Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Dec 19 2000 (IPS) — It was the “Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall”, the poet Langston Hughes wrote of the golden age known as the Black Renaissance.

It was also the Harlem of art, literature, music and activism.

A cultural mecca, New York City was the undisputed capital of the Black Renaissance, which is now being celebrated by a travelling exhibit titled ‘A Stronger Soul Within A Finer Frame’, after a 1922 poem by Jamaican- born writer Claude McKay.

McKay’s poem, called ‘Baptism,’ “expresses a recurring concern of the Black Renaissance to transform the self”, the curators note.

“A new empowered racial identity would command the respect of American society and counter stereotypical images” of kindly uncles, maternal mammies, comic buffoons and violent brutes that had dominated popular culture – largely to justify slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

“America shook with the shimmy, moaned with the blues and swung to the rhythms of jazz,” the curators explain. “White America expressed a new interest in black America, popularising its music and dance, using African American subjects in artistic creations and promoting the works of black artists and writers.”

While the Black Renaissance did not fully blossom until the 1920s and 1930s, its roots can be traced back to the 19th century, when racist caricatures of African American first began to be countered by realistic portrayals of black life.

‘A Stronger Soul’ traces the rise of the “New Negro” through rare first edition books, dust jackets, letters, photographs, film posters and record albums culled from the Archie Givens Sr. Collection of African American Literature and Life.

Its earliest pieces include a 1900 edition of ‘A New Negro for a New Century’ by Booker T. Washington, a 1903 edition of ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ by W.E.B. Dubois, and an 1892 copy of ‘A Voice from the South’, by Anna Julia Cooper.

In the last, Cooper writes: “If these broken utterances can in any way help to a cleaner vision and a truer pulse-beat in studying our Nation’s Problem, this Voice by a Black Woman of the South will not have been raised in vain.”

While many of the personalities in the collection are well-known, the exhibit also sheds light on aspects of American history that have been suppressed or marginalised, such as the heroism of black soldiers during World War I.

A photograph of soldiers from the 369th infantry returning home to Harlem in 1919 notes that they were known as the “Hell Fighters” and were renowned for their bravery in the trenches.

“They received the coveted Croix de Guerre from the French government, the only American unit to be so honoured,” the curators note. “The Hell Fighters, however, were led by a white colonel and could boast only a single black officer among their ranks.”

With the advent of the 1920s, new technology in the form of radios, phonographs and motion pictures allowed audiences around the country to share cultural experiences that had previously been localised. And it gave African Americans more control over how they were represented.

As Langston Hughes wrote in 1926: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs.”

Blues singer and actress Ethel Waters became famous during this period. Waters had begun her career doing vaudeville and carnival performances as the character “Sweet Mama Stringbean”, but was later discovered by big studios like Black Swan, Columbia and Paramount.

The dashing Lorenzo Tucker, known as the “Black Valentino”, starred in 11 all-black films by Oscar Micheaux – including ‘The Exile’ (1931), the first talkie by an African American production company.

Other notable figures whose correspondence and literature are featured in the show include writers Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, visual artist Aaron Douglas, singer Bessie Smith and jazz icon Louis Armstrong.

Then there were the activists and fighters: Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. – “The Preacher” – who used his pulpit at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem to speak out against injustice.

A. Philip Randolph, who founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, was the leading champion of the African American working classes. Mary McLeod Bethune fought to bring educational opportunities to black women in the segregated South.

Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and Alain Locke, an outspoken philosophy professor at Howard University, were also key figures in this empowerment movement.

But despite the great strides made by these artists and intellectuals, as well as those who came after, inequality and stereotypes remain facts of US life.

“Racism and prejudice still plague American society, and talented African Americans from all walks of life still strive for accurate, multi- faceted self-portraits,” the show’s organisers note. “African Americans still sometimes disagree about what images will best serve their race, making the issue of portraiture as controversial today as it was in the 1920s and 1930s.”

Since it was first organised by the University of Minnesota Art Museum in 1990, ‘A Stronger Soul Within A Finer Frame’ has been viewed by some 2.5 million people in 40 cities around the United States. When it leaves the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem on Jan. 16, the exhibit will be heading to Atlanta, Los Angeles and Minneapolis.