Talking Cure by Paula Marantz Cohen

Author:Paula Marantz Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

Conversation among Minority Americans in the United States

Paris would also attract African American artists during this period, most notably Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes. These writers spent time in France with the expatriate group above but are more associated with the so-called Harlem Renaissance back home. For many Black artists and intellectuals, Harlem came to occupy the same kind of perch on American society that Paris did.

The neighborhood in Upper Manhattan known as Harlem was initially a white middle-class enclave but opened to Black residents when developers realized that it had been overbuilt in the teens and 1920s. As a result, restrictions that existed elsewhere in the city were lifted and it became, in the words of Black writer and activist James Weldon Johnson, “the Negro capital of the world.” It was the headquarters of the NAACP, the National Urban League, and Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association, and of newspapers and magazines specifically geared to a Black audience. The level of artistic activity in Harlem in the 1920s was spectacular. The Harlem YMCA (still in existence near the 135th Street subway station) was where the Harlem Writers’ Workshop met and where figures like Langston Hughes and Claude McKay gave lectures to large and enthusiastic audiences. It was also where less prominent figures lodged and engaged in conversation.

Some say the Harlem Renaissance was launched by a dinner on March 21, 1924—more of an immortal one than that hosted by Haydon for Wordsworth in 1817. It was called the Civic Club Dinner, organized by sociologist and civil rights activist Charles Johnson and designed to bring white and Black writers together. The guest list was impressive and included such prominent white figures as the gadfly journalist H. L. Mencken, the businessman-turned-art-collector of Impressionist and African art Albert Barnes, and the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Among the Black intelligentsia present were W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Bennett, Walter White, and Alain Locke. Some say that the conversation at the Civic Club Dinner was an impetus for the flowering of creativity that followed; others saw the dinner as evidence that the movement was beholden—and hence, inhibited—by white patronage. This continues to be a subject of debate.

Langston Hughes, in his memoir The Big Sea, talks about the parties at white patron Carl Van Vechten’s apartment that “were so Negro that they were reported as a matter of course in the colored society columns, just as though they occurred in Harlem instead of West 55th Street.” Hughes reports some incidents that occurred and bon mots exchanged (Van Vechten once held a “gossip party” in which guests were expected to tell the worst things they had heard about each other). In general, Hughes was quite comfortable in this milieu and wrote about Van Vechten appreciatively: “He never talks grandiloquently about democracy or Americanism. Nor makes fetish of those qualities. But he lives them with sincerity—and humor.”

But this was far from everyone’s viewpoint. One of the more biting representations of the Harlem

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