or worse than the murders committed against slaves. During slavery anyone doing violence to a slave had to answer to that slave's master; otherwise the full weight of the law could be brought down upon whoever presumed to raise a hand against another man’s human property. With the rise of lynching after the Civil War and the cessation of Reconstruction there was no such restraint. In place of the master was the more vague standard of justice held by a particular "white community." Lynching derived its power from the participation of numerous white citizens in the ritual murder and the approval or acquiescence in the action by the remainder of the white community. Here it should be noted that through successful filibusters members of the U.S. Senate from the former Confederacy (and their occasional allies from other states) upheld the right of individual states to the custom of lynching.
Although abhorrent to many, even to some of its silent, acquiescent partners, lynching was not an aberration in American race relations. Rather, it served as an extreme reminder of the unreasoning power the basest passions, fears, and hatreds of white Americans could exercise over the lives and humanity of black Americans. For "the ultimate goal of lynchers," as Ralph Ellison reflected in Going to the Territory (1986), "is that of achieving ritual purification through destroying the lynchers' identification with the basic humanity of their victims. Hence their deafness to cries of pain, their stoniness before the sight and stench of burning flesh. . . ." At issue, then, in historical terms and the imaginative terms of African American literature, is lynching's ritual capacity to define and annihilate the humanity of the black victim and that of every last member of his or her race, symbolically or, if necessary, literally.
According to John Hope Franklin (From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 1967), "in the last sixteen years of the nineteenth century there had been more than 2,500 lynchings, the great majority of which were of Negroes." The early twentieth century did not see a significant decrease: "In the very first year of the new century more than 100 Negroes were lynched, and before the outbreak of World War I the number for the century had soared to more than 1,100." Lynchings declined in number but continued in ferocity during World War I. They were seized on so effectively by the Germans that, despite his Southern sympathies, President Wilson issued a statement against lynching and mob violence, But after the war more than a few returning black soldiers were lynched, some in their uniforms. The "Red scare" of 1919 was eclipsed by the racial violence and lynching fever of what James Weldon Johnson termed "the Red Summer." Riots and killings, some of them lynchings, occurred in Chicago, Texas, Washington, D.C., and with particular brutality that October in Arkansas. Although lynching was by no means an isolated, aberrant occurrence in the 1920s when the Klan was resurgent or in the 1930s when the depression fueled the hunt for racial as well as political scapegoats, the phenomenon was no longer virulent enough to claim one victim every two to three days. In its sporadic occurrences over the next decades, lynching continued to be a vehicle of terror and a last resort in opposition to the drive for political and civil rights through the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond.
There are convergences and divergences between lynching as a historical and a literary phenomenon. Though the sexual fears, guilt, and fantasies of white men and sometimes women (and to an almost negligible degree the actions of black men) played a role in lynching and became a central motif in literary representations by African American writers, the record is less sensational. "Although the impression was widely held that most of the Negroes lynched had been accused of committing rape on the bodies of white women," John Hope Franklin writes, "in the first fourteen years of the twentieth century only 315 lynch victims were accused of rape or attempted rape." Others were accused of homicide, robbery, insulting whites, and other "offenses." Not surprisingly, what literary expressions of lynching have in common with written and oral eyewitness accounts of mob violence are the ritual elements. Ralph Ellison calls lynching "a ritual drama that was usually enacted ... in an atmosphere of high excitement and led by a masked celebrant dressed in a garish costume who manipulated the numinous objects (lynch ropes, the American flag, shotgun, gasoline and whiskey jugs) associated with the rite as he inspired and instructed the actors in their gory task."
Ellison's observations bridge the gap between history's documentary discourse and the imaginative, mythic rhetoric of literature. At times the mob has a leader, at times not; at times the leading participants are masked, at others not; at times the brutality, though appealing to and possessing ritual elements, is spontaneous and chaotic; at other times carefully planned in advance, even down to advertisements in local newspapers. What is striking, however, is that lynching as an American race-ritual has exerted a powerful pull upon the imaginations of African American writers. Paradoxically, lynching is an even stronger motif for writers after the period between 1880 and 1920 than for earlier writers. As African American literature became more abundant and more prominent in the latter half of the twentieth century lynching, like slavery, came to seem a ritual actuality of race in American life that black writers felt bound to confront and perhaps imaginatively transform or transcend in asserting their African American identity. For the writers who must somehow contain and create past, present, and future, lynching has been an unavoidable, inexorable consequence of race, slavery, and blackness in the United States. Furthermore, though lynching singled out its victims, its point was unmistakable: Any black person who enough white people suspected or considered guilty of any offense was subject to murderous, extralegal punishment almost certain not to call down any consequences upon the heads of the perpetrators. Whatever their different approaches to matters of form, technique, style, or subject matter, black writers have represented and confronted this condition and consequence of blackness in America.
Throughout African American literature lynching tends to be a thread of the ancestors' common experience and a cautionary tale in the historical and imaginative present of American experience. In Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Trudier Harris explores the connections between lynching as a historical and a literary phenomenon. Her study demonstrates the extent to which lynching has been and continues to be rooted in the imagination of black writers no matter what their generation, genre, or gender. Also noted is the great diversity with which the phenomenon of lynching is treated by African American writers even as these authors show, in Harris's words, that "black heritage, via black history, is a continuing and integral part of black existence in spite of its brutal and dehumanizing aspects."
In Jean Toomer’s "Blood-Burning Moon" and to a lesser extent in "Kabnis" and elsewhere in Cane (1923), for example, a surviving black character is utterly devastated as a consequence of lynching. In "Blood-Burning Moon," Louisa is moonstruck. She has no articulate sense that her involvement with a white man and then a black man would lead to the white man's ineffectual rage against his powerful black competitor. In the knife fight the white man starts he is quickly killed by the black man. Tom Burwell, who kills in self-defense, is then immediately burned alive in ritual fashion by a white mob. Toomer imagines Louisa alone in the street afterwards singing to the full "blood-burning moon," the other black folks huddled inside their shacks.
In a very different response the narrator of James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1927), a stranger passing for white in a southern town, decides to continue passing after he witnesses a black man dragged into town and burned alive in a carefully planned lynching complete with the rebel yell and attended by men, women, and children. Few characters (or their creators) in African American literature enjoyed the ambivalent choice belonging to Johnson's narrator. In Richard Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home" (1938), when Big Boy and Bobo accidentally shoot and kill a white man, the black community swings into action knowing it will be subject to destruction by fire or worse. Its members realize all they can do is try to prevent the lynching of their sons, and they instantly put all of their ingenuity and resources behind the escape. Bobo is caught and lynched in a fall carnival ritual of dismemberment and burning in front of the town's men, women, and children while Big Boy is an invisible witness from the bottom of a lime kiln in an adjacent field. In the morning Big Boy escapes hidden in the back of a truck bound for Chicago, driven by someone's brave relative.
The effects of lynching are diverse: paralysis, solidarity; and escape, often to ghettos in the North. One effect explored is the appalling sense of the absolute power, outside any process of law, justice, or rationality, that could be brought to bear to keep the idea and practice of white supremacy alive. Black writers from William Wells Brown, whose Clotel (1853) depicts the burning of a black slave, to almost every African American writer of note, from Charles Waddell Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar at the turn of the century to Robert Hayden and Ralph Ellison at midcentury, to Toni Morrison, Michael S. Harper, and Ernest J. Gaines in the late twentieth century, have explored black Americans' response to lynching and its prevention through abundant use of what Ellison calls "shit, grit, and mother wit." In a reversal of the literary and historical pattern, John Edgar Wideman had his novel, The Lynchers (1973), turn on the plot hatched by four black men to lynch a white policeman. Wideman's novel, like almost all other representations of actual or aborted lynchings in African American literature, shows such plans and deeds done at the cost of the humanity of victim and perpetrator alike.
See also James E. Cutler, Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States, 1905. Walter F. White, The Fire in the Flint, 1924. Walter F. White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch, 1929. Ralph Ginsburg, 100 Years of Lynching, 1962. NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918, 1969. Ida B. Wells, On Lynching; Southern Horrors; A Red Record; Mob Rule in New Orleans, 1969. James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching, 1982. Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals, 1984. Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory, 1986.
From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press.

Anti-lynching Campaign
Dickson D. Bruce, Jr.
Antilynching Campaign: a movement to end mob violence against African-Americans--particularly the summary execution of individuals accused of crime (often the rape of white women)--in the southern United States during the period from the 1880s to the 1940s. The antilynching campaign, led by such organizations as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Council for Interracial Cooperation (CIC), and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), sought to fight lynching through education or legal action, or by securing federal legislation against it.
Women played a major role in the campaign. The most effective leader in its early development was Ida B. Wells-Barnett. An African-American teacher and journalist, Wells-Barnett was moved initially by the 1892 Memphis lynching of three black businessmen whose success had outraged their white competitors. Responding with a series of newspaper columns, later expanded into the widely circulated pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), Wells-Barnett documented the innocence of many victims of lynching, especially those charged with rape, while denouncing the failure of leading white southerners to act forcefully against the evil. In 1895, she published a larger investigative work, A Red Record, which served as a major resource for the campaign itself. Wells-Barnett led legal efforts to prevent lynchings and worked through both the NACW and the NAACP (an organization that she helped found) to secure antilynching legislation. It was through these organizations that other black women, including the writers Angelina Weld Grimké and Georgia Douglas Johnson, also became active in the effort.
Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, an increasing number of white women, especially in the South, joined the antilynching movement. Revolted by the brutality of lynching, and resenting the white southern defense of lynching based on the "protection" of white womanhood, women such as Jessie Daniel Ames and others worked through the CIC and, after 1930, the ASWPL to try to bring the practice to an end. Focusing on education and the courts--and ambivalent about federal legislation--they worked to create a climate of opinion among white southerners that would lead to lynching's demise.
Although both the CIC and the ASWPL chiefly involved women activists rather than writers, those organizations provided a background for the work of one of the most eloquent white literary opponents of lynching, and of racial injustice in general, the Georgia writer Lillian Smith. In such major works as her 1944 novel Strange Fruit and her 1949 collection of essays Killers of the Dream, Smith elaborated on arguments developed by ASWPL activists that linked lynching to a larger system of racial and sexual pathology and exploitation in the South.
With a decline in lynching in the 1940s, most of those involved in the campaign began to focus on other issues. Nevertheless, the campaign itself provided an important background to the larger battle against racism and segregation that ultimately took shape in the southern United States.
See also Morton Sosna. In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue (1977). Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (1979). Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (1980). Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of B1ack Women on Race and Sex in America (1984). Trudier Harris, comp., Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1991).
From The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. Copyright © Oxford University Press.

Photographs of Lynching Victims

Return to Langston Hughes
Sterling Brown
Claude McKay
Robert Hayden

RICHARD WRIGHT BIO

Richard Wright: A Brief Biography: The South and Chicago
A Student Project for Professor Reuben's ENGL 4110: American Short Story, Winter 2005
Prepared and Presented in Class by Kelli Rufer

Richard Nathaniel Wright was the eldest son of sharecropper Nathaniel Wright and schoolteacher Ella Wilson. He was born on September 4, 1908, on a cotton plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. Two years later, in 1910, Wright’s only sibling, Leon Alan, was born. Soon after, unable to support two children and a farm, the Wright’s moved to Natchez with Ella’s parents, the Wilson’s (Rowley, 4). It was here Wright experienced one of his earliest memories. After throwing broom bristles into the fireplace, curtains hanging nearby caught fire, setting the house ablaze (Fabre, 9). According to Wright’s account of the incident in his novel Black Boy, it was his mother, not his father, who beat him with a tree limb until he lost consciousness (Rowley, 5). The incident had a great effect on Wright. Michael Fabre writes, “It not only seriously inhibited his independent spirit but also caused him to doubt his relationship to his mother” (10). The stifling of individualism would prove to be a central theme in Wright’s work: “the search for that personal freedom which enables one to discover his own identity as a human being” (Stocking, 275).
In addition to being born into poverty Wright was exposed to the harsh implementation of Jim Crow laws by Southern whites. Wright was forced to comply with the dictation of “Jim Crow standards of conduct,” denied equal protection, and the acceptance of whites mistreating black women (Stocking, 276). This exposure would later surface in his writing and be the fuel that furthered powered his theme of individual freedom.
In 1911, the Wright’s moved their children to Memphis in search of better employment. Nathaniel worked as a night porter in a local drugstore and the boys were expected to keep complete silence during the day while he slept (Fabre, 11). Wright fell asleep to his parents arguing many nights, at first over his mother’s cooking, eventually over his father’s mistress (Rowley, 7). His father’s presence became scarce and in his absence Wright was expected to replace him. At the age of four he found himself the man of the house. Wright and Leon spent their time wandering the streets while their mother worked. Wright began school for the first time at Howe Institute at the age of seven. Shortly after, his father officially abandoned them in 1915. His mother took a job as a cook for a white family and her mother, Maggie Wilson, stayed for a short while, but eventually the money she had brought with her ran out. Wright’s mother fell ill and Wright and his brother briefly stayed in an orphanage (Rowley, 9).
In 1916 or 1917, Ella reunited with her boys to move to Elaine, Arkansas, to live with her sister Maggie and her husband Silas Hoskins. On the way to Arkansas their trip detoured to her parents home, who had recently moved to Jackson, Mississippi. Wright’s Grandmother Wilson had become a Seventh Day Adventist and a “religious fanatic” (Stocking, 276). With the help of a young female lodger at his grandparent’s home, Wright was introduced to his first story: Bluebeard and his seven wives. Wright was mesmerized, however his fascination soon ended when he was caught by his grandmother, who slapping him across the mouth, warned him he was going to hell for listening to “Devil’s stuff” (Fabre, 18). This was only a taste of the “repressive force” his grandmother would have on him later in his upbringing (Stocking, 276).
Upon arriving in Elaine, Wright immediately became aware of segregation. Hazel Rowley writes, “for the first time, he had become conscious of race” (11). Still, life was good for Wright in Elaine. He had food in his stomach and spent the summer catching bees between the slaps of his hands. Wright became close with his Uncle Silas who was a relatively prosperous builder and saloon-owner that “catered to the black workers at the local sawmill” (Rowley, 11). In 1916, at only eight years old, Wright experienced “white terror” first hand and was introduced to the act of lynching (Rowley, 12). His Uncle Silas was shot and killed by a white man who resented his successful business. At that time lynching was widely supported so no funeral was held and no arrests were made. Wright’s Aunt Maggie, his mother, and his brother escaped to West Helena, Arkansas in search of safety. Lynching would be a subject Wright would return to often in his writing. Later he would compile these stories of lynch violence in his novel Uncle Tom’s Children. Rowley writes, “The black rebel who is shot to death by a white mob in ‘Long Black Song’ is called Silas” (13).
While his mother worked to support the family Wright attended school. Soon his mother fell ill and after suffering a stroke she, and the two boys, moved back in with his Grandmother Wilson (Fabre, 31). For the next seven years Wright lived with his grandparents. He began school at the Seventh Day Adventist School in Jackson. Wright gradually became aware of the illiteracy and lack of education among African-Americans and was appalled (Rowley, 19). Following World War I racial rioting took place in many American cities. Wright became increasingly aware of southern racism and violence, brought into sharp focus when the brother of his high school friend was murdered by a white mob (Fabre, 58).
In 1925, Wright graduated the ninth grade at Smith-Robinson and was valedictorian of his class, however almost didn’t graduate. He was chosen to deliver the graduation ceremony speech, yet refused to deliver the speech the principal has prepared for him, insisting he deliver his own speech arguing it “a matter of principle” (Rowley, 36). Wright delivered his own speech. Fresh out of high school, Wright held a variety of jobs and dabbled in petty crime such as petty theft in order to obtain enough money to move. At the age of 17, Wright left Jackson, Mississippi, for Memphis, Tennessee in hopes to one day be able to send for his mother and brother (Rowley, 40). Wright was introduced to the writings of H.L. Mencken at the age of 18, who, according to Fred Stocking, “demonstrated for young Richard the amazing fact that unpopular ideas could find expression in print” (277). He couldn’t read enough and Mencken’s books inspired him to write (Rowley, 47). In the winter of 1926-27 his mother and brother finally arrived from Jackson. Together they dreamed of moving to the north where the hope of black freedom fueled their hearts (Rowley, 48).
In 1927, at the age of 19, Wright moved with his Aunt Maggie to the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. The following year he began working in the Chicago Post Office. He eventually saved enough money to move his mother and brother with him into a four-room apartment where he could write in relative comfort. Chicago was one of the most “residentially segregated cit[ies] in the nation” when Wright arrived there and he was further appalled at the injustice blacks incurred (Fabre, 74). One day while overhearing some white waitresses speak of their aspirations he was amazed at their shallowness. The realization was so devastatingly profound it caused Wright to have a revelation. According to Rowley it caused Wright to want “to make white readers understand that the differences between black and white folks were not about blood or color. He would try to show that ‘Negroes are Negroes because they are treated like Negroes’” (56-57). The injustice black Americans experienced by white Americans Wright witnessed would be a central subject in his future writing. After the Depression hit in 1929, Wright further felt the problems threatening blacks and “learned at first-hand both the humiliations of unemployment and the effects of poverty – more painful than anything he had known in the rural South” (Stocking, 277). During this time Wright wrote his first novel loosely based upon his mother’s life, however one day in despair at having no food he tore it up and burned it, as he did all his other writing in fear of people finding them (Rowley, 66).
In 1933, Wright joined the Chicago John Reed Club, “a national organization of proletarian artists and writers” with about 100 members (Rowley, 75). Wright wrote revolutionary poetry for Left Front, the club’s literary magazine. In February, 1934, Left Front published two of his poems, the Anvil published another two in April, and in June, Wright’s long poem “I Have Seen Black Hands” was published in the New Masses (Rowley, 77). For the first time, Wright’s literary skills were supported and encouraged. Wright’s membership in the John Reed Club introduced him to the Communist Party. According to Stocking, Wright was convinced society was at fault for advocating “freedom and equality of opportunity” without extending it to the whole population (277). Wright joined the Communist Party in belief that “not only the individual people but the very structure of society was responsible for the suffering around him” (Stocking, 277). He was hired to supervise a youth club organized to counter juvenile delinquency among African-Americans on the South Side. The following year he officially joined the Communist Party (Rowley, 80).
In 1935, Wright unsuccessfully tried to sell his first novel Lawd Today! but no publishers were biting. In 1937, he once again attempted publishing his novel. After failing again to publish, this time revised versions, of Lawd Today! he eventually abandoned the novel (Rowley, 103-4). During this time he developed a name among literary circles and was a member of many literary organizations, including the Illinois Writers’ Project. Wright published many poems in a number of literary magazines and was to chair a session in the second American Writers’ Congress taking place in New York in June 1937. Wright seized the opportunity to make a change in his life and decided to move to New York. Rowley writes, “Within a decade, he had transformed himself into a confident, educated man, a skilled writer, someone with something to say” and Wright head off to “broader horizons” (124).
Works Cited
Fabre, Michael. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. NY: William Morrow & Co. Inc., 1973. 1-74.
Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. NY: Henry Hold & Co., 2001. 1-124.
Stocking, Fred. “On Richard Wright and ‘Almos’ A Man’”. The American Short Story. Vol. 1. NY: Dell, 1977, 275-77.
Internet Presence
Out of approximately 1,670,000 sites Author Richard Wright
1. Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation. www.hurston-wright.org. Visited 1-14-05.
2. Richard Wright – A Webpage. home.gwu.edu/-cuff/wright. Visited 1-14-05.
3. Richard Wright Chronology. www.itvs.org/RichardWright/obron.html. Visited 1-14-05.
4. MWP: Richard Wright (1908-1960). www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-winters/dir/wright_richard/. Visited on 1-14-05.
5. Wright, Richard. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2001. www.bartleby.com/65/wr/Wright-Ri.htm. Visited on 1-14-05.
6. The CLR James Institute presents: The Richard Wright Connection. www.clrjamesinstitute.org/wrightqu.html. Visited on 1-14-05.

Join the Richard Wright Circle.

The yearly membership fee of $10.00 for the Richard Wright circle runs for one calendar year and entitles you to two issues of the Richard Wright Newsletter: Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer. Please send dues, name, address, telephone, and e-mail address to:
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Washington, D.C. 20052

Aboard a Slave Ship, 1829

In 1807 the British Parliament passed a bill prohibiting the slave trade. In January the following year the United States followed suit by outlawing the importation of slaves. The acts did nothing to curtail the trade of slaves within the nation's borders, but did end the overseas commerce in slaves. To enforce these laws, Britain and the United States jointly patrolled the seas off the coast of Africa, stopping suspected slave traders and confiscating the ship when slaves where found. The human cargo was then transported back to Africa. Interception at Sea Conditions aboard the slave ships were wretched. Men, women and children crammed into every available space, denied adequate room, food or breathing space. The stench was appalling - the atmosphere inhumane to say the least. The Reverend Robert Walsh served aboard one of the ships assigned to intercept the slavers off the African coast. On the morning of May 22, 1829, a suspected slaver was sighted and the naval vessel gave chase. The next day, a favorable wind allowed the interceptor to gain on its quarry and approach close enough to fire two shots across her bow. The slaver heaved to and an armed party from the interceptor scrambled aboard her. We join Reverend Walsh's account as he boards the slave ship: "The first object that struck us was an enormous gun, turning on a swivel, on deck - the constant appendage of a pirate; and the next were large kettles for cooking, on the bows - the usual apparatus of a slaver. Our boat was now hoisted out, and I went on board with the officers. When we mounted her decks we found her full of slaves. She was called the Feloz, commanded by Captain Jose' Barbosa, bound to Bahia. She was a very broad-decked ship, with a mainmast, schooner rigged, and behind her foremast was that large, formidable gun, which turned on a broad circle of iron, on deck, and which enabled her to act as a pirate if her slaving speculation failed. She had taken in, on the coast of Africa, 336 males and 226 females, making in all 562, and had been out seventeen days, during which she had thrown overboard 55. The slaves were all inclosed under grated hatchways between decks. The space was so low that they sat between each other's legs and [were] stowed so close together that there was no possibility of their lying down or at all changing their position by night or day. As they belonged to and were shipped on account of different individuals, they were all branded like sheep with the owner's marks of different forms. These were impressed under their breasts or on their arms, and, as the mate informed me with perfect indifference 'burnt with the red-hot iron.' Over the hatchway stood a ferocious-looking fellow with a scourge of many twisted thongs in his hand, who was the slave driver of the ship, and whenever he heard the slightest noise below, he shook it over them and seemed eager to exercise it. I was quite pleased to take this hateful badge out of his hand, and I have kept it ever since as a horrid memorial of reality, should I ever be disposed to forget the scene I witnessed. As soon as the poor creatures saw us looking down at them, their dark and melancholy visages brightened up. They perceived some- thing of sympathy and kindness in our looks which they had not been accustomed to, and, feeling instinctively that we were friends, they immediately began to shout and clap their hands. One or two had picked up a few Portuguese words, and cried out, "Viva! Viva!" The women were particularly excited. They all held up their arms, and when we bent down and shook hands with them, they could not contain their delight; they endeavored to scramble up on their knees, stretching up to kiss our hands, and we understood that they knew we were come to liberate them. Some, however, hung down their heads in apparently hopeless dejection; some were greatly emaciated, and some, particularly children, seemed dying. But the circumstance which struck us most forcibly was how it was possible for such a number of human beings to exist, packed up and wedged together as tight as they could cram, in low cells three feet high, the greater part of which, except that immediately under the grated hatchways, was shut out from light or air, and this when the thermometer, exposed to the open sky, was standing in the shade, on our deck, at 89'. The space between decks was divided into two compartments 3 feet 3 inches high; the size of one was 16 feet by 18 and of the other 40 by 21; into the first were crammed the women and girls, into the second the men and boys: 226 fellow creatures were thus thrust into one space 288 feet square and 336 into another space 800 feet square, giving to the whole an average Of 23 inches and to each of the women not more than 13 inches. We also found manacles and fetters of different kinds, but it appears that they had all been taken off before we boarded. The heat of these horrid places was so great and the odor so offensive that it was quite impossible to enter them, even had there been room. They were measured as above when the slaves had left them. The officers insisted that the poor suffering creatures should be admitted on deck to get air and water. This was opposed by the mate of the slaver, who, from a feeling that they deserved it, declared they would murder them all. The officers, however, persisted, and the poor beings were all turned up together. It is impossible to conceive the effect of this eruption - 517 fellow creatures of all ages and sexes, some children, some adults, some old men and women, all in a state of total nudity, scrambling out together to taste the luxury of a little fresh air and water. They came swarming up like bees from the aperture of a hive till the whole deck was crowded to suffocation front stem to stern, so that it was impossible to imagine where they could all have come from or how they could have been stowed away. On looking into the places where they had been crammed, there were found some children next the sides of the ship, in the places most remote from light and air; they were lying nearly in a torpid state after the rest had turned out. The little creatures seemed indifferent as to life or death, and when they were carried on deck, many of them could not stand. After enjoying for a short time the unusual luxury of air, some water was brought; it was then that the extent of their sufferings was exposed in a fearful manner. They all rushed like maniacs towards it. No entreaties or threats or blows could restrain them; they shrieked and struggled and fought with one another for a drop of this precious liquid, as if they grew rabid at the sight of it. It was not surprising that they should have endured much sickness and loss of life in their short passage. They had sailed from the coast of Africa on the 7th of May and had been out but seventeen days, and they had thrown overboard no less than fifty-five, who had died of dysentery and other complaints in that space of time, though they had left the coast in good health. Indeed, many of the survivors were seen lying about the decks in the last stage of emaciation and in a state of filth and misery not to be looked at. Even-handed justice had visited the effects of this unholy traffic on the crew who were engaged in it. Eight or nine had died, and at that moment six were in hammocks on board, in different stages of fever. This mortality did not arise from want of medicine. There was a large stock ostentatiously displayed in the cabin, with a manuscript book containing directions as to the quantities; but the only medical man on board to prescribe it was a black, who was as ignorant as his patients. While expressing my horror at what I saw and exclaiming against the state of this vessel for conveying human beings, I was informed by my friends, who had passed so long a time on the coast of Africa and visited so many ships, that this was one of the best they had seen. The height sometimes between decks was only eighteen inches, so that the unfortunate beings could not turn round or even on their sides, the elevation being less than the breadth of their shoulders; and here they are usually chained to the decks by the neck and legs. In such a place the sense of misery and suffocation is so great that the Negroes, like the English in the Black Hole at Calcutta, are driven to a frenzy. They had on one occasion taken a slave vessel in the river Bonny; the slaves were stowed in the narrow space between decks and chained together. They heard a horrible din and tumult among them and could not imagine from what cause it proceeded. They opened the hatches and turned them up on deck. They were manacled together in twos and threes. Their horror may be well conceived when they found a number of them in different stages of suffocation; many of them were foaming at the mouth and in the last agonies-many were dead. A living man was sometimes dragged up, and his companion was a dead body; sometimes of the three attached to the same chain, one was dying and another dead. The tumult they had heard was the frenzy of those suffocating wretches in the last stage of fury and desperation, struggling to extricate themselves. When they were all dragged up, nineteen were irrecoverably dead. Many destroyed one another in the hopes of procuring room to breathe; men strangled those next them, and women drove nails into each other's brains. Many unfortunate creatures on other occasions took the first opportunity of leaping overboard and getting rid, in this way, of an intolerable life." References: Walsh, Robert, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 (1831).
References:
Walsh, Robert, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 (1831).

DEATH RATES

The death-rate amongst slaves was high. To replace their losses, plantation owners encouraged the slaves to have children. Child-bearing started around the age of thirteen, and by twenty the women slaves would be expected to have four or five children. To encourage child-bearing some population owners promised women slaves their freedom after they had produced fifteen children.

Young women were often advertised for sale as "good breeding stock". To encourage child-bearing some population owners promised women slaves their freedom after they had produced fifteen children. One slave trader from Virginia boasted that his successful breeding policies enabled him to sell 6,000 slave children a year.

BILLIE HOLIDAY

"Strange Fruit" is the title of a song made famous when it was performed in 1939 at the Cafe Society nightclub in New York by the great jazz singer Billie Holiday. It was a surprisingly unusual song for a cabaret because it was an overt song of African American protest, a message that had heretofore been hidden in spirituals and the blues. The words of "Strange Fruit" refer to lynchings, the killing of black people by mobs in the South. Nearly 4,000 people were lynched in the fifty years before 1939. Most of these murders were by hanging, and the song's lyrics dramatically describe bodies hanging from trees like fruit: "Southern trees bear a strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, / Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." This was a protest song aimed directly at white people, and some walked out of Cafe Society, an integrated Greenwich Village club designed for intellectuals and political liberals. Some people thought "Strange Fruit" was not appropriate entertainment, some were overcome by the searing power of the song's imagery, some were simply fearful of expressing protest. A few African Americans were unhappy because they felt it only portrayed blacks as victims. Columbia, which recorded Billie Holiday's songs, refused to record this one. She found a small company, but many juke boxes and radio stations, including BBC, still would not play it. "Strange Fruit's" words and music were written by Abel Meeropol, a New York City schoolteacher, under the name Lewis Allen. Perhaps Holiday was able to put the feeling into the lyrics that she did because her own background was one of terrible abuse, poverty, and suffering. Her own father had died in Texas because he could not get proper medical treatment, and she continued to feel that pain. "Strange Fruit" became her last set every night at Cafe Society. The house was silenced, a single spotlight found her face, and with her unmatched phrasing, timing, timbre, and sincerity, the 24-year-old Holiday combined dignity with anger to utter the stark words, "And the sudden smell of burning flesh.... Here is a strange and bitter crop."

STRANGE FRUIT

STRANGE FRUIT
by DAVID MARGOLICK

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
As Billie Holiday later told the story, a single gesture by a patron at New York's Café Society, in Greenwich Village, changed the history of American music in early 1939, the night when she first sang "Strange Fruit."
Café Society was New York's only truly integrated nightclub outside Harlem, a place catering to progressive types with open minds. But Holiday was to recall that even there she was afraid to sing this new song, and regretted it, at least momentarily, when she first did. "There wasn't even a patter of applause when I finished," she later said. "Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping."
The applause grew louder and less tentative as "Strange Fruit" became a nightly ritual for Holiday, then one of her signature songs, at least where it could be safely performed. And audiences have continued to applaud this disturbing ballad, unique in Holiday's oeuvre and in the American popular-song repertoire, as it has left its mark on generations of writers, musicians, and listeners, both black and white. The late jazz writer Leonard Feather once called "Strange Fruit" "the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism." Jazz musicians still speak of it with a mixture of awe and fear - "When Holiday recorded it, it was more than revolutionary," said the drummer Max Roach - and perform it almost gingerly. "It's like rubbing people's noses in their own shit," said Mal Waldron, the pianist who accompanied Holiday in her final years.
A few years back a British music publication, Q Magazine, named "Strange Fruit" one of 10 songs that actually changed the world. And like any revolutionary act, it encountered great resistance. Holiday, like the black folksinger Josh White, who began performing it a few years after Holiday did, was abused, sometimes physically, by irate nightclub patrons. Columbia, the company that produced Holiday's records, refused to touch it; even progressive radio stations would not play it. And again like revolutionary acts, the song has generated its fair share of mythology, none more enduring than Holiday's often repeated claim that she partly wrote it herself or had it written for her.
"Strange Fruit" marked a watershed, praised by some, lamented by others, in Holiday's evolution from exuberant jazz singer to torch singer of lovelorn pain and loneliness. Some of the song's sadness seems to have stuck to her ever after. "She really was happy only when she sang," the jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason wrote. "The rest of the time she was a sort of living lyric to the song 'Strange Fruit,' hanging, not on a poplar tree, but on the limbs of life itself."
In recent years many musicians-from Carmen McRae to Nina Simone to Sting to Dee Dee Bridgewater to Cassandra Wilson-have recorded "Strange Fruit," each cut an act of courage, given Holiday's hold over it. (That might not apply to 101 Strings, which omitted the lyrics in its 1973 orchestral version.) The song continues to pop up in the most obscure places. The Pulitzer Prizewinning historian Leon Litwak uses it in his classes at Berkeley. It's what Mickey Rourke put on the turntable to seduce Kim Basinger early on in Adrian Lyne's 1986 film Nine 1/2 Weeks. Predictably, it failed miserably as mood music.) The song was a staple of the anti-apartheid circuit in Europe. Khallid Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan's notoriously anti-Semitic former national spokesman, quoted it in a speech cataloguing America's racist past - unaware, apparently, that it was written by a white Jewish schoolteacher from New York City.
I wrote "Strange Fruit" because I hate lynching, and I hate injustice, and I hate the people who perpetuate it.
-Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allan), 1971.
Billie Holiday, who was only 24 years old in 1939, had enough experience with racism by that time to call herself "a race woman." But while hard knocks helped her infuse a unique mixture of resilience, defiance, and shrewdness into the often banal lyrics she sang, they had never influenced her choice of material, at least not until "Strange Fruit" came along.
Holiday's 1956 "autobiography" - written by William Dufty (and known, like the 1972 film biography, as Lady Sings the Blues, though she had wanted to call the book Bitter Crop)-offers an account of the origins of "Strange Fruit" that may set a new record for most misinformation per column inch. ("Shit, man, I never read that book," she later said.) But in fairness to Dufty, she'd been peddling many of these myths for years. "The germ of the song was in a poem written by Lewis Allen [sic]," the book claims. "When he showed me that poem, I dug it right off. It seemed to spell out all the things that had killed Pop," Dufty quotes her. According to Holiday, her father was exposed to poison gas as a soldier during World War I and died of pneumonia in 1937 after several segregated southern hospitals refused to treat him. "Allen, too, had heard how Pop died and of course was interested in my singing. He suggested that Sonny White, who had been my accompanist, and I turn it into music. So the three of us got together and did the job in about three weeks."
Abel Meeropol, who is often remembered today for raising the two orphaned sons of the executed atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, recalled things very differently. An English teacher at De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx for 27 years, Meeropol had led two other, parallel lives. One was as a political activist: he and his wife were closet Communists, donating a percentage of their earnings to the party. (The F.B.I. maintained that he had "been identified by reliable informants" as a party member until 1947, though it followed him for 23 years after that.) The other was as a poet and songwriter. He wrote incessantly poems, ballads, musicals, plays, usually using the nom de plume "Lewis Allan," the names of his two biological children, neither of whom survived infancy. Apart from "Strange Fruit," he is best known for writing the lyrics of "The House I Live In," a paean to tolerance sung by Frank Sinatra in an Oscar-winning short subject in 1945.
Lynchings - in which blacks were murdered with unspeakable brutality, often in a carnival-like atmosphere, then hanged from trees for all to see-were rampant in the South during Reconstruction and beyond, but had grown relatively rare by the late 1930s. (As the recent murder of a black man in Jasper, Texas, attests, they never completely stopped.) The N.A.A.C.P, until as late as 1941, had routinely attempted to push Congress - always to no avail - to enact federal antilynching legislation. Somewhere around 1935, Meeropol, in his early 30s at the time, saw a photograph of a particularly ghastly lynching. "It ... haunted me for days," he later recalled. He wrote a poem about it, one which was originally to have appeared in the Communist journal The New Masses but first saw print as "Bitter Fruit," by Abel Meeropol-in the January 1937 issue of The New York Teacher, a union publication. Meeropol set the poem to music, and in the late 1930s the song was regularly performed in left-wing circles-by the Teachers' Union chorus, by a black singer named Laura Duncan (at Madison Square Garden), by a quartet of black singers at a fund-raiser for the anti-Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. As it happened, the co-producer of that show, Robert Gordon, was also directing the first-floor show at the new Café Society, which had opened in late December 1938. The featured attraction: Billie Holiday.
One of the first numbers we put on was called: "Strange Fruit Grows on Southern Trees," the tragic story of lynching.
Imagine putting that on in a night club!
-Barney Josephson, 1942.
Café Society - "a nightclub to take the stuffing out of stuffed shirts," where leftwing W.P.A. types did the murals and a simian - looking Hitler hung from the ceiling near the foyer - was unusual even for New York City. Billed as "the wrong place for the Right people," it mocked the empty celebrity worship, right-wing politics, and racial exclusion of places like the Stork Club. At Café Society, the doormen wore rags and ragged white gloves, blacks and whites fraternized onstage and off, and the politics were somewhere left of the New Deal. When Eleanor Roosevelt made what might have been her only foray into a New York nightclub, it was allegedly to Café Society that she went.
Located on Sheridan Square (a second Café Society soon opened on 58th Street near Park Avenue), it was the brainchild of Barney Josephson, a shoe salesman with leftist sympathies; its patrons, the historian David W. Stowe has written, consisted of "labor leaders, intellectuals, writers, jazz lovers, celebrities, students and assorted leftists." As Michael Denning of Yale has put it, Café Society represented a unique synthesis of cultures, blending the politically radical cabarets of Berlin and Paris with the jazz clubs and revues of Harlem. Nelson Rockefeller, Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, Lauren Bacall, Lillian Hellman, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson hung out there; Lena Horne, Teddy Wilson, Sarah Vaughan, Imogene Coca, Carol Channing, and Zero Mostel performed there. It was probably the only place in America where "Strange Fruit" could have been sung and savored.
One day in early 1939, Meeropol - who had never met Holiday before and knew nothing about her father-sat down at Café Society's piano and played her the song. Neither Tin Pan Alley nor jazz, it was closer to the political theater songs of Marc Blitzstein and other leftist composers. But it was utterly alien to her, and, to Meeropol at least, Holiday appeared unimpressed. "To be perfectly frank, I didn't think she felt very comfortable with the song, because it was so different from the songs to which she was accustomed," Meeropol later wrote. She asked him but one question: What did "pastoral" mean?
Josephson, too, said that Holiday "didn't know what the hell the song meant," and adopted it only as a favor to him; not until several months later, when he spotted a tear running down her cheek during one performance, did he feel the song had sunk in. ("But I gotta tell you the truth," Josephson liked to say. "She sang it just as well when she didn't know what it was about.") To be sure, Holiday was in some ways unsophisticated, famous for reading nothing more serious than comic books. Still, it's hard to believe she was as oblivious as Josephson claimed. Indeed, Meeropol later said that when Holiday introduced the song "she gave a startling, most dramatic, and effective interpretation ... which could jolt an audience out of its complacency anywhere.... Billie Holiday's styling of the song was incomparable and fulfilled the bitterness and shocking quality I had hoped the song would have."
No one ever tampered with Meeropol's words. But Arthur Herzog, who wrote another famous song often misattributed to Holiday-"God Bless the Child"-claimed that an arranger, Danny Mendelsohn, was really responsible for the final sound.
One story has it that Holiday's mother objected when she began singing "Strange Fruit." "Why are you sticking your neck out?" she asked.
"Because it might make things better," Holiday replied.
"But you' U be dead," her mother insisted.
"Yeah, but I'll feel it. I'll know it in my grave.
Josephson, who called the song "agitprop," decreed elaborate stage directions for each performance of "Strange Fruit." Holiday was to close each of her three nightly sets with it. Before she began, all service was to cease. Waiters, cashiers, busboys-all were immobilized. The room went completely dark, save for a pin spot on Holiday's face. No matter how thunderous the ovation, she was never to return for a bow. "My instruction was walk on, period," Josephson later said. "People had to remember 'Strange Fruit,' get their insides burned with it." But as Heywood Hale Broun, the longtime CBS newsman, remembered it, Holiday sang "Strange Fruit" in the middle of the set, following it up quickly with something light in order to cut the tension. "After we'd oohed and aahed in our kind of liberal way, the band would hit a sharp chord and then go into 'Them There Eyes,"' Broun said.
She came out [of Café Society]. She was screaming, "Renie, I tried to kill him, I tried to kill him, I tried to ... " And she told me then that there was this fella - a white man from Georgia, you know, one of those Georgia crackers - who was sitting ringside and drinking, and Lady was doing "Strange Fruit." And when Lady was on her way out of the club, he yelled, "Come here, Billie." She went, thinking he wanted to buy her a drink, but he said, "I want to show you some strange fruit, " and ... well, he made this very obscene picture on his napkin, and the way he had it, honey, it was awful! And she picked up the chair and hit him on the head, and before it was over, she showed him, honey, because she went crazy. I mean that she was sweeping up the floor with this man, honey, and they said the owner and bouncer at Café Society said, "Go on, Lady. We'll take care of him," and they threw him out right on his ears.
-Songwriter Irene Wilson, 1971.
To many, "Black and Blue," immortalized by Louis Armstrong, with lyrics written in 1929 by Andy Razaf, was the first black protest song aimed at a largely white audience. White songwriters approached civil rights tentatively; Irving Berlin referred obliquely to lynching in "Supper Time" (a song Ethel Waters made famous), but before Meeropol and Holiday came along, no one had ever confronted the subject so directly.
Reactions varied. Variety conceded that "Strange Fruit" had "an undefined appeal" but called it "basically a depressing piece." Some patrons voted with their feet. "Lots of people walked out on the song because they said 'we don't call this entertainment,'" Josephson told Linda Kuehl for a never completed biography of Holiday. "I remember a time a woman followed Billie into the powder room. Billie was wearing a strapless gown and she tried to brush the woman off. The woman became hysterical with tears - 'Don't you sing that song again! Don't you dare!'-she screamed and ripped Billie's [gown]." It turned out that as a young girl the woman had seen "a black man tied by the throat to the back fender of a car, dragged through the streets, hung up, and burned," recalled Josephson. She'd thought she'd come to Café Society for a good time, not to relive a childhood nightmare.
More often than not, though, people began requesting the song, and it became part of Holiday's routine, even though it made her sick to perform it. "I have to sing it," she once said. "'Fruit' goes a long way in telling how they mistreat Negroes down South."
Soon, Café Society began advertising not just Holiday - referred to in press accounts as the "buxom, colored songstress" or the "sepian songstress"-but the song itself. HAVE YOU HEARD? "STRANGE FRUIT GROWING ON SOUTHERN TREES" SUNG BY BILLIE HOLIDAY, an advertisement in The New Yorker asked in March 1939.
But Columbia records, apparently fearful of antagonizing southern customers, wanted no part of recording the song. So Holiday persuaded Milt Gabler, an entrepreneur who'd started Commodore Records, a small company run out of a music store on West 52nd Street, to do it instead.
On April 20, 1939, Holiday and the musicians - Sonny White on piano, Frankie Newton on trumpet, Tab Smith on alto sax, Kenneth Hollon and Stan Payne on tenor sax, Jimmy McLin on guitar, John Williams on bass, Eddie Dougherty on drums - made what was to become the first and most famous. recording of "Strange Fruit." At a dollar apiece, Commodore's 10-inch records went for three times the going rate. Concerned that customers would feel shortchanged by too brief a cut, Gabler had White improvise his now familiar, haunting overture; given "Strange Fruit's" dramatic close, one could hardly tack on anything at the end.
One day last winter, Gabler, now 87 years old, played "Strange Fruit" for me at his home in New Rochelle, New York. He fetched an antique LP from his archive, then laid it down with shaky hands on an ancient turntable. Amid the scratches and static emerged Billie Holiday's utterly distinctive sound. Here, she is grim and purposeful, yet still with a lovely lightness to her. There is no weepiness, nor histrionics. Her elocution is superb, with a hint of a southern accent; her tone is somehow languorous but unflinching, raw yet smooth, youthful yet worldly. The overt editorializing is minimal, and the sentiment isn't grief so much as contempt, as she spits out references to southern gallantry and the aroma of the magnolias. But the intensity mounts until the last word of the song: "crop." She sings it on a strangely unresolved note, dangling it back and forth like the dead black man swinging on the branch.
Gabler says he gave Holiday $500 for the four songs she recorded that day ("Fine and Mellow" among them), and $1,000 later. How much she eventually earned he could not say. "We used to give her cash, especially when she was in trouble, right out of the cash register in the store. We never really kept a record of it."
One of the saxophonists, Kenneth Hollon, later said the record sold 10,000 copies in its first week. Meeropol, who had failed to copyright the song, learned it had been recorded only when a friend brought him a copy. He ultimately got standard royalties: two cents per record, one for the words, another for the music. At least initially, Meeropol collected more grief from "Strange Fruit" than receipts. During a 1940 state probe of Communist 11subversion" in New York's public schools, he was asked whether the Communist Party had ever paid him for the song or if he'd donated the proceeds to the party. But the pennies mounted: according to
Bob Golden of Carlin America, the longtime publishers of "Strange Fruit," the Meeropols, father and sons, eventually earned more than $300,000 from it.
This is about a phonograph record which has obsessed me for two days. It is called "Strange Fruit" and it will, even after the tenth hearing, make you blink and hold to your chair. Even now, as I think of it, the short hair on the back of my neck tightens and I want to hit somebody. I know who, too.
-Samuel Grafton, the New York Post, October 1939.
Strange Fruit" made it to No. 16 on the charts in July 1939 and was widely publicized. The New Masses called it "the first successful attempt of white men to write blues." In a piece entitled "Strange Record," Time described "Strange Fruit" as "a prime piece of musical propaganda" for the N.A.A.C.P, and printed the first verse of "Allan's grim and gripping lyrics." ("Billie Holiday is a roly - poly young colored woman with a hump in her voice," the article began. "She does not care enough about her figure to watch her diet, but she loves to sing.") But surely the most extravagant praise came from Samuel Grafton, a columnist for the New York Post. "If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its Marseillaise," he wrote.
Proponents of federal anti-lynching legislation urged that copies of the song be sent to Congress. Within a few years "Strange Fruit" became the title of Lillian Smith's famous 1944 anti-segregation novel. Holiday's claim that Smith, a southerner herself, told her the song had inspired her to write her novel is fanciful. But Smith acknowledged "Lewis Allan" on the title page, and went to Café Society once to hear Holiday sing. (Holiday seemed stoned to Smith when she visited her backstage.)
Jazz purists never liked "Strange Fruit," nor what they thought it did to Holiday. "Perhaps I expected too much of 'Strange Fruit,' the ballyhooed ... tune which, via gory wordage and hardly any melody, expounds an anti-lynching campaign," a Down Beat critic wrote. "At least I'm sure it's not for Billie." More famously, John Hammond, who had discovered Holiday as a teenager and produced her records at Columbia, called the song "the beginning of the end for Billie" and "artistically the worst thing that ever happened to her." To him, Holiday had simply gone too serious. "The more conscious she was of her style, the more mannered she became," he later said. By taking herself so seriously, she suffered artistically and lost her sparkle. Holiday, he lamented, had become the darling of left-wing intellectuals and homosexuals; fortunately, whites had never caught on to Bessie Smith in the same way.
After performing at Café Society for two years, Holiday left. (Hounded by the Red-baiting of J. Edgar Hoover and his covey of favored columnists, Josephson was essentially forced to sell his clubs in 1949.) Some other New York clubs refused to let Holiday sing the song, prompting her to specify by contract that she could perform it if she chose. That didn't guarantee anything. A patron at Jimmy Ryans on West 52nd Street once requested it, only to see Holiday come back afterward almost in tears. "Did you hear that bar-tender ringing the cash register all through?" she asked him. "He always does that when I sing."
"Strange Fruit" has "a way of separating the straight people from the squares and cripples," Holiday's autobiography states. She recalled the time a woman in Los Angeles asked her to sing "that sexy song" she was so famous for-"you know, the one about the naked bodies swinging in the trees." (She refused.) Another time, at a club outside Los Angeles (where Lana Turner regularly asked her to perform it), a young white man hurled racial epithets at her. "After two shows of this I was ready to quit," she later recalled. "I knew if I didn't the third time round I might bounce something off that cracker and land in some San Fernando ranch-type jail." Instead, Bob Hope, who was at the club with Judy Garland, badgered the heckler until he left.
In interviews, Holiday said that whenever she performed "Strange Fruit" in the South there was trouble. She told one newspaper that she was driven out of Mobile, Alabama, for trying to sing it. In fact, Holiday made few southern tours, and there's little evidence that she sang "Strange Fruit" when she did. Stories of jukeboxes carrying "Strange Fruit" down South being smashed seem fanciful, if only because Commodore Records probably didn't circulate that far.
Claims that the song was banned from the radio are equally hard to document, but not hard to believe; radio stations played few records then, and rarely anything controversial. "WNEW [in New York] has been trying to get up the courage to allow Billie Holiday, singing at Caf6 Society, to render the anti-lynching song - 'Strange Fruit Growing on the Trees Down South' - on one of the night spot's regular broadcasts," the New York Post reported in November 1939. "Station turned thumbs down a week ago, but approved the number for last night's airing. Then it said 'no' again, but has agreed to let Billie sing it tonight at 1 o'clock." (According to one published report, the song was also banned from the BBC.)
Albert Murray, the eminent historian of the blues, calls "Strange Fruit" a "do good" hit, one that resonated far more with white liberals than with blacks. But Holiday sang the song for black audiences, including several performances at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. Jack Schiffman, whose family ran the Apollo, says his father did not want Holiday to do so, fearing disturbances. But in his memoirs Schiffman described what happened when she did. "When she wrenched the final words from her lips, there was not a soul in that audience, black or white, who did not feel half strangled," he wrote. "A moment of oppressively heavy silence followed, and then a kind of rustling sound I had never heard before. It was the sound of almost two thousand people sighing."
She would get herself together to do that one. The others were kind of natural tunes, and she would spin them off the way she talked. This one was special. She had to do preparation for this one.
-Pianist Mal Waldron.
Until the end of Holiday's life, "Strange Fruit" remained a fixture in her performances, and wherever, whenever she sang it, it was an event. With every indignity she suffered, her passion for it seemed to grow; a racial snub she'd just suffered at a St. Louis nightclub, The New York Amsterdam News reported in 1944, explained why she sang the song "with so much fervor and smoldering hatred in her eyes." Actress Billie Allen-Henderson recalled how the maitre d' at New York's Birdland actually confiscated all cigarettes before Holiday began. "I was trying to be sophisticated and all of a sudden something stabs me in the solar plexus and I was gasping for air," Henderson said. "It was so deeply felt. She was... 'unrelenting' is a good word for it. I thought, That's what art can do." Dempsey J. Travis, a former jazz musician and author of several books, heard a decrepit, dissipated Holiday sing it several times on Chicago's South Side. "The words told the story, but her face never reflected any emotion," he said. "You listened to every word; it was like watching water drop slowly from a faucet.... It was as if she was singing 'Ave Maria' or 'Amazing Grace.'"
Holiday performed "Strange Fruit" on a European tour in 1954; that may have inspired a Parisian named Henri-Jacques Dupuy to translate it into French. But "Strange Fruit" proved just as unsettling abroad. "With all the troubles the French are currently having with coloured people in Indochina and North Africa, I do not think it will be possible to get a major recording of Mr. Dupuy's version," Rudi Révil, a French song publisher, wrote Meeropol.
Holiday's "autobiography," with all of its mistakes, appeared in 1956. Meeropol, while conceding that her tragic life may have led to some "lapses into fancy," claimed he won a pledge from the publisher, Doubleday, to delete all misinformation about "Strange Fruit" from subsequent editions of the book. (They nonetheless live on in the most recent paperback edition, published by Penguin in 1992.) One can only imagine how Meeropol reacted to the movie Lady Sings the Blues, for its fictions were far more egregious than anything Holiday ever cooked up. The film shows Diana Ross as Holiday encountering a lynching while touring the South; stricken by what she sees, she adopts a laserlike, knowing look-the look, presumably, of lyrics taking shape. The chords of "Strange Fruit" then sound, and Ross sings a bowdlerized version of the song, shorn of all of its most powerful images. The filmmakers paid $4,500 for the right to rape the lyrics.
Meeropol developed Alzheimer's disease in the late 1970s; his elder son played "Strange Fruit" for him in the nursing home, and when the record got too scratchy, he sang it to him. Even after the old man stopped recognizing anyone, he seemed to recognize it, and perked up when he did. When Meeropol died in 1986, it was sung at the memorial service.
In The Heart of a Woman, Maya Angelou recounts how, during a visit to Los Angeles in 1958, in a hoarse and raspy voice, Holiday sang "Strange Fruit" as a bedtime song for her son, Guy. "What's a pastoral scene, Miss Holiday?" the young boy interjected.
"Billie looked up slowly and studied Guy for a second," Angelou writes. "Her face became cruel, and when she spoke her voice was scornful. 'It means when the crackers are killing the niggers. It means when they take a little nigger like you and snatch off his nuts and shove them down his goddam throat. That's what it means.... That's what they do. That's a goddam pastoral scene."'
Within a year, Holiday was dead. To some, the song remained uniquely hers. "Frankly, I don't think anybody but Billie should do it," said Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers. "I don't think anybody can improve on it." But the song's power and appeal to a younger generation of performers only grew with the civil-rights movement, and as lynching became a metaphor for the American black experience rather than a direct threat.
Abbey Lincoln, who tackled "Strange Fruit" on her 1987 album, Abbey Sings Billie, said she had no trouble singing the song. Slavery's over and so is lynching, she said; her goal was not to dwell on black victimhood but to pay homage to Holiday herself. For Cassandra Wilson and Dee Dee Bridgewater, however, "Strange Fruit" has proved considerably more difficult.
Wilson, Down Beat's "Female Vocalist of the Year" two years ago, said that when she first heard "Strange Fruit," in her native Jackson, Mississippi, in the late 1970s, it "made my skin crawl." Many years had to pass before she felt she had the wisdom, the experience, and the courage to perform it. "That was a song that I always felt I had to get to," she said. One approaches it, she said, not by trying to outdo or enhance Holiday-a fool's errand by any definition-but by stripping the song bare. Holiday sometimes performed "Strange Fruit" almost punitively, to chastise an inattentive or unappreciative audience. Wilson, by contrast, said that because the song is so emotionally taxing for her she does it to reward audiences with whom she has established a special rapport.
Like Wilson, Dee Dee Bridgewater, whose album Dear Ella won two Grammy's this year, first heard "Strange Fruit" while in her 20s. She, too, was profoundly moved by it; she, too, balked at singing it herself. But when she portrayed Holiday in a one-woman show in the mid-1980s, she had no choice. She subsequently included "Strange Fruit" in her concert repertoire, but only when she felt she had a sufficiently sensitive pianist-namely, a blind Dutchman named Bert van den Brink-accompanying her. Together, they performed it eight or nine times, always in Europe. Often, she cried as she sang it; sometimes, she choked on the ending. At least once, she couldn't finish.
Then there was Bridgewater's performance in Turin, Italy. "There was just dead silence, then this amazing roar," she recalled. "In that deadness, I just broke down. I was sobbing. I had to leave the stage." Shortly after that, she decided never to sing it again. "I just can't do it anymore," she said. "I just don't want to go there."
By: DAVID MARGOLIK, as published in Vanity Fair - September 1998