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African American Poetry (1870-1928): A Digital Anthology

Front-piece to "The New Negro" (1925)

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The Beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance: Overview and Timeline of Key Events The aesthetic movement we now know as the Harlem Renaissance (roughly, 1922-1930) was known a little differently at the time. Many critics and participants in the 1920s itself referred to the period as the "New Negro" Renaissance, and that phrasing is encapsulated by the anthology edited by Alain Locke, The New Negro: an Interpretation. (See our note on Historical language.) Since the 1970s, the period has largely been known as the Harlem Renaissance, as seen in the title of Arna Bontemps' memoir, The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972) and Nathan Huggins' influential literary history, Harlem Renaissance (1971).

The period is best known as an era when a critical mass of writers, musicians, visual artists, and performers converged in New York City, and began producing revolutionary American art and literature. This was the beginning of jazz and the blues, and both aesthetics were hugely influential in the Harlem Renaissance, as were other elements of African American folk culture. In terms of literature specifically, the Harlem Renaissance was the first era where mainstream publishers began to print literature -- novels, poetry, and drama -- by African American writers in significant numbers.

Historically, the Harlem Renaissance was made possible by the growth of large Black communities in northern cities as a result of the "Great Migration" (a phenomenon described in poems like Georgia Douglas Johnson's "The Hegira" and Lucy Ariel Williams' "Northboun'"). Another key element was likely the growth of Black colleges and universities, which had, by the 1920s, been educating a growing, highly literate Black middle class (see our HBCU tag). Many of the pioneering figures of the Harlem Renaissance either studied at or taught at Black colleges and universities, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Charles S. Johnson, Langston Hughes, and William Stanley Braithwaite.

Importantly, the advent of a literary renaissance for Black writers in the 1920s was not accompanied by significant progress for civil rights for the African American community. Indeed, Jim Crow segregation remained intact in the south, lynchings remained common in southern towns and cities, and no signficant new civil rights litigation was passed during the period. Anti-lynching legislation was introduced (see Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill), with support from the NAACP, but ultimately failed. Also, years such as 1919 were marked by significant racialized violence (the "Red Summer"), including violence against returning World War I veterans. That said, magazines like The Crisis and Opportunity were deeply committed to advocating for civil rights for the African American community, and did find some success with the 1923 acquittal of twelve Black men originally sentenced to death followiing the Elaine massacre.

Here are a few key events leading up to the Harlem Renaissance:

October 1919: Jessie Fauset becomes literary editor of The Crisis, relocating from Washington, DC to New York City. Over the next few years, Fauset's influence leads to the growth of a more high-brow sensibility in the poetry published in the magazine. See our extensive collection of poems published in The Crisis here.

1920: Publication of W.E.B. Du Bois' Darkwater: Voices Within the Veil. Perhaps Du Bois' second most influential work theorizing the nature of race and racism in American life (after The Souls of Black Folk), the volume also contained a number of Du Bois' poems.

1920: Publication of Fenton Johnson's Tales of Darkest America, in Chicago, Illinois. The collection contained short stories previously published in Johnson's magazine, The Favorite Magazine.

1921: Shuffle Along, the first major musical with an all-Black cast premiers on Broadway, and is a success with both Black and white audience. While the story and acting style would likely have some elements that would be problematic with audiences today, it's seen as a breakthrough by Black writers during the period; for example, Langston Hughes cites Shuffle Along as a major event in his autobiography, The Big Sea. (More on Shuffle Along here)

June 1921: Langston Hughes published his first adult-oriented poem in a national magazine, in The Crisis, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (Note: Hughes also had a few earlier publications for children in The Brownies' Book)

April 1922: Publication of Claude McKay's Harlem Shadows. Appreciative reviews appear in New York Times Books Review (May 14,1922), Negro World (May 26, 1922), New York Age (May 20, 1922), Bookman (July 1922), and New York Evening Post (October 1922).

June 1922: Publication of James Weldon Johnson's landmark anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry. The anthology contains poems by poets important in the 1900s and 1910s, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, William Stanley Braithwaite, and James D. Corrothers, but also poets who would bridge into the new generation, including Georgia Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, Jessie Fauset, and Claude McKay.

August 1922: Publication of Georgia Douglas Johnson's Bronze, with a preface by W.E.B. Du Bois.

1923: Publication of Robert Kerlin's Negro Poets and their Poems, an enthusiastic work of criticism and appreciation by a white literary critic. Contains brief accounts of poets of the earlier generation, as well as an introduction to the younger generation (Langston Hughes, Andrea Razafkeriefo, Jessie Fauset, Anne Spencer, etc.). This is the first major collection that contains poetry by Langston Hughes.

January 1923: Advent of Opportunity: a Journal of Negro Life, edited by Charles S. Johnson. See our collection of poems published in Opportunity here. The journal is primarily an academic journal, though poetry starts appearing in April 1923 (Leslie Pinckney Hill's "Voyaging" and Countee Cullen's "The Dance of Love" both appear in that issue).

January 1923: The Messenger, founded as a Black socialist magazine, becomes more engaged with African American poetry, and becomes another important venue where emerging writers can publish their work. (See our collection here)

March 1924: Jessie Fauset publishes her first novel, There is Confusion, a novel about a middle-class Black family in Philadelphia. See more about Fauset on our Jessie Fauset: Author page. The dinner at the Harlem Civic Club in her honor was presided over by Charles S. Johnson (editor of Opportunity) and Alain Locke, alongside white publishers and editors, several of whom also spoke at the event. Later, Fauset would complain that her own work and accomplishment was somewhat sidelined by the grand ambitions of the dinner as it transpired. The event is often cited as one of the important initial moments of the Harlem Renaissance (more here).

1924: Walter F. White publishes The Fire in the Flint, a novel about a Black doctor and World War I veteran who returns to Georgia after the war to set up a practice.

May 1925: Literary prize for Opportunity: a Journal of Negro Life announced. Langston Hughes' "The Weary Blues" (the poem) wins first prize. Countee Cullen's "To One Who Said Me Nay" awarded second prize. Helene Johnson's "Trees at Night" receives Honorable Mention.

December 1925: Publication of Alain Locke's edited collection, The New Negro: an Interpretation. (A shorter version of the anthology appeared as a special issue of the journal Survey Graphic in March, 1925.) Contains poems by Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Anne Spencer, Angelina Grimke, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Also short fiction and critical essays.

January 1926: Publication of Langston Hughes first book of poetry, The Weary Blues

October 1926: "Negro Number" of the predominantly white literary magazine Palms, a "little magazine" published in Mexico by mainly North American poets. Contains poetry by Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Helene Johnson, and others. The Table of Contents as well as an account of the inception of the issue can be found here; Cullen's decision to publish Caroling Dusk in 1927 may have been inspired by his experience editing this special issue.

November 1926: Publication of Wallace Thurman's Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists

1926: Jessie Fauset leaves The Crisis.

1927: After 1926, the Harlem Renaissance was essentially in full swing. Another important anthology that appeared was Countee Cullen's anthology, Caroling Dusk, which was published in 1927. 1927 also saw the publication of James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones, Langston Hughes' Fine Clothes to the Jew, Countee Cullen's Copper Sun, and the Charles Johnson anthology, Ebony and Topaz.

In 1927, a Arthur Huff Fauset and Nellie Rathbone Bright start publishing Black Opals, an African American literary magazine, based in Philadelphia. The magazine publishes four issues, with contributors like Jessie Fauset, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery, among others.

Also in May 1927, Carolina Magazine did the first of a series of special issues dedicated to African American writing (the May 1928 and May 1929 issues of the magazine were also devoted to the "New Negro"). The special issue was edited by Lewis Alexander, and featured poems by a number of poets connected to Fire!! and The New Negro: an Interpretation.

1928: Claude McKay's novel Home to Harlem is published in 1928, as is W.E.B. Du Bois' Dark Princess. Nella Larsen's Quicksand also appeared in 1928, followed by Passing in 1929. Rudolph Fisher's novel The Walls of Jericho also appeared in 1928.

The first issue of Wallace Thurman's Harlem: A Forum on Negro Life also appeared in 1928. It contained writings by Walter White, Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and a short story by Langston Hughes,

Georgia Douglas Johnson's collection, An Autumn Love Cycle, also appeared in 1928, with a forward from Alain Locke.

1929: Countee Cullen publishes The Black Christ and Other Poems.

By the early 1930s, the "vogue" for Black writing and art amongst mainstream publishers would begin to decline, especially with respect to poetry. However, many of the writers named above would continue to publish throughout the subsequent decades. Writers like McKay and Hughes, who started out publishing mostly poetry, would shift gears and publish more fiction and nonfiction prose during that period. (Langston Hughes' novel Not Without Laughter appears in 1930.) Moreover, Zora Neale Hurston's career would really find its peak during this 'post-Harlem Renaissance' period, with the publication of novels like Their Eyes Were Watching God. Other important writers, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, would also emerge in that period.
"The New Negro: an Interpretation." Anthology Edited by Alain Locke (full text) (1925)
Table of Contents

Part I: The Negro Renaissance

The New Negro   Alain Locke   3
Negro Art and America   Albert C. Barnes   19
The Negro in American Literature.   William Stanley Braithwaite   29
Negro Youth Speaks   Alain Locke   47

FICTION

⁠The City of Refuge   Rudolph Fisher   57
⁠Vestiges   Rudolph Fisher   75
⁠Fog.   John Matheus   85
⁠Carma, from Cane   Jean Toomer.   96
⁠Fern, from Cane   Jean Toomer.   99
⁠Spunk   Zora Neale Hurston   105
⁠Sahdji.   Bruce Nugent   113
⁠The Palm Porch   Eric Walrond   115

POETRY

⁠Poems.   Countée Cullen   129
⁠Poems.   Claude McKay   133
⁠Poems.   Jean Toomer.   136
⁠The Creation   James Weldon Johnson   138
⁠Poems.   Langston Hughes.   141
⁠The Day-Breakers   Arna Bontemps   145
⁠Poems   Georgia Johnson.   146
⁠Lady, Lady   Anne Spencer   148
⁠The Black Finger .   Angelina Grimke   148
⁠Enchantment   Lewis Alexander.   149

DRAMA:

The Drama of Negro Life Montgomery Gregory
The Gift of Laughter Jessie Fauset
Compromise (A Folk Play) Willis Richardson

MUSIC:

The Negro Spirituals Alain Locke
Negro Dancers Claude McKay
Jazz at Home J. A. Rogers
Song Gwendolyn B. Bennett
Jazzonia Langston Hughes
Nude Young Dancer Langston Hughes

THE NEGRO DIGS UP HIS PAST Arthur A. Schomburg
American Negro Folk Literature Arthur Huff Fauset
T’appin Told by Cugo Lewis
B’rer Rabbit Fools Buzzard
Heritage Countée Cullen
The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts Alain Locke

PART II: The New Negro in a New World

THE NEGRO PIONEERS Paul U. Kellogg
THE NEW FRONTAGE ON AMERICAN LIFE Charles S. Johnson

The Road Helene Johnson

THE NEW SCENE:

Harlem: the Culture Capital James Weldon Johnson
Howard: The National Negro University Kelly Miller
Hampton-Tuskegee: Missioners of the Masses Robert R. Moton
Durham: Capital of the Black Middle Class E. Franklin Frazier
Gift of the Black Tropics W. A. Domingo

THE NEGRO AND THE AMERICAN TRADITION

The Negro’s Americanism Melville J. Herskovits
The Paradox of Color Walter White
The Task of Negro Womanhood Elise Johnson McDougald

WORLDS OF COLOR:

The Negro Mind Reaches Out W. E. B. DuBois
African American Poetry: Anthologies of the 1920s There were several important anthologies of African American poetry published between 1920 and 1927; they were a key part of the development of the Harlem Renaissance movement, and helped to dramatically raise the visibility of Black authors more generally. At present, we have created digital versions of five of these anthologies, with a sixth in progress as of summer 2023.

Alongside periodicals, anthologies served as an extremely important means of recording and amplifying the cultural capital accrued by Black writers in the 1920s. The key event according to literary historians might be the publication of Alain Locke's The New Negro in 1925, widely cited as the real launching point for the Harlem Renaissance. The New Negro helped solidify the reputations of young poets like Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and helped introduce emerging writers like Zora Neale Hurston.

However, by comparing the selections in The New Negro to earlier collections, we can see how idiosyncratic and limited Locke's choices were. For one thing, he drastically underplayed the importance of poets who were women in his account of Black poetry of the 1920s: Georgia Douglas Johnson has a very limited presence. Jessie Fauset is only present in the anthology as the author of an essay; her creative contributions are absent. Anne Spencer, Angelina Grimke, and Gwendolyn Bennett each have a single poem included, but prolific and talented writers like Carrie Williams Clifford, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Effie Lee Newsome, Clara Ann Thompson, and Olivia Ward Bush-Bnaks are all entirely excluded. Locke also underplayed the tradition of race-conscious poetry by writers like Lucian B. Watkins, Leslie Pinckney Hill, James D. Corrothers, and many others. The earlier anthologies by Johnson (1922) and Kerlin (1923), both limited in their own ways, paint a more inclusive picture of the poetry of the period.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Ed. The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (1920). This anthology was marketed to "youthful" readers, and contained a mix of poetry, prose, and extracts from dramatic works. It contains a considerable amount of material by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar-Nelson herself, but also race-conscious poetry by writers like Joseph H. Cotter, Jr., Walter Everette Hawkins, and James Weldon Johnson. The preface was by Leslie Pinckney Hill. The volume was published in Illinois, and it is unclear to us how widely it was distributed.

The Upward Path: A Reader for Colored Children (1920). Edited by Myron T. Pritchard and Mary Beth Ovington, with an Introduction by Robert R. Moton of the Tuskegee Institute. This is another collection oriented towards young readers. Mary Beth Ovington was a white woman who was also a co-founder of the NAACP; in 1920, she served as Chairman of the Board of the organization. Robert R. Moton took over as the principal of the Tuskegee Institute after Booker T. Washington's death in 1915. This anthology was published in New York, and it's unclear how widely it circulated.

James Weldon Johnson, Ed. Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). A breakthrough anthology assembled by an established poet, novelist, and then secretary of the NAACP. Johnson printed a revised version of the Books of American Negro Poetry in 1931.

Robert T. Kerlin, Negro Poets and their Poems (1923). An enthusiastic anthology with critical commentary by a white academic with strong civil rights credentials. (Kerlin was fired from his academic post after criticizing the treatment of Black folks in the Elaine Massacre)

Newman I. White, Ed. An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes (1924). A largely academic anthology produced by a team of white editors. The anthology was not widely cited at the time and probably less influential than Johnson and Kerlin's projects.

Alain Locke, Ed. The New Negro: an Interpretation (1925). Far and away the most influential anthology of the period, Locke's anthology contained many miscellaneous historical and sociological essays alongside works of poetry, fiction, and drama by Black writers. Scholars have questioned the inclusion of so many white critics and patrons (such as Albert Barnes) in the anthology, and have also criticized the marginalization of women.

Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists (1926). Intended as the first issue of a journal, Fire!! immediately ran into financial difficulties and only printed a single issue. But its strong assertion of generational turnover and its emphasis on literary aesthetics made it unique.

Countee Cullen, Ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties (1927). Perhaps the most comprehensive African American poetry anthology of the 1920s, this anthology is notable for its inclusion of a large number of important women poets (in contrast to The New Negro), including Angelina Weld Grimke, Anne Spencer, Carrie Williams Clifford, Effie Lee Newsome, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helene Johnson, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Jessie Fauset.

Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea. Edited by Charles S. Johnson. Published by Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life. With poems, short stories, and one act plays by Jessie Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimke, Anne Spencer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helene Johnson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Frank Horne, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Bennett, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and others.
A Note on Historical Language: 'Negro,' 'Colored,' 'Black,' and 'African American' An explainer regarding the language policies for this site by the site editor. May 2023

The goal of this project is to honor and celebrate the writings of African American poets from an earlier historical time period -- the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As such, our goal is to use respectful language and to be cautious about language that might be deemed offensive or demeaning. Let me start by saying that -- and invite any readers with questions or concerns to contact us directly at amsp @ lehigh . edu.

That said, we also feel an obligation to faithfully reflect the language the poets and writers included on this site used to describe themselves. Several anthologies from the period use the word "Negro" in their titles, including most famously, Alain Locke's The New Negro: an Interpretation; the UNIA's official newspaper was also called Negro World... Many of our students have found the historical usage of the term "Negro" confusing, and at times have hesitated to say words like "Negro" or "colored" aloud (even in historical context), worrying they might be offensive. This explainer is designed in part to address those questions.

"Colored" vs. "Negro": Historically, there have been many terms used to describe people of African descent in North America. In the time period at issue, two words that were commonly used were "colored" and "Negro." "Negro" in particular was widely used by African-American people themselves to describe themselves, and it was considered a term of respect. Writers like W.E.B. Du Bois made a specific case for it, such as in a 1928 letter where he argued that "Negro" is "etymologically and phonetically . .. much better and more logical than 'African' or 'colored' or any of the various hyphenated circumlocutions." (cited in Smith, 1992: 497). Though Du Bois had a prominent position for many years in a civil rights organization that used the word "colored" (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), he tended to use "Negro" in almost all of his own writings (including in The Crisis, he tended to prefer the term "Negro" over "colored" (see the NAACP's "History of The Crisis"). We see this preference even as early as the title of his first book, The Philadelphia Negro (1899).

Capitalizing "Negro": Interestingly, there was a historical debate about whether the word "Negro" should be capitalized. In his article on the history of ethnonyms for the African American community, Tom W. Smith points out that the New York Times made the editorial decision to capitalize the word "Negro" starting in 1930: "In our 'style book' 'Negro' is now added to the list of words to be capitalized. It is not merely a typographical change; it is an act of recognition of racial self-respect for those who have been for generations in the 'lower case"' (cited in Smith, 1992: 499). The 1930 census was also the first to use the term "Negro" (see Cohn 2010); earlier census terms had used single-letter designations ("W" for "white," "B" for "Black," and "M" for "mulatto").

From "Negro" to "Black": Starting in the 1960s, civil rights activitsts such as Stokely Carmichael made a push to shift away from "Negro" and towards "Black" as a more powerful ethnonym, one that intentionally engaged the history of racist devaluation of Black life and intended to reverse it. Carmichael first articulated the case for this in his "Black Power" speech at UC-Berkeley in 1966:
If we had said “Negro power” nobody would get scared. Everybody would support it. If we said power for colored people, everybody’d be for that, but it is the word “black” that bothers people in this country, and that’s their problem, not mine. That’s the lie that says anything black is bad. (Stokely Carmichael, 1966)
The movement was largely persuasive; the scholar Zenobia Bell has shown that African American magazines like Ebony and Jet started consistently using the term "Black" by 1969, and the term was soon preferred by the younger generation. (That said, when Gallup polled African Americans about their preferred racial identifier in 1969, "Negro" was still the most commonly preferred term.) The U.S. Census also followed suite, and by 1970, the choices for racial self-identification in the Census were phrased as "Negro or Black." (see Cohn, 2010)

Later, activists such as Jesse Jackson suggested replacing "Black" with "African American," and that too became a broadly-used term starting in the late 1980s (and a term that continues to be widely used today by many news organizations and institutional entities as a neutral, 'objective' term). However, in recent years many writers, theorists, and activists have again made the case that a term like "Black" is more meaningful to them than the more sociological sounding "African American."

Our policy on the use of the 'N-Word': Some Black writers from this time period used the N-word in their writing, sometimes quoting speech (in the Zora Neale Hurston story "Sweat," for instance it is used both with the '-r' and '-ah' endings. There is also a poem by Frank Horne that uses that word as its title. (And there was a substantial controvery in 1925-6 over a novel by a white writer, Carl Van Vechten, which used the N-word in its title. The editor of the anthology Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, Wallace Thurman, made it a point to respond to that debate in the preface to that anthology in 1926.)

To minimize the chance of offense, we are generally going to represent the N-word in abbreviated form on this site. If any readers have any questions, concerns, or suggestions on this front, I would encourage you to contact us at the email address given above.

On the use of the term "mulatto": The word "mulatto" was widely used to describe mixed race people (of any gender) throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Indeed, the 1890 census even used the terms "quadroon" and "octoroon." This term too would fall out of fashion by the 1960s, and today the respectful term might be "mixed race," "biracial," or "multiracial." That said, for reasons grounded in the history of the "one-drop rule," many mixed race people with African ancestry tend to strongly affirm that they are also Black.

Further Reading:

Zenobia Bell, "African-American Nomenclature: The Label Identity Shift from "Negro" to "Black" in the 1960s." UCLA MA Thesis, 2013. Accessible here.

Stokely Carmichael, "Black Power" (Speech given at UC-Berkeley). 1969. Accessible here.

D'Vera Cohn, "Race and the Census: the 'Negro Controversy" Pew Research, 2010. Accessible here.

Lydia Saad, "Black Americans' Preferred Racial Label." Gallup Vault. July 13, 2020. Accessible here.

Tom W. Smith, Changing Racial Labels: From "Colored" to "Negro" to "Black" to "African American" The Public Opinion Quarterly , Winter, 1992, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 496-514.