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• 1 media/women of the early harlem renaissance splash.png 2017-06-23T15:11:29-04:00 Introduction -- About this Site 20 Introduction to "Women of the Early Harlem Renaissance" image_header 2022-11-29T13:56:35-05:00

  In This Collection...
  Georgia Douglas Johnson, "Bronze" (1922)
  Carrie Williams Clifford, "Race Rhymes" (1911)
  Carrie Williams Clifford, The Widening Light (1922)
  Clara Ann Thompson, Songs From the Wayside (1908)
  Georgia Douglas Johnson, "The Heart of a Woman" (1918)

  This site aims to collect poetry, drama, and fiction by African American women between 1900 and 1922.
  
  I envision the project as aligning with what Kim Gallon has referred to as a “technology of recovery” that is one of the core principles bridging African American literary studies and the digital humanities. The aim is to use Scalar’s visualization and tagging structures to explore stylistic, thematic, and social relationships among a small group of writers, as well as to explore the conversations these writers were having with established writers and editors like W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, and William Stanley Braithwaite. As of this writing, the project is in a relatively early stage of development, with four books of poetry available as digital editions. 
  
  [Update from 2022: please see our sister project, African American Poetry: a Digital Anthology, for additional poets and texts not originally included here.]
  
  On the need for this archive
  
  The existing digital archive infrastructure for women writers from the Harlem Renaissance is minimal at best. Works by writers like Georgia Douglas Johnson, Carrie Williams Clifford, Clara Ann Thompson, or Carrie Law Morgan Figgs can be accessed online via repositories like Archive.org and Hathi Trust, but these collections are of limited utility to readers. They tend to present their collections as PDF page images that lack useful metadata (i.e., semantic tags, publication information, historical annotations, or glossaries) or contextual or biographical information that might help a user know what she might be looking at. Sites that provide more useful introductions to these writers, like the Poetry Foundation or Poets.org, tend to only offer very limited selections from these poets’ works. Often the selections reflect critical consensus -- these are poems that have already been widely anthologized. Finally, since many of Harlem Renaissance poets published their works in The Crisis, a limited number of poems by these writers can be accessed via the digital page images of The Crisis that are available at the Modernist Journals Project, but searchability is limited, and again, there is little by way of biographical or contextual information to help a novice reader navigate the wealth of material available. Researchers aiming to dig deeper as well as teachers and students aiming for different thematic areas or particular historical topics (i.e., lynching incidents), could benefit from access to an archive designed to present these writers collections of poetry in full text format. Admittedly, a major limitation is American copyright law; currently, most full-text digital archives limit themselves to materials published before 1922. This is deeply limiting when arguably the most influential women writers of the Harlem Renaissance -- Gwendolen Bennett, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen -- only started to publish their work after that date.
   
  We are very interested in exploring the thematic relationships that existed within this body of work. One way this site will do that is through semantic tags. As we enter each new poem into the site, we are tagging it with a range of terms, such as "slavery," "motherhood," "racism," "Christianity," etc.  
  
  But we are also interested in patterns and relationships between and among the writers features here, as well as their relationships to established figures such as Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, and William Stanley Braithwaite. We will also be exploring social networks between and among these writers (after Clifford left Ohio, for instance, she moved to Washington DC, where she came to know figures such as Mary Church Terrell, Alain Locke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois). Washington DC and Ohio seem to be particularly important sites for the development of this early 20th century African American writing, and as the site evolves we intend to add geo-tags that will enable us to map the evolution of this body of work. 
  
  Accessibility/ Exportability
  
  Plain text versions of all poems on this site may be accessed from the following Google Drive folder:
  
  https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1ucvCcPLUF_ka4ciPsgjN75VXFk2fJj9A
  
  This accessible version might be useful to readers in environments with limited access to the internet -- it comports with the ideals of low-bandwidth, minimal computing. It might also be easier to navigate for readers who have vision impairments or who prefer documents that are simpler to navigate than a Scalar project. 
  
  Finally, the accessible document allows the texts from the site to be exportable for those users interested in quantitative analysis. Repurposing of these texts for quantitative analysis is encouraged under the framework of a Creative Commons-Attribution license. 
  
  
  Further Reading on this site:

  Origin of this project
  Harlem Renaissance: Periodization and Definition (Amardeep Singh)
  Texts, Themes, Visualizations (Amardeep Singh)
  Bibliography
  
  Some texts to be featured on this site might include the following: 
  
  Georgia Douglas Johnson
  • Bronze (1922)
  • The Heart of a Woman (1918) 
  • "Omnipresence" (poem published in Voice of the Negro, 1905)
  • "A Sonnet in Memory of John Brown" (poem published in The Crisis, August 1922)
  • "Potency" (poem published in The Crisis, 1919)
  
  Carrie Williams Clifford
  • Race Rhymes (1911) (poems)
  • The Widening Light (1922)  (poems)
  • "Cleveland and its Colored People." The Colored American Magazine 8-9 (1908): 365-80.
  • "Love's Way (A Christmas Story)." Alexander's Magazine 1, no. 9 (January 1906): 55-58.
  • "Votes for Children," Crisis 10, no. 4 (August 1915): 185.
  
  Pauline Smith, Exceeding Riches and Other Verse (1922). 
  
  Clara Ann Thompson, Songs from the Wayside (1908)
  
  Angelina Grimke, Rachel
  
  Mazie Earhart Clark, Life's Pathway: Little Lyrics of Love, Loyalty and Devotion (1917). 
  
  Carrie Law Morgan Figgs
  • Nuggets of Gold (1921)
  • Poetic Pearls (1920)
  
  Jessie Redmon Fauset 
  
  Poems 
  • "Rondeau." The Crisis. April 1912: 252.
  • "La Vie C'est La Vie." The Crisis. July 1922: 124.
  Short stories
  • "Emmy." The Crisis. December 1912: 79-87; January 1913: 134-142.
  • "My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein." The Crisis. July 1914: 143-145.
  • "Mary Elizabeth." The Crisis, December 1919
  Essays
  • "Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress." The Crisis. November 1921: 12-18.
  • "What Europe Thought of the Pan-African Congress." The Crisis. December 1921: 60-69.
  • Review of Georgia Douglas Johnson's The Heart of a Woman . Journal of Negro History, October 1919. 
  
  Anne Spencer
  • "Dunbar" (poem published in The Crisis, November 1920)
  • "Feast at Shushan" (poem published in The Crisis, February 1920)
• 1 2017-06-22T14:12:47-04:00 "Race Rhymes" by Carrie Williams Clifford (1911) 18 Digital Edition of Carrie Williams Clifford's "Race Rhymes" (1911) plain 2018-11-07T10:01:05-05:00 01/01/1911 39.3418251,-83.0346484 38.8935755,-77.0846156
  
  This digital edition was edited and proofread by Amardeep Singh and Joanna Grim. 

  Carrie Williams Clifford was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1862, making her a generation older than many of her peers (most writers active in the Harlem Renaissance were born after 1880). For the first half of her adult life, she did not publish poetry. 
  
  Clifford was born into a middle-class family; her mother was a successful businesswoman. Clifford lived in Cleveland for some years, before marrying William H. Clifford, an Ohio state legislator. Clifford was active in Cleveland with the National Association of Colored Women, and played a leadership role in that and other organizations focused on African American women's issues. Clifford was also an editor of the Cleveland Journal, an African American-oriented newspaper. In 1910, the couple moved to Washington, DC, where the Cliffords hosted gatherings with many prominent African-American activists, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Mary Church Terrell. 
  
  
  Among the collections of poetry we have been reading while developing this archive, there is no doubt that Clifford's Race Rhymes (1911) is among the most forthright in its commitment to activism and racial justice. While Georgia Douglas Johnson and others aspired towards a certain level of polish -- perhaps influenced by critics like William Stanley Braithwaite -- here Clifford is first and foremost interested in producing verses that speak to the social issues of her day. In her preface to this collection, Clifford says as much: "In giving to the world this brochure, the author makes no claim to unusual poetic excellence or literary brilliance." This disavowal is arguable, though what is not arguable is how powerful Clifford's voice is in this work as well as her subsequent collection, The Widening Light. 
  
  In her introduction to a recent edition of Clifford's poetry, P. Jane Splawn wrote of Clifford: 

  In her poetry and in her life, Clifford did indeed speak with a determination and resolve that would not be quenched by America's accomodationist desires for its black constituency. Clifford was unwavering in reminding America of African Americans' contributions of both their blood and labor for the progress of this country and in warning the 'boastful, white American[s]' who, as she saw it, must one day account to an avenging God for the offenses committed against blacks and other people of color. (Splawn, xvii-xviii)

  
  To this reader, the poems that deal with concrete historical themes are among the most memorable, especially, "Lines to Garrison," "Foraker and the Twenty-Fifth," and "Atlanta's Shame." The first of those three poems narrates, in celebratory fashion, the life of famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. "Foraker and the Twenty-Fifth" is an account of Joseph B. Foraker's contentious political quarrel with President Teddy Roosevelt over a historical event known as the "Brownsville Affair," where an entire battalion of African-American troops was dishonorably discharged by the President for dubious reasons. Finally, "Atlanta's Shame" is a response to the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906, which which left as many as 100 African-American men dead following questionable claims of sexual assault on white women. 
  
  --Amardeep Singh, Lehigh University
  
  
  Works Cited: 
  
  P. Jane Slawn, "Introduction." Writings of Carrie Williams Clifford and Carrie Law Morgan Figgs. New York: G.G. Hall & Co., 1996.

• 1 media/women of the early harlem renaissance splash.png 2017-06-06T10:19:45-04:00 Women of the Early Harlem Renaissance (1900-1922) 15 An Archive of Work by African American Women Writers. Edited by Amardeep Singh, Lehigh University book_splash 2017-06-23T15:12:42-04:00 Proposal: a site collecting poetry, drama, and fiction by African American women between 1900 and 1922.
  
  As is well-known, the peak years of the Harlem Renaissance are 1922-1930, but much of the writing from that period remains in copyright, and not accessible for digital archives without acquiring permissions. Writing from this earlier period is still quite important -- many of the themes one finds in the writing of famous figures like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston are being developed by a diverse group of writers in several different sites. Importantly, most of the writers featured on this archive were not actually geographically located in Harlem. Writers like Clara Ann Thompson and Carrie Williams Clifford were from Ohio (Cincinnati and Cleveland, respectively); Georgia Douglas Johnson lived in Washington, DC. 
  
  One of the goals of this site is simply to make some of that material accessible in a readable and teachable format, with scholarly annotations and editorial commentary to give readers a guide. 
  
  But we are also interested in patterns and relationships between and among the writers features here, as well as their relationships to established figures such as Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, and William Stanley Braithwaite. To explore those relationships we will be working with semantic tags -- labeling poems and other works as we digitize them, which will make it possible to visualize them using Scalar's visualization tools. We will also be exploring social networks between and among these writers (after Clifford left Ohio, for instance, she moved to Washington DC, where she came to know figures such as Mary Church Terrell, Alain Locke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois). Washington DC (Alain Locke taught at Howard University) and Ohio seem to be particularly important sites for the development of this early 20th century African American writing. 
  
  Another theme we are interested in is charting the emergence of race-consciousness in this body of work. Writers like Carrie  Williams Clifford demonstrate a high degree of politicization from an early point, while Georgia Douglas Johnson's early poetry (The Heart of a Woman) downplays and masks racial themes in favor of a more abstract and apolitical romanticism (perhaps under the influence of William Stanley Braithwaite, a writer she cited explicilty). In her Introduction to her 1997 volume of Johnson's works (part of the excellent "African-American Women Writers 1910-1940" series edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), Claudia Tate reflects on the apolitical nature of Johnson's early poetry as a reflection of her generation: 

  From the perspective of present-day readers, Johnson is not usually regarded as a 'New Negro' but rather as a member of what Robert Bone has labeled 'the rear guard,' For Bone and us as well, the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance is generally characterized by the works of the younger generation of black writers, 'the young Turks,' who were mostly male--principally Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman. This is not surprising inasmuch as they were the most productive members of this younger generation who would overshadow the writers of Johnson's generation. The young Turks were also destined to become the dominant canonical figures, because their black nationalist values were resurgent during the 1960s and early 1970s, when scholars of African-American culture rewrote the literary history of the New Negro Renaissance (Tate, xxi).

  Here Tate's comments about the link between gender, thematics, and canonicity seem especially salient as a reason to conduct this research into a group of writers who were written out of the male-dominated canon that began to materialize in the late 1960s. 
  
  
  Some texts to be featured on this site might include the following: 
  
  Georgia Douglas Johnson,
  • Bronze (1922)
  • The Heart of a Woman (1918) 
  
  Carrie Williams Clifford, 
  • Race Rhymes (1911) (poems)
  • The Widening Light (1922)  (poems)
  • "Cleveland and its Colored People." The Colored American Magazine 8-9 (1908): 365-80.
  • "Love's Way (A Christmas Story)." Alexander's Magazine 1, no. 9 (January 1906): 55-58.
  • "Votes for Children," Crisis 10, no. 4 (August 1915): 185.
  
  Pauline Smith, Exceeding Riches and Other Verse (1922). 
  
  Clara Ann Thompson, Songs from the Wayside (1908)
  
  Angelina Grimke, Rachel
  
  Mazie Earhart Clark, Life's Pathway: Little Lyrics of Love, Loyalty and Devotion (1917). 
  
  Carrie Law Morgan Figgs
  • Nuggets of Gold (1921)
  • Poetic Pearls (1920)
  
  Jessie Redmon Fauset 
  
  Poems 
  • "Rondeau." The Crisis. April 1912: 252.
  • "La Vie C'est La Vie." The Crisis. July 1922: 124.
  Short stories
  • "Emmy." The Crisis. December 1912: 79-87; January 1913: 134-142.
  • "My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein." The Crisis. July 1914: 143-145.
  Essays
  • "Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress." The Crisis. November 1921: 12-18.
  • "What Europe Thought of the Pan-African Congress." The Crisis. December 1921: 60-69.
  • Review of Georgia Douglas Johnson's The Heart of a Woman . Journal of Negro History, October 1919. 
• 1 2018-11-06T14:00:29-05:00 Carrie Williams Clifford 2 Author Page plain 2018-11-07T11:14:43-05:00 01/01/1862

  Carrie Williams Clifford was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1862, making her a generation older than many of her peers (most writers active in the Harlem Renaissance were born after 1880). For the first half of her adult life, she did not publish poetry. 
  
  Clifford was born into a middle-class family; her mother was a successful businesswoman. Clifford lived in Cleveland for some years, before marrying William H. Clifford, an Ohio state legislator. Clifford was active in Cleveland with the National Association of Colored Women, and played a leadership role in that and other organizations focused on African American women's issues. Clifford was also an editor of the Cleveland Journal, an African American-oriented newspaper. In 1910, the couple moved to Washington, DC, where the Cliffords hosted gatherings with many prominent African-American activists, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Mary Church Terrell. 
  
  In 1900, Clifford was involved in the publication of a collection of papers called Sowing for Others to Reap. This was a publication of essays and poems connected with the Ohio state branch of the National Association of Colored Women; at the time Clifford was the president of that organization. The poets whose works are contained in this special issue, people like Minnie Moore Waters, are virtually unknown to present-day critics. (See Minnie Moore Waters' poem "The Overcomers")
  
  Among the collections of poetry we have been reading while developing this archive, there is no doubt that Clifford's Race Rhymes (1911) is among the most forthright in its commitment to activism and racial justice. While Georgia Douglas Johnson and others aspired towards a certain level of polish -- perhaps influenced by critics like William Stanley Braithwaite -- here Clifford is first and foremost interested in producing verses that speak to the social issues of her day. In her preface to this collection, Clifford says as much: "In giving to the world this brochure, the author makes no claim to unusual poetic excellence or literary brilliance." This disavowal is arguable, though what is not arguable is how powerful Clifford's voice is in this work as well as her subsequent collection, The Widening Light. 
  
  In her introduction to a recent edition of Clifford's poetry, P. Jane Splawn wrote of Clifford: 

  In her poetry and in her life, Clifford did indeed speak with a determination and resolve that would not be quenched by America's accomodationist desires for its black constituency. Clifford was unwavering in reminding America of African Americans' contributions of both their blood and labor for the progress of this country and in warning the 'boastful, white American[s]' who, as she saw it, must one day account to an avenging God for the offenses committed against blacks and other people of color. (Splawn, xvii-xviii)

  
  To this reader, the poems that deal with concrete historical themes are among the most memorable, especially, "Lines to Garrison," "Foraker and the Twenty-Fifth," and "Atlanta's Shame." The first of those three poems narrates, in celebratory fashion, the life of famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. "Foraker and the Twenty-Fifth" is an account of Joseph B. Foraker's contentious political quarrel with President Teddy Roosevelt over a historical event known as the "Brownsville Affair," where an entire battalion of African-American troops was dishonorably discharged by the President for dubious reasons. Finally, "Atlanta's Shame" is a response to the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906, which which left as many as 100 African-American men dead following questionable claims of sexual assault on white women. 
  
  Works by Carrie Williams Clifford on this site:
  Race Rhymes (1911)
  The Widening Light  (1922)
  
  
  --Amardeep Singh, Lehigh University