| Chap. 1 | Chap.
2 | Chap. 3 | Chap.
4 | Chap. 5 | Chap.
6 | Chap. 7 | Chap.
This chapter focuses on black life in the
years between the World Wars a period marked by continued migration
and urbanization and particularly by the outpouring of art,
literature and music in Harlem and across the rest of urban
America. The migration of African American to New York, Detroit,
Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and other industrial and cultural
centers in search of work also increased their national visibility
and influence. The power of jazz, for example, is one manifestation
of this new influence.
The first two vignettes however focus on
the West. Central Avenue: The “Pulse” of Black Los
Angeles reminds us of the growth of an African American community
on the Pacific coast while Racial Violence on the Southern Plains:
Tulsa, 1921, illustrates the migration of racial violence and
tensions west along with the general population. African American
urban women are profiled in two related vignettes, Harlem Women:
Race, Class and Gender and Betterment Organizations Among Harlem
Women. The growing influence of African Americans in professional
sports is illustrated in A League of Their Own: Founding the
Negro Baseball League and Jack Johnson is a Dandy. The problem
of continuing Southern educational discrimination is highlighted
in the table White and Black Education in 1924: A Comparison.
A number of vignettes depict the Harlem Renaissance
beginning with Alain Locke Describes the “New Negro”
in 1925. Langston Hughes Recalls Harlem During the Renaissance,
Langston Hughes’s “America,” Harlem Renaissance
Poetry: “If We Must Die” and Harlem Renaissance
Poetry: “I Want to Die While You Love Me,” provide
glimpses into the literature of the period. The Debate Over
“Racial Art” reminds us that the Renaissance had
its African American critics. Finally, Zora on “Being
Colored” gives one woman’s view of racial dynamics
during the Renaissance.
The interwar years were also marked by the
rise of two radically different movements that promised full
freedom and equality for African Americans. The first movement,
led by Marcus Garvey is illustrated in two vignettes. The first,
Marcus Garvey’s Views on Race and Nation provides a brief
introduction to Garveyism, the political national¬ism which
proved exceedingly popular among the people of Afri¬can
ancestry throughout the world. The cartoon, At the Crossroads
from The Negro World, the newspaper of Garvey’s Universal
Negro Improvement Association offers one view of the reasons
for the popularity of “Garveyism.” Marcus Garvey:
A Seattle Woman Remembers, de¬scribe the reaction to Garveyism
through the recollections of a child during that period. In
A Lunatic or a Traitor we see W. E. B. DuBois’s critique
of the Garvey Movement.
The other movement that proved appealing
for some African Americans, particularly in the 1930s, was Marxism.
The first vignette, The Messenger: A Blacks Socialist Newspaper
offers a "left" alternative to the Communist Party.
James Weldon Johnson on Communism describes an NAACP leader's
reaction to the movement that forged an uneasy alliance with
many African Americans in the 1930s. Black Pilgrims in the Soviet
Union discusses the visits of black leaders to that country
and the response of its political leadership.
The vignette Negro Women in Steel illustrates
the growing support of organized labor in the 1930s while Franklin
Roosevelt, Two Views shows the responses to Presidential leadership
during the Great Depression. Charles Hamilton Houston Outlines
the Campaign Against School Segregation traces the 1935 roots
of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Decision. The final
vignettes Segregated Baseball, 1939 and Kenny Washington at
UCLA, 1937, describe both the continuing barriers in sports
and the role of gifted athletes in undermining those barriers.
CENTRAL AVENUE: THE “PULSE” OF BLACK LOS ANGELES
In the account below historian Lonnie Bunch,
III, describes Central Avenue, the center of black life in Los
Angeles between World Wars I and II.
Central Avenue was in its heyday as the center
of both the black business and residential communities. By 1920
the black population of Los Angeles had doubled from the 1910
level to 15,579. Unlike earlier migrations...black neighborhoods
were unable to accommodate the influx. "Keep the neighborhood
white" drives...eventually led to the overpopulation of
the Central Avenue community by forcing all new arrivals into
the area. Any discussion of the 1920s should begin with "The
Avenue." The story of Central Avenue with its elegant neighborhoods,
jazz clubs, business districts and trolley cars full of black
faces has grown to mythic proportions. Some remember the "Avenue"
as a miniature Harlem where musicians and literati gauged the
community's pulse by day and transformed that energy into rhyme
and music by night. Others recall with pride the offices of
the black physicians and dentists, the storefronts of black
businesses, and the fabled Dunbar Hotel. Many, however, have
memories only of overcrowded homes and apartments, the underside
of the Avenue...
By 1910 Central Avenue was the main thoroughfare
of black Los Angeles, with the nucleus at 9th and Central, later
moving south to 12th and Central. Soon "The Avenue"
became an eclectic mix of stately homes representing the cream
of black society, rentals and apartments that housed the new
southern migrants, and the business and professional offices
of the black middle class. In essence, poverty and prosperity
existed side by side on Central Avenue.
The black businesses in the Central Avenue
corridor were a continuing source of pride for black Angelenos.
As one walked from 12th Street a myriad of businesses appeared...the
offices of the California Eagle, the Lincoln Theater, the Kentucky
Club, Blodgett Motors (with advertisements claiming "you
can't go wrong with an Essex"), the Elks Auditorium...and
the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company were just a few
of the many enterprises that graced the street. Just off the
avenue was the 28th Street YMCA, the site of political meetings,
social gatherings, as well as the leading organization working
with Negro youth in the city. Nearby...between Hooper and Central
Avenues, the Dunbar Hospital...ministered to the needs of the
community until World War II. Liberty Savings and Loan [was]
located near 25th and Central from its inception in 1924 until
it ceased operation in 1961... The Hudson-Liddell Building at
41st and Central…was designed by Paul Williams... Williams,
the preeminent black architect, had already designed...the 28th
Street YMCA, the Hollywood YMCA and the Second Baptist Church.
But the jewel of Central Avenue was the Hotel
Somerville, later renamed the Dunbar Hotel. One of the most
important landmarks in Los Angeles, it was more than just a
resort for weary travelers of color. The lobby, restaurant and
conference room became the central meeting place of black Angelenos,
hosting a wide range of social and community events. It was
truly the symbol of black achievement in the city. The hotel
was the creation of John Somerville, a dentist in Los Angeles...
Somerville and his wife, Vada were both graduates of the School
of Dentistry of the University of Southern California and active
participants in the affairs of the black community for over
Central Avenue was also home to a musical
and literary movement that followed the patterns of the Harlem
Renaissance, though on a much smaller scale... Literati from
Langston Hughes to native son Arna Bontemps periodically spent
time in the ever enlarging artist colony. Poetry readings by
local and nationally known writers became standard Sunday fare
at the 28th Street YMCA...
The plethora of musical establishments, jazz dens and nightclubs...made
Central Avenue the entertainment center of the city... Nightclubs
such as the Kentucky Club, the Club Alabam, the Savoy at 55th
and Central...the Apex at 4015 Central...all provided opportunity
for black musicians to develop a following... Central Avenue
was the home to many dreams...the hub of black life.
Source: Lonnie Bunch, III, Black Angelenos:
The African American in Los Angeles, 1850-1950 (Los Angeles,
1989), pp. 29-34.
RACIAL VIOLENCE ON THE SOUTHERN PLAINS: TULSA, 1921
On June 1, 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma exploded
in black white violence following the arrest of Dick Rowland,
a 19 year old elevator operator for rape. In the following account
published in The Nation NAACP official Walter F. White described
the carnage and provides his assessment of the reasons behind
A hysterical white girl related that a nineteen-year¬
old colored boy attempted to assault her in the public elevator
of a public office building of a thriving town of 100,000 in
open daylight. Without pausing to find whether or not the story
was true, without bothering with the slight detail of investigating
the character of the woman who made the outcry (as a matter
of fact, she was of exceed¬ingly doubtful reputation), a
mob of 100-per-cent Ameri¬cans set forth on a wild rampage
that cost the lives of fifty white men; of between 150 and 200
colored men, women and children; the destruction by fire of
$1,500,000 worth of property; the looting of many homes; and
everlasting damage to the reputation of the city of Tulsa and
the State of Oklahoma. . .
This, in brief, is the story of the eruption
of Tulsa on the night of May 31 and the morning of June 1. One
could travel far and find few cities where the likelihood of
trouble between the races was as little thought of as in Tulsa…a
thriving, bustling, enormously wealthy town of between 90,000
and 100,000. In 1910 it was the home of 18,182 souls, a dead
and hopeless outlook ahead. Then oil was discovered. The town
grew amazingly. On De¬cember 29, 1920, it had bank deposits,
totaling $65,449,985.90; almost $1,000 per capita when compared
with the Federal Census figures of 1920, which gave Tulsa 72,075.
The town lies in the center of the oil region and many are the
stories told of the making of fabulous fortunes by men who were
operating on a shoe-string. Some of the stories rival those
of the "forty-niners" in California. The town has
a number of modern office buildings, many beautiful homes, miles
of clean, well-paved streets, and aggressive and progressive
business men who well exemplify Tulsa’s motto of "The
City with a Personality."
So much for the setting. What are the causes
of the race riot that occurred in such a place? First, the Negro
in Oklahoma has shared in the sudden prosperity that has come
to many of his white brothers, and there are some colored men
there who are wealthy. This fact has caused a bitter resentment
on the part of the lower order of whites, who feel that these
colored men, members of an "inferior race," are exceedingly
presump¬tuous in achieving greater economic prosperity than…members
of a divinely ordered superior race. There are at least three
colored persons in Oklahoma who are worth a million dollars
each; J. W. Thompson of Clear¬view is worth $500,000; there
are a number of men and women worth $100,000; and many whose
possessions are valued at $25,000 and $50,000 each. This was
particularly true of Tulsa, where there were two colored men
worth $150,000 each; two worth $100,000; three $50,000; and
four who were assessed at $25,000. In one case where a colored
man owned and operated a printing plant with $25,000 worth of
printing machinery in it, the leader of the mob that set fire
to and destroyed the plant was a linotype operator employed
for years by the colored owner at $48 per week. The white man
was killed while attack¬ing the plant. Oklahoma is largely
populated by pioneers from other States. Some of the white pioneers
are former residents of Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas,
and other States more typically southern than Oklahoma. These
have brought with them their anti-Negro prejudices, Lethargic
and unprogressive by nature, it sorely irks them to see Negroes
making greater progress than they themselves are achieving.
One of the charges made against the colored
men in Tulsa is that they were "radical." Questioning
the whites more closely regarding the nature of this radicalism,
I found it means that Negroes were uncompromisingly de¬nouncing
"Jim-Crow" cars, lynching" peonage;) in short,
were asking that the Federal constitutional guaranties, of "life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" be given regard¬less
of color. The Negroes of Tulsa and other Okla¬homa cities
are pioneers; men and women who have dared, men, and women who
have had the initiative and the courage to pull up stakes in
other less-favored States and face hardship in a newer one for
the sake of greater even¬tual progress. That type is less
ready to submit to insult. Those of the whites who seek to maintain
the white group control naturally do not relish seeing Negroes
emancipating themselves from the old system…
So much for the general causes. What was
the spark that set off the blaze? On Monday; May 30, a white
girl by the name of Sarah Page, operating an elevator in the
Drexel Building, stated that Dick Rowland, a nineteen-year-old
colored boy, had attempted criminally to assault, her. Her second
story was that the boy had seized her arm as he entered the
elevator. She screamed. He ran. It was found afterwards that
the boy had stepped by accident on her foot. It seems never
to have occurred to the Citizens of Tulsa that any sane person
attempting crimi¬nally to assault a woman would have picked
any place in the in the world rather than an open elevator in
a public building with scores of people within calling distance.
The story of the alleged assault was published, Tuesday afternoon
by the Tulsa Tribune, one of the two local newspapers. At four
o’clock Commissioner of Police J. M. Adkison reported
to Sheriff McCullough that there was talk of lynching Rowland
that night. Chief of Police John A. Gustafson, Captain Wilkerson
of the Police Department, Edwin F. Barnett, managing editor
of the Tulsa Tribune, and numerous other citizens all stated
that there was talk Tuesday of lynching the boy.
In the meantime the news of the threatened
lynching reached the colored settlement where Tulsa’s
15,000 colored citizens lived. Remembering how a white man,
[Roy Belton] had been lynched after being taken from the same
jail where the colored boy was now confined, they feared that
Rowland was in danger. A group of colored men telephoned the
sheriff and proffered their services in protecting the jail
from attack. The sheriff told them that they would be called
upon if needed. About nine o’clock that night a crowd
of white men gathered around the jail, numbering about 400,
according to Sheriff McCullough. At 9:15 the report reached
"Little Africa" that the mob had stormed the jail.
A crowd of twenty-five armed Negroes set out immediately, but
on reaching the jail found the report untrue. The sheriff talked
with them, assured them that the boy would not be harmed, and
urged them to return to their homes. They left, later returning,
75 strong. The sheriff persuaded them to leave. As they complied,
a white man at¬tempted to disarm one of the colored men.
A shot was fired, and then--in the wards of the sheriff--"all
hell broke loose." There was a fusillade of shots, from
both sides and twelve men fell dead—two of them colored,
ten white. The fighting continued until midnight when the colored
men, greatly outnumbered, were forced back to their section
of the town.
Around five o’clock Wednesday morning,
the mob, now numbering more than 10,000, made a mass attack
on Little Africa. Machine guns were brought into use; eight
aeroplanes were employed to spy on the movements of the Negroes
and according to some were used in bombing the colored section...
The colored men and women fought gamely in defense of their
homes; but the odds were too great. According to the statements
of onlookers, men in uniform, either home guards or ex-service
men or both, carried cans of oil into Little Africa and, after
looting the homes, set fire to them. Many are the stories of
horror told to me, not by colored people, but by white residents.
One was that of an aged colored couple saying their evening
prayers before retiring in their little home on Greenwood Avenue.
A mob broke into the house, shot both of the old people in the
backs of their heads, blowing their brains out and spattering
them over the bed, pillaged the home, and then set fire to it.
Another was that of the death of Dr. A. C.
Jackson, a colored physician. Dr. Jackson was worth $100,000;
had been described by the Mayo brothers "the most able
Negro surgeon in America"; was respected by white and colored
people alike, and was in every sense a good citizen. A mob attacked
Dr. Jackson’s home. He fought in defense of it, his wife
and children and himself. An officer of the home guards who
knew Dr. Jackson came up at that time and assured him that if
he would surrender he would be protected. This Dr. Jackson did.
The officer sent him under guard to Convention Hall, where colored
people were being placed for protection. En route to the hall,
dis¬armed, Dr. Jackson was shot and killed in cold blood.
The officer who had assured Dr. Jackson of protection stated
to me, "Dr. Jackson was an able, clean-cut man. He did
only what any red-blooded man would have done under similar
circumstances in defending his home. Dr. Jackson was mur¬dered
by white ruffians.
It is highly doubtful if the exact number
of casualties will ever be known. The figures originally given
in the press estimate the number at 100. The number buried by
local undertakers and given out by city officials is ten white
and twenty-one colored. For obvious reasons these offi¬cials
wish to keep the number published as low as possible, but the
figures obtained in Tulsa are far higher. Fifty whites and between
150 and 200 Negroes is much nearer the actual number of deaths.
Ten whites were killed dur¬ing the first hour of fighting
on Tuesday night. Six white men drove into the colored section
in a car on Wednesday morning and never came out. Thirteen whites
were killed between 5:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. Wednesday. O. T.
John¬son, commandant, of the Tulsa Citadel of the Salvation
Army, stated that on Wednesday and Thursday the Salvation Army
fed thirty-seven Negroes employed as grave diggers and twenty,
on Friday and Saturday. During the first two days these men
dug 120 graves in each of which a dead Negro was buried. No
coffins were used. The bodies were dumped into the holes and
covered over with dirt. Added to the number accounted far were
numbers of others--men, women, and children--who were incinerated
in the burning houses in the Negro settlement. One story was
told me by an eye-witness of five colored men trapped in a burning
house. Four burned to death. A fifth attempted to flee, was
shot to death as he emerged from the burning structure, and
his body was thrown back into the flames. There was an unconfirmed
rumor afloat in Tulsa of two truck loads of dead Negroes being
dumped into the Arkansas River, but that story could not be
What is America going to do after such a
horrible carnage—one that for sheer brutality and murderous
anarchy cannot be surpassed, by any of the crimes now being
charged to the Bolsheviki in Russia? How much longer will America
allow, these pogroms to continue unchecked? There is a lesson
in the Tulsa affair for every American who fatuously believes
that Negroes will always be the meek and submissive creatures
that circumstances have forced them to be during the past three
hundred years. Dick Rowland was only an ordinary bootblack with
no standing in the community. But when his life was threatened
by a mob of whites, every one of the 15,000 Negroes of Tulsa,
rich, and poor, educated and illiterate, was willing to die
to protect Dick Rowland. Perhaps America is waiting for a nationwide
Tulsa to wake her. Who knows?
Source: Walter F. White, “The Eruption
of Tulsa,” The Nation 112 (29 June 1921), pp. 909-910.
HARLEM WOMEN: RACE, CLASS AND GENDER, 1925
Harlem writer Elise Johnson McDougald in a
1925 article for the Survey Graphic titled “The Double
Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation,”
explores the world of Harlem women. This first of three excerpts
from her article describes the major socio-economic classes
among black women in the then largest African American urban
community in the nation.
Throughout the long years of history, woman
has been the weather-vane, the indicator, showing in which direction
the wind of destiny blows. Her status and development have augured
now calm and stability, now swift currents of progress. What
then is to be said of the Negro woman today?
In Harlem, more than anywhere else, the Negro
woman is free from the cruder handicaps of primitive household
hardships and the grosser forms of sex and race subjugation.
Here she has considerable opportunity to measure her powers
in the intellectual and industrial fields of the great city.
Here the questions naturally arise: "What are her problems?"
and "How is she solving them?"
To answer these questions, one must have
in mind not any one Negro woman, but rather a colorful pageant
of individuals, each differently endowed… Because only
a few have caught this vision, the attitude of mind of most
New Yorkers causes the Negro woman serious difficulty. She is
conscious that what is left of chivalry is not directed toward
her. She realizes that the ideals of beauty, built up in the
fine arts, exclude her almost entirely. Instead, the grotesque
Aunt Jemimas of the street-car advertisements proclaim only
an ability to serve, without grace or loveliness…. She
is most often used to provoke the mirth laugh of ridicule; or
to portray feminine viciousness or vulgarity not peculiar to
Negroes. This is the shadow over her. To a race naturally sunny
comes the twilight self-doubt and a sense of personal inferiority.
It cannot be denied that these are potent and detrimental influences,
though not generally recognized because they are in the realm
of the mental and. spiritual. More apparent are the economic
handicaps which follow her recent entrance into industry. It
is conceded that she has special difficulties because of the
poor working conditions and low wages of her men. It is not
surprising that only the determined women forge ahead to results
other than mere survival. The few do prove their mettle stimulate
one to a closer study of this achievement is won in Harlem.
Better to visualize the Negro woman at her
job… First, comes a very small leisure group-the wives
and daughters of men who are in business, in the professions
and in a few well-paid personal service occupations. Second,
a most active and progressive group, the women in business and
the professions. Third, the many women in the trades and industry.
Fourth, a group weighty in numbers struggling on in domestic
service, with an even less fortunate fringe of casual workers,
fluctuating with the economic temper of the times.
The first is a pleasing group to see. It
is picked for outward beauty by Negro men with much the same
feeling as other Americans of the same economic class. Keeping
their women free to preside over the family, these women are
affected by the problems of every wife and mother, but touched
only faintly by their race's hardships. They do share acutely
in the prevailing difficulty of finding competent household
help. Negro wives find Negro maids unwilling generally to work
in their own neighborhoods, for various reasons. They do not
wish to work where there is a possibility of acquaintances coming
into contact with them while they serve and they still harbor
the misconception that Negroes of any station are unable to
pay as much as persons of the other race. It is in these homes
of comparative ease that we find the polite activities of social
exclusiveness. The luxuries of well-appointed homes, modest
motors, tennis, golf and country clubs, trips to Europe and
California, make for social standing…
A spirit of stress and struggle characterizes
the second two groups. These women of business, profession and
trade are the hub of the wheel of progress. Their burden is
twofold. Many are wives and mothers whose husbands are insufficiently
paid, or who have succumbed to social maladjustment and have
abandoned-their families. An appalling number are widows. They
face the great problem of leaving home each day and at the same
time trying to rear children in their spare time-this too in
neighborhoods where rents are large, standards of dress and
recreation high and costly, and social danger on the increase.
The great commercial life of New York City
is only slightly touched by the Negro woman of our second group.
Negro business men offer her most of their work, but their number
is limited. Outside of this field, custom is once more against
her and competition is keen for all. However, Negro girls are
training and some are holding exceptional jobs. One of the professors
in a New York college has had a young colored woman as secretary
for the past three years. Another holds the head clerical position
in an organization where reliable handling of detail and a sense
of business ethics are essential. For four years she has steadily
advanced. Quietly these women prove their worth, so that when
a vacancy exists and there is a call, it is difficult to find
even one competent colored secretary who is not employed…
In other departments the civil service in
New York City is no longer free from discrimination. The casual
personal interview, that tenacious and retrogressive practice
introduced in the Federal administration during the World War
has spread and often nullifies the Negro woman's success in
written tests. The successful young woman just cited above was
three times "turned down" as undesirable on the basis
of the personal interview. In the great mercantile houses, the
many young Negro girls who might be well suited to salesmanship
are barred from all but the menial positions..
In the less crowded professional vocations,
the outlook is more cheerful. In these fields, the Negro woman
is dependent largely upon herself and her own race for work.
In the legal, dental, medical and nursing professions, successful
women practitioners have usually worked their way through college
and are "managing" on the small fees that can be received
from an underpaid public. Social conditions in America are hardest
upon the Negro because he is lowest in the economic scale. This
gives rise to a demand for trained college women in the profession
of social work. It has met with a response from young college
women, anxious to devote their education and lives to the needs
of the submerged classes. In New York City, some fifty-odd women
are engaged in social work, other than nursing. In the latter
profession there are over two hundred and fifty. Much of the
social work has been pioneer in nature: the pay has been small
with little possibility of advancement. For even in work among
Negroes, the better paying positions are reserved for whites.
The Negro college woman is doing her bit in this field at a
sacrifice, along such lines as these: in the correctional departments
of the city, as probation officers, investigators, and police
women; as Big Sisters attached to the Children’s' Court;
as field workers and visitors for relief organizations and missions;
as secretaries for travelers-aid and mission societies; as visiting
teachers and vocational guides for the schools of the city;
and, in the many branches of public health nursing, in schools,
organizations devoted to preventive and educational medicine,
in hospitals and in private nursing.
In New York City, nearly three hundred Negro
women share the good conditions in the teaching profession.
They measure up to the high pedagogical requirements of the
city and state law and are increasingly, leaders in the community.
Here too the Negro woman finds evidence of the white workers'
fear of competition. The need for teachers is still so strong
that little friction exists. When it does seem to be imminent,
it is smoothed away, as it recently was at a meeting of school
principals. From the floor, a discussion began with: "What
are we going to do about this problem of the increasing number
of Negro teachers coming into our schools?" It ended promptly
through the suggestion of another principal: "Send all
you get and don't want over to my school. I have two now and
I'll match their work to any two of your best whom you name."
One might go on to such interesting and more unusual professions
as journalism, chiropody, bacteriology, pharmacy, etc., and
find that, though the number in any one may be small, the Negro
woman is creditably represented in practically every one. According
to individual ability she is meeting with success.
…The woman engaged in trades
and in industry faces equally serious difficulty in competition
in the open working field. Custom is against her in all but
a few trade and industrial occupations. She has, however been
established long in the dressmaking trade among the helpers
and finishers, and more recently among the 'drapers and fitters
in' some of the best establishments. Several Negro women are
themselves proprietors of shops in the country's greatest fashion
district. Each of them has, against great odds, convinced skeptical
employers of her business value; and, at the same time, has
educated fellow workers of other races, doing much to show the
oneness of interest of all workers…
In trade cookery, the Negro woman's talent
and pail experience is recognized. Her problem here is to find
employers who will let her work her way to managerial positions,
in tea-rooms, candy shops and institutions. One such employer
became convinced that the managing cook, a colored graduate
of Pratt Institute, would continue to build up a business that
had been failing. She offered her a partnership. As in the cases
of a number of such women, her barrier was lack of capital.
No matter how highly trained, nor how much speed and business
acumen has been acquired, the Negro's credit is held in doubt.
An exception in this matter of capital will serve to prove the
rule. Thirty years ago, a young Negro girl began learning all
branches of the fur trade. She is now in business for herself,
employing three women of her race and one Jewish man. She has
made fur experts of still another half-dozen colored girls.
Such instances as these justify the prediction that the hold
gained in the trade world will, year by year, become more secure.
Because of the limited fields for workers
in this group, many of the unsuccessful drift into the fourth
social grade, the domestic and casual workers. These drifters
increased the difficulties of the Negro woman suited to housework.
New standards of household management are forming and the problem
of the Negro woman is to meet these new business-like ideals.
The constant influx of workers unfamiliar with household conditions
in New York keeps the situation one of turmoil. The Negro woman,
moreover, is revolting against residential domestic service.
It is a last stand her fight to maintain a semblance of family
life. For this reason, principally, the number of day or casual
worker is on the increase. Happiness is almost impossible under
the strain of these conditions. Health and morale suffer, how
else can her children, loose all afternoon, be gathered together
at night-fall? Through it all she manages to give satisfactory
service and the Negro woman is sought after for this unpopular
work largely because her honesty, loyalty and cleanliness have
stood the test of time. Through her drudgery, the women of other
groups find leisure time for progress. This is one of her contributions
Source: Elise Johnson McDougald, “The
Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation,”
The Survey Graphic LIII (March 1925): 689-691.
BETTERMENT ORGANIZATIONS AMONG HARLEM WOMEN
The final section of Elise Johnson McDougald’s
Survey Graphic article briefly discusses the various organizations
middle class Harlem women crafted to address problems and improve
conditions among the masses of African Americans in that section
of New York.
Obsessed with difficulties that might well
compel individualism, the Negro woman has engaged in a considerable
amount of organized action to meet group needs. She has evolved
a federation of her clubs, embracing between eight and ten thousand
women, throughout the state of New York. Its chief function
is to crystallize programs, prevent duplication of effort, and
to sustain a member organization whose cause might otherwise
fail. It is now firmly established, and is about to strive for
conspicuous goals. In New York City, one association makes child
welfare its name and special concern. Others, like the Utility
Club, Utopia Neighborhood, Debutante's League, Sempre Fidelius,
etc., raise money for old folks' homes, a shelter for delinquent
girls and fresh air camps for children. The Colored Branch of
the Y. W. C. A. and the women’s' organizations in the
many churches, as well as in the beneficial lodges and associations,
care for the needs of their members.
On the other hand, the educational welfare
of the coming generation, has become the chief concern of the
national sororities of Negro college women. The first to be
organized in the country, Alpha Kappa Alpha, has a systematized
and continuous program of educational and vocational guidance
for students of the high schools and colleges. The work of Lambda
Chapter, which covers New York City and its suburbs, is outstanding.
Its recent campaign gathered together nearly one hundred and
fifty such students at a meeting to gain inspiration from the
life-stories of successful Negro women in eight fields of endeavor.
From the trained nurse, who began in the same schools as they,
these girls drank in the tale of her rise to the executive position
in the Harlem Health Information Bureau. A commercial artist
showed how real talent had overcome the color line. The graduate
physician was a living example of the modern opportunities in
the newer fields of medicine open to women. The vocations as
outlets for the creative instinct became attractive under the
persuasion of the musician, the dressmaker and the decorator.
Similarly, Alpha Beta Chapter of the national Delta Sigma Theta
Sorority recently devoted a week to work along similar lines.
In such ways as these are the progressive and privileged groups
of Negro women expressing, their community and race consciousness.
We find the Negro woman, figuratively, struck
in the face daily by contempt from the world about her. Within
her soul, she knows little of peace and happiness. Through it
all, she is courageously standing erect, developing within herself
the moral strength to rise above and conquer false attitudes.
She is maintaining her natural beauty and charm and improving
her mind and opportunity. She is measuring up to the needs and
demands of her family, community and race, and radiating from
Harlem a hope that is cherished by her sisters in less propitious
circumstances throughout the land. The wind of the race's destiny
stirs more briskly because of her striving.
Source: Elise Johnson McDougald, “The
Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation,”
The Survey Graphic LIII (March 1925): 691.
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN: FOUNDING NEGRO BASEBALL
In the following account Edwin Bancroft Henderson
describes the origin of the Negro Baseball League.
The first Negro team composed of paid members is recorded as
a playing aggregation that at first was a team of waiters of
the Argyle Hotel at Babylon, New York. This club of hotel waiters
and bellhops was organized in 1885 by Frank Thompson, head waiter
of the hotel. During that summer the team played nine games
with the best of the white semi-pro clubs around New York and
Long Island, winning six and losing four. In September, Thompson
called them the “Cuban Giants,” and started them
on a professional career.
Knowing the growing prejudices that had infiltrated
into the social structure of the North and East, the management
realized that to pass off the boys as Cubans or Spaniards would
enable them to play in places where as native Negro boys they
would not have been able to make business contacts. On the playing
field, a few of the Negro players would put on an act and talk
a “gibberish” to each other. Because the New York
Giants were a popular team of players, the Cubans added the
name “Giants.” The name “Giants” became
attached to nearly every prominent colored team for a quarter
of a century. One still remembers the Brooklyn Royal Giants,
the Bacharach Giants, the Mohawk Giants, the Chicago American
Giants, and others.
Several efforts were made to form leagues of Negro baseball
teams. All the early attempts were doomed to failure. In the
spring of 1887, a Negro League was formed on paper, but did
not reach the field. In 1889, a league of six white and two
Nero clubs was organized in the East but folded up in a few
weeks. About 1906 several of the prominent teams in the East,
including the Cuban Giants, the Cuban X-Giants, the Washington
Giants, the Royal Giants of Newark, endeavored to form the International
League, but before midsummer it collapsed.
Leaving the East, one finds that on February
13, 1920, in Kansas City, Missouri, the western circuit of the
National Negro Baseball League was organized. Seated in that
meeting were Tenny Blount of Detroit, L. S. Cobb of the St.
Louis Giants, W. A. Kelley of Washington, John Matthews of the
Dayton-Monarchs, Joe Greene of the Chicago Giants, C. J. Taylor
of the Indianapolis A.B.C.’s, Elwood Knox of Indianapolis,
Andrew “Rube” Foster, J. L. Williamson of Kansas
City, Missouri, and Charles Marshall, an Indianapolis newspaperman.
The League upon organizing was chartered in
the states of Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York
and Maryland. Those signing the constitution of the newly formed
league were Rube Foster, Tenny Blount, J. L. Wilkerson, C. I.
Taylor, Joe Greene, and Lorenzo Cobb. Each paid $500 to bind
them to the league and constitution. Those who helped with the
constitution were Dave Wright of Chicago, Ellwood Knox of Indianapolis,
Carey B. Lewis of Chicago, and Elisha Scott of Leavenworth.
Rube Foster was named president and secretary. The clubs to
represent the League during this first year were the American
Giants (Chicago), Chicago Giants, Kansas City Monarchs, St.
Louis Giants, Detroit Stars, and the Indianapolis A.B.C’s.
The next meeting was on December 4, 1920, in Indianapolis. Foster
was re-elected president and secretary for the ensuing year.
The association now became the National Association of Colored
Professional Baseball and the Negro National League. The following
teams were added:
the Hilldale Club, Columbus Club, the New York Bacharach Giants,
and the Cuban Stars.
In 1921—22, the Eastern League came
into being. Ed Bolden of the Hilldale Club organized the Eastern
League and was president. It consisted of the Harrisburg Giants,
the Hilldales, Lincoln Giants, Brooklyn Royal Giants, Bacharach
Giants, Baltimore Black Sox, with the Washington Potomacs as
an associate club. There was much shifting of teams due to the
lack of organized control. Sometime about 1932, the Negro National
League and the Eastern League went down. Subsequent to this
dissolution “Cum” Posey brought about the East-West
organization. This East-West League consisted of Hilldale, Baltimore
Black Sox, Detroit Stars, Columbus, Pittsburgh Crawfords, Homestead
Grays, Washington Pilots, and Black Yankees. The first world
series between Negro teams was held in 1924 and 1925 between
the Negro National and Negro Eastern League champion teams.
The first teams in 1924 and 1925 were the Hilldale (Eastern),
Kansas City (Western). Contenders in 1926 and 1927 were the
Chicago American Giants and the Bacharach Giants.
The 1939 Negro American League located in
the West started the following teams with franchises in the
cities indicated: Kansas City Monarchs in St. Louis, Atlanta
Black Crackers in Louisville, Jacksonville Red Caps in Cleveland,
Memphis Giants in Memphis, A.B.C.’s in Indianapolis, and
the Chicago American Giants in Chicago.
A Negro National League consisted that year of the following:
The Elite Giants in Baltimore, Newark Eagles, Toledo, Homestead
Grays, the Philadelphia Stars, the New York Black Yankees, and
the New York Cuban Stars team managed by Alexander Pompez. This
later day Negro National League contrived to function during
subsequent years apparently on firmer ground. The dubs carried
from fifteen to twenty salaried players and business associates.
In the beginning many of the games were staged for exhibition
only. Tom Wilson of the Baltimore Elites was elected president
to succeed “Gus” Greenlee, retired.
Another Association existing in the late thirties
known as the American Association included the following teams:
Baltimore, Hilldale, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Philadelphia
and High Point.
Source: Edwin Bancroft Henderson, The Negro
In Sports (Washington, D. C.: The Associated Publishers, Inc.,
1949), Ch. IX, pp. 168-171.
JACK JOHNSON IS A DANDY
In his 1926 autobiography republished in 1969,
Jack Johnson is a Dandy, the first black heavyweight champion
describes his life inside and outside the ring. What follows
is an excerpt from that autobiography.
My name is familiar to a great many people
chiefly because I have held the heavyweight boxing championship
of the world, and because for more than a quarter of a century
I have figured prominently in the making of world ring history.
On more than one occa¬sion I have been the central character
in sensational episodes which stirred the interest and curiosity
of the public.
But I am not writing this history of my life—¬full
of experiences and adventures as it is—because of these
facts. On the contrary, in looking back over the years of my
tumultuous career, I am astounded when I realize that there
are few men in any period of the world's history, who have led
a more varied or intense existence than I. My life, almost from
its very start, has been filled with tragedy and romance, failure
and success, poverty and wealth, misery and happiness. All these
conflicting conditions that have crowded in upon me and plunged
me into struggles with warring forces have made me somewhat
of a unique character in the world of today, and the story of
the life I have led may therefore not only contain some interest
if told for its own sake, but may also shed some light on the
life of our times.
Quick changes have come into my life on numerous
occasions. I have been tossed from one extreme to the other
within a few hours. Sometimes I found myself in the midst of
disaster and often I arose to unexpected heights of affluence,
power and prominence. Many, many times fortune has virtually
dropped into my hands and as many times it has slipped magically
from my grasp. I have attained the peaks of victory in grueling
fights with men as eager, as ambitious, as alert and as strong
as I. With these victories generally came great sums of money,
sometimes almost more than I ever dreamed of possessing. I was
surrounded by countless admiring friends all…eager to
shout my praises; all striving for my esteem and for my bounty.
By a sudden flip of fortune I have seen these friends melt away.
But there have been many who have proved staunch throughout
the years; who have shared with me in my successes and victories
and who have suffered with me in the moments of failure, disappointment
I have traveled in nearly every country of the world and wherever
I have gone I have had adventures that men of my race and nation
have never had. I have mingled with notable people of every
land. I have been with kings and queens; mon¬archs and rulers
of nations have been my associates. In all the great gathering
places of the world where the elite of every nation have met
and are meeting, I have enjoyed the distinction of being a celebrity
pointed out over all others.
In my life there have been many women, and
with women there has come great happiness and also grief and
tragedy. Women have come into my life and gone out of it leaving
memories, many of which I treasure and many of which I would
forget if I could. However, these women whom I have known and
loved have been salient factors in my life. They have been the
inspiration that urged me to strive for the uppermost places;
they have been the cause of situations which turned the eyes
of the world upon me, some merely gleaming with morbidness,
others flashing condemnation and hate.
I have had my innings with the law. I know
the bit¬terness of being accused and harassed by prosecutors.
I know the horror of being hunted and haunted. I have dashed
across continents and oceans as a fugitive, and I have matched
my wits with the police and secret agents seeking to deprive
me of one of the greatest blessings man can have—liberty.
And after I had eluded them, after I had spent months in fighting
for my cherished freedom and enjoying it at a dearly purchased
price, I voluntarily relinquished it and surrendered myself,
know¬ing that I should have to enter prison.
In my fight for my freedom I felt that whatever
my conduct had been which led to accusations against me and
conviction, it had been no worse than that of thou¬sands
of others. I felt that I had committed no heinous crime and
that because of my color, perhaps, and because of prejudices
and jealousies I was being persecuted and prosecuted. However,
after months abroad, always alert lest I should be led into
some trap that would mean loss of my freedom, I decided that
I would return to my native country, submit to the demands of
the law, and clear my "debt to society…
…I am not attempting this enter¬prise
to explain and excuse my faults and mistakes, nor to win sympathy
and smooth over the rough places in my life. On the contrary,
I feel that the story of my life is one that will prove interesting
and entertaining to my readers as the story of a man, and that
it will not be without good results. I am not pointing out any
morals, yet when one suffers the inevitable consequences that
ensue when the wrong course is chosen or mistakes are made and
frankly admits and describes these mis¬takes and their results,
surely it will prove of some bene¬fit if it aids others
to avoid similar mistakes and the attending unhappiness and
I, have no quarrel with fate, nor do I cling
to the ab¬surd belief that fate has set any special mark
upon me. Yet fate must have intended me for adventures and ex¬periences
that do not fall to the lot of the average man…Of course
I had the dreams and desires that are com¬mon to youth,
but never in the wildest moments of my boyhood imagination did
I vision myself the champion fighter of the world, and the first
man of my race ever to attain that distinction…How incongruous
to think that I, a little Galveston colored boy should ever
become an acquaint¬ance of kings and rulers of the old world,
or that I should number among my friends some of the most notable
persons of America and the world in general! What a vast stretch
of the imagination to picture myself a fugi¬tive from my
own country, yet sought and acclaimed by thousands in nearly
every nation of the world! What an unusual circumstance that
while I feared to return to my own country and was a voluntary
exile, one of the most notorious revolutionary leaders of Mexico,
[Francisco] Villa, was making frantic efforts to finance my
return to the Western hemisphere and was attempting to stage
in Mexico the championship fight between myself and [Jess] Willard.
How utterly fantastic would have been the thought that I should
some day be plunged into romances and love with white women
in defiance of a treasured and guarded custom. How far removed
from my thought was the possibility that tragedy would creep
into my life—the tragedy of a prison term in one instance
and the death by suicide of one whom I greatly loved in the
Source: Jack Johnson, Jack Johnson is a Dandy:
An Autobiography (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1969),
Table: White and Black Education in 1924: A Comparison
W.E.B. DuBois in 1924 was provided graphic
evidence of the disparity in white and black educational appropriations
from an unlikely source, the Charleston News and Courier, when
it published figures committed by the state legislature for
The appropriation for public education in
South Carolina for 1924 were, according to the Charleston News
and Courier as follows:
For White People: [35,000 students]
The University of South Carolina $ 476,025
The Citadel 161,143
Clemson College 91,813
Winthrop College 468,108
[South Carolina] Medical College 120,775
Confederate Home College 5,000
Howe School 48,206
School for Deaf and Blind 125,700
Training School for Feeble Minded 150,310
Industrial School for Boys 129,548
Industrial School for Girls 27,170
For Colored People [32,000 students]
Colored College $101,150
Reformatory for Negro Boys 52,287
Source: The Crisis, Vol. 28, No. 3 (July 1924)
ALAIN LOCKE DESCRIBES THE “NEW NEGRO” IN 1925
Intersecting the recent northward migration
of African Americans with the cultural outpouring that would
be called the Harlem Renaissance, Howard University professor
and literary critic Alain Locke describes the ongoing psychological
transformation of African America. The excerpt below is from
his introduction to the first major anthology that attempts
to capture that mood.
In the last decade something beyond the watch and guard of statistics
has happened in the life of the American Negro, and the three
norms who have traditionally presided over the Negro problem
have a changeling in their laps. The Sociologist, the Philanthropist,
the Race leader are not unaware of the New Negro, but they are
at a loss to account for him. He simply cannot be swathed in
their formulae. For the younger generation is vibrant with a
new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the masses; and under
the very eyes of the professional observers is transforming
what has been a perennial problem into the progressive phases
of contemporary Negro life.
Could such a metamorphosis have taken place
as suddenly as it has appeared to? The answer is no; not only
because the New Negro is not here, but because the Old Negro
had long become more of a myth than a man. The Old Negro, we
must member, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy.
His has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction
partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism.
The Negro himself has contributed his share to this through
a sort of protective social mimicry forced upon him by the adverse
circumstances of dependence. So for generations in the mind
of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human
being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended,
to be "kept down," or "in his place," or
"helped up," to be worried with or worried over, harassed
or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden...
But while the minds of most of us, black
and white, have thus burrowed in the trenches of the Civil War
and Reconstruction, the actual march of development has simply
flanked these positions, necessitating a sudden reorientation
of view... The mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped
from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking
off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority. By
shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving
something like a spiritual emancipation. Until recently, lacking
self-understanding, we have been almost as much of a problem
to ourselves as we still are to others. But the decade that
found us with a problem has left us with only a task...
With this renewed self respect and self-dependence,
the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic
phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pressure
there may be of conditions from without. The migrant masses,
shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations
of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing
happens spiritually in the attitudes and self expression of
the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education and his
new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the
poise and greater certainty of knowing what it is all about.
From this comes the promise and warrant of a new leadership…
...The day of "aunties," "uncles"
and "mammies" is equally gone. Uncle Tom and Sambo
have passed on, and even the "Colonel" and "George"
play barnstorm from which they escape with relief when the public
spotlight is off. The popular melodrama has about played itself
out, and it is time to scrap the fictions, garret the bogeys
and settle down to a realistic facing of facts...A main change
has been, of course, that shifting of the Negro population which
has made the Negro problem no longer exclusively or predominantly
Southern. Why should our minds remain sectionalized when the
problem no longer is? Then the trend of migration has not only
been toward the North and the Central Midwest, but cityward
and to the great centers of industry—the problems of adjustment
are new, practical, local and not particularly racial. Rather
they are an integral part of the large industrial and social
problems of our present day democracy...
In the very process of being transplanted,
the Negro is being transformed... With each successive wave
[of migration] the movement of the Negro become more and more
a mass movement...a deliberate flight not only from countryside
to city, but from medieval America to modern.
Take Harlem as an instance of this. Here
is Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the
world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse
elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West
Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of
the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city
and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student,
the business man, the professional man, artist poet, musician,
adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and
social outcast. Each group has come with its own separate motives
and for its own special ends, but their greatest experience
has been the finding of one another. Proscription and prejudice
have thrown these dissimilar elements into a common area of
contact and interaction. Within this area, race sympathy and
unity have determined a further fusing of sentiment and experience.
So what began in terms of segregation becomes more and more,
as its elements mix and react, the laboratory of a great race
welding. Hitherto, it must be admitted that American Negroes
have been a race more in name than in fact, or to be exact,
more in sentiment than in experience. The chief bond between
them has been that of a common condition rather than a common
consciousness; a problem in common rather than a life in common.
In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for
group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises
at least to be—a race capital... That is why our comparison
is taken with those nascent centers of folk expression and self
determination which are playing a creative part in the world
to day. Without pretense to their political significance, Harlem
has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had
for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia.
When the race leaders of twenty years ago
spoke of developing race-pride and stimulating race-consciousness,
and of the desirability of race-solidarity, they could not in
any accurate degree have anticipated the abrupt feeling that
has surged up and now pervades the awakened centers. Some of
the recognized Negro leaders and a powerful section of white
opinion identified with “race work” of the older
order have indeed attempted to discount this feeling as a “passing
phase,” an attack of “race nerves” so to speak,
an “aftermath of the war,” and the like. It has
not abated, however, if we are to gauge the present tone and
temper of the Negro press, or by the shift in popular support
from the officially recognized and orthodox spokesmen to those
of the independent, popular, and often radical type who are
unmistakable symptoms of a new order. It is a social disservice
to blunt the fact that the Negro of the Northern centers has
reached a stage where tutelage, even of the most interested
and well-intentioned sort, must give place to new relationships,
where positive self-direction must be reckoned with in ever
increasing measure. The American mind must reckon with a fundamentally
Source: Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An
Interpretation (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 3-8.
LANGSTON HUGHES RECALLS HARLEM DURING THE RENAISSANCE
Langston Hughes in his autobiography, The
Big Sea, offers this description of Harlem during the 1920s.
White people began to come to Harlem in droves.
For several years they packed the Cotton Club on Lenox Avenue.
But I was never there, because the Cotton Club was a Jim Crow
club for gangsters and monied whites. They were not cordial
to Negro patronage unless you were a celebrity like Bojangles
[Robinson]¬ So Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club
and never appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart
of their dark community. Nor did ordinary Negroes like the growing
influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown, flooding the little
cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed
and sang, and where now strangers were given the best ringside
tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers—like amusing
animals in a zoo.
The Negroes said: "We can't go downtown
and sit and stare at you in your clubs. You won’t even
let us in your clubs." But they didn't say it loud--for
Negroes are practically never rude to white people. So thousands
of whites came to Harlem night after night, thinking Negroes
loved to have them there, and firmly believing that all Harlemites
left their houses at sundown to sing and dance in cabarets,
because most of the whites saw nothing but the cabarets, not
Some of the small clubs, however had people
like Gladys Bentley who was something worth discovering in those
days, before she got famous, acquired an accompanist, specially
written material, and conscious vulgarity. But for two or three
amazing years, Miss Bentley sat and played a big piano all night
long, literally all night, without stopping--singing songs like
"St. James Infirmary," from ten in the evening until
dawn, with scarcely a break between the notes, sliding from
one song to another, with a powerful and continuous under beat
of jungle rhythm. Miss Bentley was an amazing exhibition of
musical energy--a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded
the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard--a perfect
piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm…
The ordinary Negroes hadn't heard of the
Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn't raised their wages
any. As for all of those white folks in the speakeasies and
night clubs of Harlem—well maybe a colored man could find
some place to have a drink that the tourist hadn’t yet
Then it was that house-rent parties began
to flourish—and not always to raise the rent either…
The Saturday night rent parties were often more amusing than
any night club, in small apartments where God knows who lived--because
the guests seldom did--but where the piano would often be augmented
by a guitar, or an odd cornet, or somebody with a pair of drums
walking in off the street. And where awful bootleg whiskey and
good fried fish or steaming chitterlings were sold at low prices.
And the dancing and singing and impromptu entertaining went
on until dawn came in at the windows…
Almost every Saturday night when I was in
Harlem I went to a house-rent party. I wrote lots of poems about
house-rent parties, and ate…many a fired fish and pig’s
foot—with liquid refreshments on the side. I met ladies’
maids and truck drivers, laundry workers and shoe shine boys,
seamstresses and porters. I can still hear their laugher in
my ears, hear the soft slow music and feel the floor shaking
as the dancers danced…
Source: Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, (New
York, 1940), pp. 224-226, 228-233.
HARLEM RENAISSANCE POETRY: “IF WE MUST DIE”
In 1919 Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts
entered "If We Must Die," the poem of young Claude
McKay into the Congressional Record. The poem, inspired by the
spirited defense blacks mounted in the Chicago race riot of
1919, symbolized the militancy of the New Negro. However Georgia
Douglas Johnson's poignant poem captures the beauty and passion
of renaissance writing as well. Both poems appear below.
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back!
Source: Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,”
The Liberator 2 (July 1919), 21
HARLEM RENAISSANCE POETRY: “I WANT TO DIE WHILE YOU LOVE
The following selection by Renaissance Poet
Georgia Douglas Johnson suggests that not all of the literature
of that era represented racial protest.
I want to die while you love me,
While yet you hold me fair,
While laughter lies upon my lips
And lights are in my hair.
I want to die while you love me.
I could not bear to see,
The glory of this perfect day,
Grow dim--or cease to be.
I want to die while you love me.
Oh! who would care to live
Till love has nothing more to ask,
And nothing more to give.
I want to die while you love me,
And bear to that still bed
Your kisses, turbulent, unspent,
To warm me when I'm dead
Source: James Weldon Johnson, The Book of
American Negro Poetry (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.,
1922), p. 183.
THE DEBATE OVER "RACIAL" ART
Not all black intellectuals supported the
Harlem Renaissance. In the account below we see the exchange
of letters in 1926 between Renaissance artist Langston Hughes
and black conservative George S. Schuyler in the magazine, The
Nation, over the existence of racially-based art.
To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION:
SIR: Langston Hughes, defending racial art
in America, forgets that the Negro masses he describes are no
different from the white masses we are all familiar with. Both
‘watch the lazy world go round’ and ‘have
their nip of gin on Saturday nights’ (love of strong liquors
is supposed to be a Nordic characteristic). If there is anything
‘racial’ about the spirituals and the blues, then
there should be immediate ability to catch the intricate rhythm
on the part of Negroes from Jamaica, Zanzibar, and Sierra Leone.
Such is not the case, and we must conclude that they are the
products of a certain American environment: the South. They
are American folk-songs, built around Anglo-Saxon religious
An artist, if seems, to me, is one who, able
to see life about him, and struck by its quick interchange of
comedy, drama, tragedy, attempts to portray it or interpret
it in music, poetry, or prose, on canvas or in stone. He can
only use the equipment furnished him by education and environment.
Consequently his creation will be French; British, German, Russian,
Zulu, or Chinese, depending on where he lives. The work of the
artist raised and educated in this country must necessarily
It is the Afroamericans masses, who consume
several millions’ worth of hair-straightener and skin-whitener
per anum in an effort to reach the American standard in pigmentation
and hair-texture. This does not look as if they did not care
whether they were like white folks or not. Negro propaganda-art,
is hardly more than a protest against a feeling of inferiority,
and such a psychology seldom produces art.
GEORGE S. SCHUYLER,
To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION:
Sir: For Mr. Schuyler to say that "the Negro masses . .
. are no different from the white masses" in America seems
to me obviously absurd. Fundamentally, perhaps, all peoples
are the same. But as long as the Negro remains a segregated
group in this country he must reflect certain racial and environmental
differences which are his own. The very fact that Negroes do
straighten their hair and try to forget their racial back¬ground
makes them different from white people. If they were exactly
like the dominant class they would not have to try so hard to
imitate them. Again it seems quite as absurd to say that spirituals
and blues are not Negro as it is to say that cow¬boy songs
are not cowboy songs or that the folk-ballads of Scotland do
not belong to Scotland. The spirituals and blues are American,
certainly, but they are also very much American Negro. And if
one can say that some of my poems have no racial distinctiveness
about them or that "Cane" is not Negro one can say
with equal truth that "Nize Baby" is purely American."
From an economic and sociological viewpoint
it may, be entirely desirable that the Negro become as much
like his white American brother as possible. Surely colored
people want all the opportunities and advantages that anyone
else possesses here in our country. But until America has completely
absorbed the Negro and until segregation and racial self-consciousness
have entirely disappeared, the true work of art from the Negro
artist is bound, if it have any color arid distinctiveness at
all, to reflect his racial background and his racial environment.
Source: George S. Schuyler, “Negroes
and Artists,” The Nation 123 (14 July 1926), p. 36; Langston
Hughes, “American Art or Negro Art?” The Nation
123 (18 August 1926), p. 151.
ZORA ON "BEING COLORED"
Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to
Be Colored Me," written in 1928 was a declaration of faith
and a refreshing reproach of the "racial burden" thesis
that informed much of the writing of the Harlem Renaissance.
Here is part of her autobiographical essay.
I am colored but I offer nothing in the way
of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only
Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's
side was not an Indian chief.... But I am not tragically colored.
There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind
my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing
school of Negroland who hold that nature somehow has given them
a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it...
I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a
little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world--I
am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter
of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery
is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and
the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle
that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On
the line!" The Reconstruction said "Get set!";
and the generation before said "Go!" I am off to a
flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind
and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and
the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth
all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on
earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won
and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think--to know that
for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice
as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the
national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh
I do not always feel colored....I feel most
colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background....
Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set
down in our midst, but the contrast is just a sharp for me.
For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is the
New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter
chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and
are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz
orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no
time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It
constructs the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and
narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears
on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury,
rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle
beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance
wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai
above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in
the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted
red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing
like a war drum. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra
wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly
to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find
the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.
"Good music they have here,"
he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips. Music. The
great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him.
He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him
but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen
between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so
At certain time I have no race, I am me.
When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh
Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front
of the Forty-second Street Library...the cosmic Zora emerges...
Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make
me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves
the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me...
Source: Zora Neale Hurston, The World Tomorrow
XI (May 1928), 215-216.
MARCUS GARVEY’S VIEWS ON RACE AND NATION
In the following article from the Negro World,
the newspaper of the Universal Negro Improvement Association,
Marcus Garvey lays out his beliefs on race and nation.
The time has come for the Negro to forget
and cast behind him his hero worship and adoration of other
races, and to start out immediately, to create and emulate heroes
of his own.
We must canonize our own saints, create our
own martyrs, and elevate to positions of fame and honor black
men and women who have made their distinct contributions to
our racial history. Sojourner Truth is worthy of the place of
sainthood alongside of Joan of Arc; Crispus Attacks and George
William Gordon are entitled to the halo of martyrdom with no
less glory than that of the martyrs of any other race. Toussaint
L'Ouverture's brilliancy as a soldier and statesman outshone
that of a Cromwell, Napoleon and Washington; hence, he is entitled
to the highest place as a hero among men. Africa has produced
countless numbers of men and women, in war and in peace, whose
lustre and bravery outshine that of any other people. Then why
not see good and perfection in ourselves?
We must inspire a literature and promulgate
a doctrine of our own without any apologies to the powers that
be. The right is ours and God's. Let contrary sentiment and
cross opinions go to the winds. Opposition to race independence
is the weapon of the enemy to defeat the hopes of an unfortunate
people. We are entitled to our own opinions and not obligated
to or bound by the opinions of others.
If others laugh at you, return the laughter
to them; if they mimic you, return the compliment with equal
force. They have no more right to dishonor, disrespect and disregard
your feeling and manhood than you have in dealing with them.
Honor them when they honor you; disrespect and disregard them
when they vilely treat you. Their arrogance is but skin deep
and an assumption that has no foundation in morals or in law.
They have sprung from the same family tree of obscurity as we
have; their history is as rude in its primitiveness as ours;
their ancestors ran wild and naked, lived in caves and in the
branches of trees, like monkeys, as ours…for centuries
even as they accuse us of doing; their cannibalism was more
prolonged than ours; when we were embracing the arts and sciences
on the banks of the Nile their ancestors were still drinking
human blood and eating out of the skulls of their conquered
dead; when our civilization had reached the noonday of progress
they were still running naked and sleeping in holes and caves
with rats, bats…and animals. After we had already fathomed
the mysteries of the stars and reduced the heavenly constellations
to minute and regular calculus they were still backwoodsmen,
living in ignorance and blatant darkness.
The world today is indebted to us for the
benefits of civilization... Then why should we be ashamed of
ourselves? Their MODERN IMPROVEMENTS are but DUPLICATES of a
grander civilization that we reflected thousands of years ago,
without the advantage of what is buried and still hidden, to
be resurrected and reintroduced by the intelligence of our generation
and our prosperity. Why should we be discouraged because somebody
laughs at us today? Who [is] to tell what tomorrow will bring
forth? Did they not laugh at Moses, Christ and Mohammed…?
We see and have changes every day, so pray, work, be steadfast
and be not dismayed.
As the Jew is held together by his RELIGION,
the white races by the assumption and the unwritten law of SUPERIORITY,
and the Mongolian by the precious tie of BLOOD, so likewise
the Negro must be united in one GRAND RACIAL HIERARCHY. Our
UNION MUST KNOW NO CLIME, BOUNDARY, or NATIONALITY. Like the
great Church of Rome, Negroes the world over MUST PRACTICE ONE
FAITH, that of Confidence in themselves, with One God! One Aim!
One Destiny! Let no religious scruples, no political machination
divide us, but let us hold together under all climes and in
every country, making among ourselves a Racial Empire upon which
"the sun shall never set."
There is no humanity before that which starts
with yourself….God and Nature first made us what we are,
and then out of our own creative genius we make ourselves what
we want to be. Follow always that great law… There is
no height to which we cannot climb by using the active intelligence
of our minds… Being at present the scientifically weaker
race, you shall treat others only as they treat you; but in
your homes and everywhere possible you must teach the higher
development of science to your children; and be sure to develop
a race of scientists par excellence, for in science and religion
lies our only hope to withstand the evil designs of modern materialism.
Never forget your God. Remember, we live, work and pray for
the establishing of a great…RACIAL EMPIRE whose only natural,
spiritual and political limits shall be God and "Africa,
home and abroad."
Source: Marcus Garvey, "African Fundamentalism,"
Negro World (New York), 6 June 1925.
Source: Negro World, “At the Crossroads,” April
14, 1928, p. 4.
MARCUS GARVEY: A SEATTLE WOMAN REMEMBERS
In September 1976 Juanita Warfield Porter
was interviewed as part of an oral history project sponsored
by the state of Washington. Mrs. Proctor, a Seattle native who
at that time was 64 years old, discussed her parents as members
of the UNIA in that city. Mrs. Proctor was 10 years old when
Marcus Garvey visited Seattle in 1922. In the passage below
she describes that visit and the activities of the Seattle division.
On Sunday morning after Sunday School at
First AME Church we Warfield children walked down 14th Avenue
to the UNIA Hall where they'd have meetings for the kids.....Sometimes
we kids wouldn't want to stay. 'Course, we'd have to stay until
my parents came to the meeting. After they came my mother and
the other ladies used to fix a big dinner for us kids and then
they'd have their meeting. I can remember the large dining room,
they had this long table.
My mother was one of the Black Cross Nurses.
There were about 50 to 100 women that belonged to the Black
Cross Nurses. They practiced first aid and stuff like that.
They used to march in the parades, like the Memorial Day Parade,
and Fourth of July Parade. And they'd dress in their beautiful
white uniforms with the black cross on the forehead, and on
the arm a red, black and green sash. And my dad, and the men
wore the red, black and green sash across their chest.
INTERVIEWER: Where your mother and father
officers in the UNIA?
Well no, they were more of working members,
you know, mostly they were very faithful members, because they
went every Sunday and they would practice marching. They had
march sessions, you know, on Wednesday evenings. I remember
sometimes they would take us kids to them and they would practice
their march. And then on Fridays they had choir rehearsal. See,
they even had choirs too.
I remember Marcus Garvey coming here. We
met [him] at the Union Station, and all the Black Cross Nurses
and the men were all there [in uniform] to greet him. And I
was the little girl that they gave the flowers to give to him.
I though he was going to be a big tall man. He looked big in
the pictures, and when I went to give him the flowers he was
almost as short as I was.
He spoke at the Washington Hall on 14th and
Fir. As for his speech, you know, with kids, when we're kids
we don't pay any attention to what they were talking about.
They were trying to teach us about Africa, that we should know
more about Africa. I remember that, and they were working to...
free.... Liberia. And I remember my mother and father talking
about Marcus Garvey was getting this ship up to send black people
back to Africa, the ones that wanted to go.
Source: Juanita Warfield Proctor Interview,
September 22, 1975. Transcript at the Manuscripts and Archives
Division, University of Washington Library, Seattle, Washington.
A LUNATIC OR A TRAITOR
In a May 1924 editorial in the Crisis, W.E.B.
DuBois made one of his harshest attacks on Marcus Garvey and
Marcus Garvey is, without doubt, the most
dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world.
He is either a lunatic or a traitor. He is sending all over
this country tons of letters and pamphlets appealing to Congressmen,
business men, philanthropists and educators to join him on a
platform whose half concealed planks may be interpreted as follows:
That no person of Negro descent can ever
hope to become an American citizen.
That forcible separation of the races and
the banishment of Negroes to Africa is the only solution of
the Negro problem.
That race war is sure to follow any attempt
to realize the program of the N.A.A.C.P.
We would have refused to believe that any
man of Negro descent could have fathered such a propaganda if
the evidence did not lie before us in black and white signed
by this man….
Everybody, including the writer, who has
dared to make the slightest criticism of Garvey has been intimidated
by threats and threatened with libel suits. Over fifty court
cases have been brought by Garvey in ten years. After my first
unfavorable article on Garvey, I was not only threatened with
death by men declaring themselves his followers, but received
letters of such unbelievable filth that they were absolutely
unprintable. When I landed in this country from my trip to Africa
I learned with disgust that my friends stirred by Garvey’s
threats had actually compelled to have secret police protection
for me on the dock!
Friends have even begged me not to publish
this editorial lest I be assassinated. To such depths have we
dropped in free black America! I have been exposing white traitors
for a quarter century. If the day has come when I cannot tell
the truth about black traitors it is nigh time that I died.
The American Negroes have endured this wretch
all too long with fine restraint and every effort at cooperation
and understanding. But the end has come. Every man who apologizes
for or defends Marcus Garvey from this day forth writes himself
down as unworthy of the countenance of decent Americans. As
for Garvey himself, this open ally of the Ku Klux Klan should
be locked up or sent home.
Source: W.E.B. DuBois, Crisis, May 1924, pp.
THE MESSENGER: A BLACK SOCIALIST NEWSPAPER
In the first editorial of the Messenger titled
"Our Reason for Being," co-editors Chandler Owen and
A Philip Randolph describe their approach to the black situation
in the United States.
First, as workers, black and white, we all
have one common interest, viz., the getting of more wages, shorter
hours, and better working conditions. Black and white workers
should combine for no other reason than that for which individual
workers should combine, viz., to increase their bargaining power.
The combination of black and white workers will be a powerful
lesson to the capitalists of the solidarity of labor. It will
show that labor, black and white, is conscious of its interests
and power. This will prove that unions are not based upon race
lines, but upon class lines. This will serve to convert a class
of workers, which has been used by the capitalist class to defeat
organized labor, into an ardent, class conscious, intelligent,
Sixth, The Industrial Workers of the World
commonly termed the I. W. W. draw no race, creed, color or sex
line in their organization. They are making a desperate effort
to get the colored men into the One Big Union. The Negroes are
at least giving them an ear, and the prospects point to their
soon giving them a hand. With the Industrial Workers Organization
already numbering 800,000, to augment it with a million and
a half or two million Negroes, would make it fairly rival the
American Federation of Labor. This may still be done anyhow
and the reactionaries of this country, together with Samuel
Gompers, the reactionary President of the American Federation
of Labor, desire to hold back this trend of Negro labor radicalism....
The New York World, the mouth piece of the
present administration, and also a plutocratic mouth piece,
says in its issue of June 4, 1919, "The radical forces
in New York City have recently embarked on a great new field
of revolutionary endeavor, the education through agitation of
the southern Negro into the mysteries and desirability of revolutionary
Bolshevism. There are several different powerful forces in N.Y.
City behind this move. The chief established propaganda is being
distributed through The Messenger, which styles itself-"The
only magazine of scientific radicalism in the world, published
by Negroes." With the exception of The Liberator, it is
the most radical journal printed in the U.S."...
There is a new leadership for Negro workers.
It is a leadership of uncompromising manhood. It is not asking
for a half loaf but for the whole loaf. It is insistent upon
the Negro workers exacting justice, both from the white labor
unions and from the capitalists or employers.
The Negroes who will benefit from this decision
are indebted first to themselves and their organized power,
which made them dangerous. Second, to the radical agitation
carried on by The Messenger; and third, to the fine spirit of
welcome shown by the Industrial Workers of the World, whose
rapid growth and increasing power the American Federation of
Labor fears. These old line Negro political fossils know nothing
of the Labor Movement, do not believe in labor unions at all,
and have never taken any active steps to encourage such organizations.
We make this statement calmly, coolly and with a reasonable
reserve. The very thing which they are fighting is one of the
chief factors in securing for Negroes their rights. That is
Bolshevism. The capitalists of this country are so afraid that
Negroes will become Bolshevists that they are willing to offer
them almost anything to hold them away from the radical movement.
Nobody buys pebbles which may be picked up on the beach, but
diamonds sell high. The old line Negro leaders have no power
to bargain, because it is known that they are Republicans politically
and job-hunting me-too-boss-hat-in-hand-Negroes, industrially.
Booker Washington and all of them have simply advocated that
Negroes get more work. The editors of The Messenger are not
interested in Negroes getting more work. Negroes have too much
work already. What we want Negroes to get is less work and more
wages, with more leisure for study and recreation....In organization
there is strength; and whenever Negroes or anybody else make
organized demands, their call will be heeded.
Source: The Messenger (August 1919), 11-12.
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON ON COMMUNISM
The appeal of Communism influenced even the
most moderate black leaders, as it influenced thousands of American
whites grappling with the Depression. In 1934 James Weldon Johnson,
former Executive Secretary of the NAACP, described why Communism
was attractive to blacks but nevertheless concluded that it
would fail as a force for social change in America. Part of
his explanation is provided below.
Communism is coming to be regarded as the
infallible solution by an increasing number of us. Those who
look to the coming revolution....seem to think it will work
some instantaneous and magical transformation of our condition.
It appears to me that this infinite faith in Communism indicates
extreme naiveté. ....In considering Communism with respect
to the Negro, the question before us, of course, is not how
it works in Russia, but how it would probably work in the United
States. If the United States goes Communistic, where will the
Communists come from? They certainly will not be imported from
Russia. They will be made from the Americans here on hand. We
might well pause and consider what variations Communism in the
United States might undergo.
I hold no brief against Communism as a theory
of government. I hope that the Soviet experiment will be completely
successful. I know that it is having a strong influence on the
principal nations of the world, including our own. I think it
is a high sign of progress that Negro Americans have reached
the point of holding independent opinions on political and social
questions. What I am trying to do is sound a warning against
childlike trust in the miraculous efficacy on our racial situation
of any economic or social theory of government -Communism or
Socialism or Fascism or Nazism or New Deals. The solving of
our situation depends principally upon an evolutionary process
along two parallel lines: our own development and the bringing
about of a change in the national attitude toward us. That outcome
will require our persevering effort under whatever form the
government might take on.
I grant that if America should turn truly
Communistic (by which I mean-if it should adopt and practice
Communism without reservations, and not adapt it as it has adapted
democracy and Christianity so as to allow every degree of inequality
and cruelty to be practiced under them); that if the capitalistic
system should be abolished and the dictatorship of the proletariat
established, with the Negro aligned, as he naturally ought to
be, with the proletariat, race discriminations would be officially
banned and the reasons and feelings back of them would finally
But except to a visionary there are no indications
that the present or prospective strength of Communism is able
or will be able to work such a change, either by persuasion
or by military coup. In the situation as it now exists it would
be positively foolhardy for us, as a group, to take up the cause
of Communistic revolution and thereby bring upon ourselves all
of the antagonisms that are directed against it in addition
to those we already have to bear. It seems to me that the wholesale
allegiance of the Negro to Communistic revolution would be second
in futility only to his individual resort to physical force...
Source: James Weldon Johnson, Negro American,
What Now?, (New York, 1934), pp. 35-40, 98-103.
BLACK "PILGRIMS" IN THE SOVIET UNION
In the following account historian Allison
Blakely describes the migration of a small group of African
Americans to the Soviet Union to participate in its "new
society." Part of his description appears below.
If some Negroes viewed Russia as a land of
promise in the nineteenth century, in the 1920s and 1930s other
Negroes, especially from the Americas, saw the Soviet Union,
and its idea of the "new society," as "the promised
land" itself.... The bright humanitarian ideals of the
Soviet Union represented one more alluring option to Negroes
seeking a society where they would not be persecuted because
of their color.... One observer estimated that by the early
1930s several hundred Negroes had visited the Soviet Union.
As least a small segment of that number remained for several
years or permanently; others followed them in subsequent decades--politicos,
technicians, and artists.
There were...Negroes who fought in the Red
Army during the Russian Civil War. A memoirist recalled that
a man named George fought on the Ural front in 1918 as a signal
corpsman in an international communist detachment assigned to
the division commanded by Vasili Chapaev.... Another Negro,
this one a cavalry officer who died leading a charge near Voronezh,
inspired Boris Kornilov's poem, Moia Afrika [My Africa], published
in 1935. In fact, the Soviets claimed to have won over an entire
African regiment from the forces the French employed to aid
the Whites [White Russian forces] during the Civil War.
In the 1920s several Negroes were among the
first foreigners invited to attend special schools established
to train Communist Party leaders for various parts of the world.
As part of Comintern's training program, in 1921 it founded
the Communist University for the Toilers of the East (sometimes
called the Far East University). It was intended primarily for
students from the Soviet East and from colonial countries. However,
it soon admitted four American Negroes and one African then
residing in the United States...
The communist students represented only a
small minority of negroes who have been so fascinated by...Soviet
society that they paid a visit. Most were neither pro- nor anti-communist;
their only definite objective was to find a society where a
person's worth was not defined by his skin color. The most interesting
and well-documented visit of the type was that of the writer
Claude McKay in 1922... He was originally invited to Russia
in 1920 by John Reed, after Lenin had raised the issue of the
Negro question at the Second Comintern Congress, but at the
time McKay felt unqualified for the mission. Having missed that
opportunity, in 1922 he raised the fare for what he call his
"magic pilgrimage to Russia."
Another American Negro, Otto Huiswood, had
come to the Soviet Union as part of the American delegation
to the Comintern Congress. However, it soon became obvious that
the Soviet leaders preferred McKay as a representative Negro.
Huiswood was light-skinned whereas McKay was dark-skinned and
therefore better fit the Russian preconception of a Negro. This
was highly ironic considering Huiswood's credentials. A native
of Dutch Guiana whose father had been born a slave, Huiswood
would eventually become one of the most prominent Americans
in the Comintern. As a delegate from New York....he was the
only Negro among the ninety-four founders of the American Communist
Party. McKay later claimed that the American delegation tried
to have him deported because he had arrived with a British group
and not with them. However the prominent Japanese communist
Sen Katayama interceded on McKay's behalf and he was allowed
to stay. The Soviet leaders apparently had a specific objective
in mind; for McKay soon found himself being photographed with
Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, Katayama, and other Party luminaries.
At the opening of the Congress, McKay, and not Huiswood, was
seated on the platform as representing the symbolic presence
of the black American worker.
Source: Allison Blakely, Russia and the Negro:
Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington, D.C., 1986),
NEGRO WOMEN IN STEEL
By the late 1930s African American workers
in major Northern cities had finally become part of organized
labor, usually joining “industrial” unions such
as the United Steelworkers. Mollie V. Lewis’s 1938 article
in Crisis titled “Negro Women in Steel,” however
wrote of the growing support of the wives of these black unionized
steelworkers in Gary, Indiana, suggesting that the incorporation
of African American workers and their families into the labor
movement also furthered the cause of societal racial integration.
Part of her article appears below.
Perhaps you are a Negro woman, driven to the worst part of town
but paying the same high rent,” writes Jenny Elizabeth
Johnstone in her challenging little pamphlet Women in Steel.
“You are strong. There is nothing new in suffering to
you,” she continues. “Your man is driven even harder
than the white workers, but your man gets lower pay— hired
the last and fired the first,” I know these women of the
steel towns of which Miss Johnstone writes—these women
living dreary lives under the domination of powerful and impersonal
corporations. I have been one of them. The conditions under
which they live, the excessive rents demanded for cramped and
inadequate shelter, the uncertainty of employment for their
men folk and the disruptive inconvenience of the mill shifts
all combine to make life a hard and uneven road for them. It
is because of such conditions, faced by the women of every mill
worker’s family, that the Steel Workers’ Organizing
Committee, of the Committee for Industrial Organization has
sponsored the formation of women’s auxiliaries in the
campaign for the unionization of the industry.
Last summer I revisited Gary, that hard and
unbeautiful metropolis of steel upon the banks of Lake Michigan.
In the mills which line the lake shore, furnaces were going
full blast, twenty four hours a day. Steel was pouring from
them in molten streams. Thou sands of men of both races and
many nationalities, sweaty and grimy, were tending the furnaces
and conducting the ore through its processes to the finished
Something new had come into the lives of
these men. Thousands of them had joined the union. For the first
time it was possible for them openly to be union men in the
mills of the United States Steel Corporation. For the first
time this vast corporation for which they worked had recognized
their union and entered into an agreement with it.
Only a few miles distant, however, in Indiana
Harbor and South Chicago, Little Steel had taken a bitter stand
against the union and against the spirit of the New Deal and
had engaged in a costly fight which was climaxed by the Memorial
Day Massacre. The strike was now over and the men were returning
to work without the recognition which had been negotiated with
Hand in hand with the campaign to organize
the mill workers went the drive to bring the women folk of these
men into active participation in the labor movement. The agency
for organizing the women was the Women’s Auxiliary of
the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers of
North America. The objectives of the campaign were to organize
the women “to lend aid to the union in all possible ways,”
to help them to maintain the morale of the steel workers, to
educate them in the principles of trade unionism, and to weld
them into a force for social betterment.
Bringing Races Together
In the matter of race relations, Gary and
the adjacent steel towns are by no means utopian. From time
to time bitter racial animosities have flared, not only between
Negroes and whites, but also between native citizens and the
foreign born, In addition many of the foreign born brought with
them to this country nationalistic enmities rooted in Old World
conflicts. To induce the women of such diverse groups to join
the same organization, even for their own benefit, has been
no easy task. In Gary I talked with Mrs. Minneola Ingersoll
who was in charge of the organization of women’s auxiliaries
in the Chicago-Calumet district, Mrs. Ingersoll is a young southern
white woman and a graduate of the University of Alabama. Together
we visited the homes of members of the auxiliary of both races
and various nationalities.
“Our policy in the auxiliary,
as in the union,” Mrs. Ingersoll said, “is to organize
all regardless of their race, color, creed or nationality. When
it comes to exploitation, the mill owners draw no color line.
They exploit the native white workers just as they do the Mexican,
Polish and Negro workers.”
In Indiana Harbor where Inland Steel had
forced its workers into a long and bitter strike rather than
grant their demand for recognition, a num her of Negro women
had been drawn into the auxiliary In Gary, however, Negro women
seemed more reluctant to join and the campaign had been less
successful among them, Along with the women of other groups,
Negro women were represented on the picket lines of the struck
During the strike they cooperated with others
behind the lines in the preparation and serving of hot meals
to the strikers. They were members of the various committees
which sought contributions of money and food to keep the strike
Negroes Aided in Strike
…The organizing of white and
Negro women in the same units has naturally had its by-product
in the field of race relations, While the auxiliaries have by
no means eliminated racial barriers in a district where jim
crowism flourishes, they have for the first time made it possible
for the women of both races to get to know one another on friendly
While the municipal government of Gary continues
to keep the children apart in a system of separate schools,
their parents are getting together in the union and in the auxiliary.
And after school hours, the children meet jointly in a junior
lodge under guidance of an instructor. It is noteworthy that
the only public eating place in Gary where both races may be
freely served is a cooperative restaurant largely patronized
by members of the union and. auxiliary.
These, it may be true, are of minor importance.
But they represent steps toward inter-racial cooperation on
a mass basis. When the black and white workers and members of
their families are convinced that their basic economic interests
are the same, they may be expected to make common cause for
the advancement of these interests. Women of both races have,
for traditional reasons, been inclined to be more stand-offish
than men when it comes to organizing a common body. The efforts
of the auxiliary to bring the women together may ultimately
prove to be a significant factor in overcoming racial barriers
which still retard the advance of the labor movement in this
Source: Mollie V. Lewis, Negro Women in Steel,
The Crisis 45 (February 1938), 54.
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: TWO VIEWS
The accounts below by Mary McLeod Bethune,
the most prominent African American appointee of FDR and Roy
Wilkins, an NAACP officer suggest the diversity of opinion about
the President concerning his commitment to full equality for
African American citizens.
Bethune: I knew Franklin D. Roosevelt as a
friend and as a political leader…There are those who criticize
FDR's slowness to move against basic evils in our midst and
his obvious dislike of extreme methods of achieving his objectives.
But it is important to understand that his methods were those
of a man of great experience and insight. He was a man of great
depth of mind and seldom made rash moves. I had many opportunities
to study the man at work and in the midst of a crisis, and I
was struck by the calm, exact, almost mathematical way in which
he thought and moved.
I often expressed to him my impatience with
the slowness of the democratic process. I remember going to
see him one evening .... I was feeling particularly distressed
that day over reports I had received on flagrant bias shown
against Negroes seeking to enter the National Youth Administration
in certain parts of the South. I told him about the situation
in NYA in the South, about the lack of training facilities for
Negroes in certain Southern states and of the refusal of state
governments to allocate funds for Negro NYA activities. Negroes
could not enter the technical training schools established under
NYA. I was visibly disturbed and made the President aware of
how I felt. I caught his arm and clung to him. "The Negro
people need all of the strength that you can give, Mr. President,
in opening up opportunities for them," I told him.
He looked at me seriously for a few seconds,
and then said, "Mrs. Bethune, I shall fail you. I'll see
[that] everything that can be done to open up these sections
of the South to NYA training for Negroes will be done. Your
people and all minorities shall have their chance…"
That was not the last time that I felt impelled
to speak out strongly to the President on conditions confronting
Negroes in the South. More than once I proposed pretty drastic
steps to end the hideous discriminations and second class citizenship
which make the South a blot upon our democracy. But FDR usually
demurred, pointing out that a New Reconstruction would have
to keep pace with democratic progress on a national scale. He
strove to bring the whole country into a unified understanding
of freedom....Frequently I would ask him with some impatience
why this couldn't be done at once or that done immediately.
He would think awhile, and then say very carefully patiently,
"Mrs. Bethune, if we do that now, we'll hurt our program
over there. We do this thing stride by stride, but leaving no
FDR taught me much about practical politics
and how important it is that we understand their meaning if
we are to make progress in the political arena… One day…at
a reception in 1940, he beckoned to me and opened up a conversation
I shall always remember. "You know, Mrs. Bethune,"
he said, looking out of the window and yet speaking directly
to me, "people like you and me are fighting, and must continue
to fight, for the day when a man will be regarded as a man regardless
of his race or faith or country. That day will come, but we
must pass through perilous times before we realize it, and that's
why it's so difficult today because that new idea is being born
and many of us flinch from the thought of it. Justice must and
That is why I believed so deeply in Franklin
Wilkins: On the subject of the Negro, the
Roosevelt record is spotty, as might be expected in an administration
where so much power is in the hands of the southern wing of
the Democratic Party. And yet Mr. Roosevelt, hobbled as he has
been by the Dixie die hards, has managed to include Negro citizens
in practically every phase of the administration program. In
this respect, no matter how far behind the ideal he may be,
he is far ahead of any other Democratic president, and of recent
The best proof that Mr. Roosevelt has not
catered always to the South and has insisted on carrying the
Negro along with his program is to be found in the smearing,
race hating propaganda used against him in the 1936 campaign
by southern white groups. Both he and Mrs. Roosevelt were targets
of filthy mud slinging simply because they did not see eye to
eye with the South on the Negro.
This does not mean that the Roosevelt administration
has done all that it could have done for the race. Its policies
in many instances have done Negroes great injustice and have
helped to build more secure walls of segregation. On the anti
lynching bill Mr. Roosevelt has said not a mumbling word. His
failure to endorse this legislation, to bring pressure to break
the filibuster, is a black mark against him. It does no good
to say that the White House could not pass down some word on
this bill. The White House spoke on many bills. Mr. Roosevelt
might have pressed the anti-lynching bill to a vote, especially
during January and February 1938, when there was tremendous
public opinion supporting the bill. His failure to act, or even
speak, on the anti lynching bill was the more glaring because,
while mobs in America were visiting inhumanities upon Negroes,
Mr. Roosevelt periodically was rebuking some foreign government
for inhumanity, and enunciating high sentiments of liberty,
tolerance, justice, etc…
Full credit must go to the administration
for its program of low cost housing, so sorely needed by low
income families. No one pretends that the American housing program
is more than a beginning, but Negroes have shared in it in the
most equitable manner. However, there were, outside the slum
clearance program, some damaging practices. The FHA, which insures
mortgages for home buyers, has enforced a regulation which puts
the power and approval of the government on ghetto life. No
Negro family which sought a home outside the so called "Negro"
neighborhood could get a FHA-insured loan...
The farm program has not been ideally administered,
but colored people have shared in the benefits. More than 50,000
families have been assisted by the Farm Security Administration.
Mr. Roosevelt had the courage to appoint a Negro to a federal
judgeship, the first in the history of the country. His nominee
was confirmed by a Democratic Senate without a murmur.
Heavily on the debit side is Mr. Roosevelt's
approval of the War Department's notorious Jim Crow in the armed
[The] most important contribution of the
Roosevelt administration to the age-old color line problem in
America has been its doctrine that Negroes are a part of the
country and must be considered in any program for the country
as a whole…. For the first time in their lives, government
has taken on meaning and substance for the Negro masses.
Sources: Mary McLeod Bethune, "My Secret
Talks with FDR," Ebony 4 (April 1949, [Roy Wilkins], "The
Roosevelt Record," Crisis 47 (November 1940).
CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON OUTLINES THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST SCHOOL
In 1935 Charles Hamilton Houston, the chief
legal strategist for the NAACP announces the organization’s
campaign against race discrimination in public education and
the strategy it would follow. Unfortunately Houston died before
the Brown Decision was rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court in
The National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People is launching an active campaign against race
discrimination in public education. The campaign will reach
all levels of public education from the nursery school through
the university. The ultimate objective of the association is
the abolition of all forms of segregation in public education,
whether in the admission of students, the appointment or advancement
of teachers, or administrative control. The association will
resist any attempt to extend segregated schools. Where possible
it will attack segregation in schools. Where segregation is
so firmly entrenched by law that a frontal attack cannot be
made, the association will throw its immediate force toward
bringing Negro schools up to an absolute equality with white
schools. If the white South insists upon its separate schools,
it must not squeeze the Negro schools to pay for them.
It is not the purpose or the function of
the national office of the N.A.A.C.P. to force a school fight
upon any community. Its function is primarily to expose the
rotten conditions of segregation to point out the evil consequences
of discrimination and injustice to both Negroes and whites,
and to map out ways and means by which these evils may be corrected.
The decision for action rests with the local community itself.
If the local community decides to act and asks the N.A.A.C.P.
for aid, the N.A.A.C.P. stands ready with advice and assistance.
The N.A.A.C.P. proposes to use every legitimate
means at its disposal to accomplish actual equality of educational
opportunity for Negroes. A legislative program is being formulated.
Court action has already begun in Maryland to compel the University
of Maryland to admit a qualified Negro boy to the law school
of the university. Court action is imminent in Virginia to compel
the University of Virginia to admit a qualified Negro girl in
the graduate department of that university. Activity in politics
will be fostered due to the political set up of and control
over public school systems. The press and the public forum will
be enlisted to explain to the public the issues involved and
to make both whites and Negroes realize the blight which inferior
education throws over them, their children and their communities.
Source: Charles Houston, "Educational
Inequalities Must Go!," Crisis 42 (October 1935).
SEGREGATED BASEBALL, 1939
In the article reprinted below Washington
Post Sports Writer Shirley Povich describes the loss of talented
players because of Major League Baseball’s color bar.
Povich joins a growing chorus of white sports writers who demand
the integration of baseball and other professional sports.
Orlando, Fla., April 6. There's a couple of
million dollars worth of baseball talent on the loose, ready
for the big leagues yet unsigned, by any major league clubs.
There are pitchers who would win 20 games this season for any
big league club that offered them contracts, and there are outfielders
who could hit .350, in¬fielders who could win quick recognition
as stars, and there is at least one catcher who at this writ¬ing
is probably superior to Bill Dickey.
Only one thing is keeping them out of the
big leagues--the pigmentation of their skin. They hap¬pen
to be colored. That's their crime in the eyes of many club owners
Their talents are being wasted in the rickety
parks in the Negro sections of Pittsburgh, Philadel¬phia,
New York, Chicago and four other cities that comprise the major
league of Negro baseball. They haven't got a chance to get into
the big leagues of
the white folks. It's a tight little boycott that the majors
have set up against colored players.
It's a sort of gentleman's agreement among
the club owners that is keeping Negroes out of big league baseball.
There's nothing in the rules that forbids a club from signing
a colored player. It's not down in black and white, so to speak.
But it's definitely understood that no club will attempt to
sign a colored player. And, in fact, no club could do that,
because the elasticity of Judge Landis' authority would for¬bid
it. And the judge can rule out of baseball any character whose
presence he may deem ‘detrimental’ to the game.
Just how a colored player would be detrimental
to the game has never been fully explained, but that seems to
be the light in which they are regarded by the baseball brass
hats. Perhaps it is because there is such an overwhelming majority
of Southern boys in big league baseball who would not take kindly
to the presence of colored athletes and would flash a menacing
spike, or so. Perhaps it's because base¬ball has done well
enough without colored players. It's a smug, con¬servative
business not given to very great enterprise and the intro¬duction
of new and novel features.
There have been campaigns aimed at smashing
the boycott. One New York newspaper openly advocated the signing
of Negro players, and Heywood Broun has often berated the baseball
magnates for drawing the color line. But despite the presence
of thousands of colored customers in the stands, the club owners
have blithely hewed to the color line. They are content, seemingly,
to leave well enough alone and make no concerted play for Negro
A $200,000 Catcher
But in its restricted localities, Negro baseball
has flowered. There are Negro teams which now might do very
well in big league com¬petition even if they played as a
Negro entity. The Homesteads of Pittsburgh are probably the
best colored team. They train here in Florida each spring, even
as do the American and National League first teams. The other
evening at Tinker Field, the Homesteads met the Newark Eagles
of the same colored league. Curious Washington players flocked
to the game, went away with a deep respect for colored baseball
Walter Johnson sat in a box at the game, profoundly impressed
with growing the talents of the colored players. ‘There,’
he said, ‘is a catcher that any big league club would
like to buy for $200,000. I've heard of him before. His name
is Gibson. They call him ‘Hoot’ Gibson, and he can
do everything. He hits that ball a mile. And he catches so easy,
he might just as well be in a rocking chair. Throws like a rifle.
Bill Jim Dickey isn't as good a catcher. Too bad the Gibson
is a colored fellow.’
Until last season there was a colored pitcher
around named ‘Satchel’ Page. The colored folks have
a penchant for picturesque names for their idols and ‘Satchel’
Page was so-called because of the size of his feet. He was 6
feet 3, a left-hander and a whale of a pitcher. ‘He re-tired
last year at the age of 44,’ said Jimmy Wasdell, ‘and
he was still a great pitcher. I've been on clubs that barnstormed
against Negro teams and in a dozen games against this Page we
never beat him. He beat Paul and Dizzy Dean one night, 1-0,
and we got only one hit off him. I was the only minor leaguer
on our club...’
Source: “This Morning with Shirley Povich,”
Washington Post, 7 April 1939, Section III, p. 21.
KENNY WASHINGTON AT UCLA, 1937
Many people recall Woody Strode as one of
the first African Americans to obtain major dramatic roles in
Hollywood feature films of the 1950s and 1960s. However, like
other actors of the day, or later, his career had its roots
in both college and professional football. In the late 1930s
Strode played on football at UCLA and where he was teammate
to a young junior college transfer, Jackie Robinson (who choose
the Bruins over the University of Oregon despite an overzealous
UO booster's gift of a new car). However the most famous Bruins
teammate at the time was Strode's friend, Kenny Washington,
the first black quarterback in UCLA history and one of only
a half dozen African American to have ever played in that position
at a major university. Washington, Robinson, and Strode, were
examples of some of the first black college athletes who became
generally admired beyond the African American community. The
account below is Strode's recollection of Washington's greatest
game, the 1937 USC-UCLA meeting at the Coliseum.
Our biggest game of the 1937 season was our finale against USC.
The first USC-UCLA game was played in 1929; UCLA lost 76-0.
The next year we lost 52-0. Bill Ackerman decided it wasn't
healthy for us to play them. They were just too good. The schools
decided not to play again until UCLA had a chance to build up
UCLA didn't play USC again until Kenny and I got there. So we
never had beaten USC; we just ate their leftovers. And I swear
the people at those two schools hated each other. "Goddamn
USC, those rich sons of bitches!" I can imagine the betting
that went down it was like a war.
We always met at the Wilshire Country Club
before the game: Willis O. Hunter, the director of athletics
at USC, all the officials from UCLA, the president of the student
body, the coaches, yell leaders, song girls, dean of students,
and anybody else connected with the game. They'd go over anything
that might lead to a problem. See, things would happen. Like
we stole Tire Biter once; that was their dog. Or one time somebody
from the USC band was walking by and someone from our school
poured a whole bucket of blue paint on his uniform. Well, I
had to buy that kid a new uniform. So they had this big meeting
to try and keep everything on an even keel.
My biggest concern going into that first
game against USC was whether or not Kenny could play. At eighteen
years of age, in his first year of major college football, Kenny
handled the ball 90 percent of the time and then backed me up
behind the line on defense. He'd play sixty minutes of a sixty-minute
ballgame. Kenny got so beat up he'd spend his weekends at the
Hollywood Hospital getting glucose dripped into his arm. We
were all jealous, "Look at that Kenny Washington lying
up there with all those pretty nurses."
USC hit pretty hard, and if you're hurt internally,
it's just going to be that much harder on you. Of course the
press didn't know Kenny was injured; they went ahead and promoted
the game based on his ability to play. Maxwell Stiles wrote
this for the Los Angeles Examiner:
If one man can lick a football team, Kenny
Washington looks like the man to do it. But if you are going
to stick to the theory that a TEAM should beat a MAN, they you
have to take Howard Jones' Trojans.
We played on a cool, crisp December 4th at
2:00 p.m. and 80,000 fans showed up... I was coming in through
the players' entrance, ready to play in the biggest game of
my life. I don't know how we thought we could beat USC; they'd
rotate three tackles on me so I was always trying to block a
fresh guy. But we were tough because we played from our hearts.
I was so keyed up I must have bounced off three lockers and
four doors trying to find the tunnel to the field.
We were down 13-0 in the third quarter when
[Coach] Spaulding pulled Kenny out of the game. He was taking
a terrible beating. As soon as Don Ferguson came in to replace
him, USC scored again... It was the fourth quarter when the
wheels started falling off the Trojan's horse... We recovered
[a fumble] on their 44-yard line. That's when Spaulding put
Kenny back in the game.
The ball was snapped to Kenny and he faded
back. Our right halfback, Hal Hirshon, took off around my end.
I stayed in to block... Hal caught the ball and scored; 19-7
USC. In those days the team scored upon had the option to kick
off or receive. USC figured the pass to Hal Hirshon was just
a lucky break for us. They figured they'd kick off, pin us down
on our end of the field and run the clock out, after all, they
'd been stopping us all day. They figured wrong.
They kicked off, and we took over on our
own 28-yard line. We got into our huddle and Hal said, "Kenny,
I can beat their safety!" Kenny said, "Okay, run as
fast as you can, as far as you can and I'll hit you."
Hal went deep. A couple of Trojans leaked
through but Kenny shucked them off. He ran to his right and
set to throw on the 15-yard line. Hal and [the safety] raced
stride for stride until they crossed mid-field. Then [the safety]
started pulling up. He must have thought, "Screw it. Nobody
can throw this far!"
Hal kept running, flat-out towards the goal.
Kenny cranked it up and unloaded. Hal caught it on their 20
yard-line and took it for the score; 19-13 USC... Well, no one
ever, even in the pros, had thrown a pass as far as Kenny Washington
did that day. That was the longest officially documented pass
in the history of American football: 72 yards all together,
53 yards in the air from the line of scrimmage. But Kenny received
the snap 10 yards behind the line, and he backpedaled and sidestepped
until he was boxed into a corner on the 15. Well, from our own
15 to the other guys' 23, that's 65 yards in the air, not counting
the diagonal. Nobody had ever seen throwing like that.
This time USC decide they would let us kick
off. They knew if Kenny got the ball back he might throw it
the entire length of the field. They received the kick, but
we were so fired up they couldn't move the ball. They punted
and we took over around midfield; there were three minutes left
on the clock.
Kenny ran and passed us down to their 14-yard
line. On third down we tried to trick them. This time Hal Hirshon
got the ball and tried a pass to Kenny in the end zone. But
Hal was completely exhausted from running downfield time after
time. Hal threw the ball way short and as Kenny turned back
for it he slipped and fell flat on his face.
It was fourth down and 13 to go on their
14-yard line. The final seconds were ticking off the clock.
A touchdown meant a sure tie with a chance to win on the conversion.
Kenny received the snap and faded back. I ran a hook pattern
to the 1-yard line; I was wide open. Kenny passed and as I turned,
I saw the ball coming at me like a bullet. And like a bullet
it went right through me.
We could have won if I held on to that pass.
I didn't miss many. But when Kenny threw the ball, he threw
it hard. He didn't throw many interceptions; if I couldn't get
it nobody could. I've often thought about that pass; I don't
know how I missed it. I guess it just wasn't meant to be.
Source: Woody Strode, Goal Dust: An Autobiography
(New York, 1990), pp. 66-70.