Alain Locke

"For generations the Negro has been the peasant matrix of that section of America which has most undervalued him, and here he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well.... In less than half a generation it will be easier to recognize this, but the fact remains that a leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance has gone into the making of the South from a humble, unacknowledged source."

Alain Locke was born September 13, 1886 in Philadelphia. His grandfather, Ishmael Locke, had studied at Cambridge and established schools in Liberia before becoming the headmaster of a school in Providence, Rhode Island. He attended Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude with degrees in History and philosophy in three years as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and became the first African American Rhodes Scholar, studying at Hertford College of Oxford University. He then attended the University of Berlin and the College de France.

In 1912 Locke began teaching English at Howard University, where W.E.B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson were also on the faculty. In 1917 he returned to Harvard, earning a doctorate in philosophy. His dissertation was on the premise that prejudices are not objectively true or false, and therefore are not universal. This was the beginning of his theory of "cultural pluralism", the view that the uniqueness of different styles and values within a culture are to be maintained and appreciated.

Locke returned to Howard as a full professor of philosophy but his desire for a curriculum including African American studies led to conflicts with the university president and all-white board of directors, and he was dismissed in 1925. Protests by students, alumni and the African American press led to his reinstatement but he did not return until three years later when an African American, Mordecai Johnson, was named president.

During this three-year period Locke firmly established his reputation as the leading authority on African American culture with the publication of The New Negro, an anthology of poems and prose, linked together by his essays about the increased race-consciousness, self-determination and sophistication of young, urban African Americans. He brought the Harlem Renaissance to the attention of white America, and mentored writers such  as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Throughout his lifetime he published over 300 books and articles, including an annual list of books relevant to African American culture.

Locke was never able to promote African American studies at Howard, but he was successful in creating a department of social sciences in 1935 and a Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1953. He died in New York City on June 9, 1954 at the age of 67. He was a member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity.

Joel Augustus Rogers

"Ethiopians, that is, Negroes, gave the world the first idea of right and wrong and thus laid the basis of religion and all true culture and civilization."

Historian and journalist Joel Augustus Rogers was born September 6, 1883 in Negril, Jamaica and emigrated to the United States in 1906 after having served in the British Army. He settled in Harlem and became part of the Harlem Renaissance, befriending such intellectuals as Hubert Harrison.

Self-taught in sociology, anthopology and history, Rogers used the social sciences to refute the pervasive racism of the era. His first book, From "Superman" to Man, takes the form of a series of dialogues between a Pullman porter and a Southern politician. It addresses themes such as innate intelligence, intermarriage and world contributions that are expanded in his later works.

Rogers was a reporter for several African American publications including the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Enterprise. He knew Marcus Garvey from Jamaica and covered Garvey's 1923 trial. He also reported on the coronation of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie in 1930 for the Amsterdam News and later that decade covered the invasion of that country by Italian forces, becoming the first African American war correspondent. In 1934 Rogers began a feature series similar in format to Ripley's Believe it or Not entitled Your History to present information from his research. It ran in African American periodicals until 1971 under several titles, including Facts about the Negro. Excerpts were published in the book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro. 

Rogers wrote histories of the Ku Klux Klan, Ethiopia, and the Caribbean, and learned French, German, Italian and Spanish in order to conduct research through Europe, writing about the African ancestry of such Europeans as Alexander Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas in World's Great Men of Color (1946). He presented the African contribution in the United States in Africa's Gift to America: The Afro-American in the Making and Saving of the United States (1959). He wrote a total of 16 books, mostly self-published.

Rogers died March 26, 1966 in New York City at the age of 85. Because of his lack of academic credentials he is not well known as a historian but was highly regarded by professionals in the field and other African American intellectuals.

"No man living has revealed so many important facts about the Negro race as has Rogers." ~ W. E. B. DuBois 

 "[Rogers] looked at the history of people of African origin, and showed how their history is an inseparable part of the history of mankind." ~ John Henrik Clarke

Romare Bearden

"What I saw was black life, presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which, made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and exalted its presence… It defined not only the character of black American life, but also its conscience." ~ August Wilson on Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden was born on September 2, 1911 in Charlotte, North Carolina, and his family moved to Harlem three years later. His mother was New York editor for the Chicago Defender, a position which introduced her to leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Bearden spent summers in North Carolina and graduated from Peabody High School in Pittsburgh while living with his grandparents.

He then attended New York University, graduating in 1935 with a degree in education. He began his art career during college with cartoons published in the campus magazine and national publications such as Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post. After graduation he studied at the art Students League under George Grosz, primarily painting scenes of the American south. He also began working for the New York City Department of Social Services as a caseworker for the gypsy population, a position he held until 1969.

Morning

After serving in Europe with the U. S. Army during World War II, Bearden returned to Europe to study at the Sorbonne in Paris where his work was strongly influenced by Picasso and Matisse. Critic Hilton Kramer referred to his style as "patchwork cubism". It also encompasses global artforms such as Mexican murals, African masks and textures, Japanese prints and Chinese landscapes, while emphasizing social realism and Bearden's personal experience.

Although working in a variety of mediums he is best know for his collages, one of which was on the cover of Time in 1968, and Encyclopedia Britannica refers to him as "the preeminent collagist in the U.S." Many of his public murals are based on his collages, such as the 10' by 16' Berkeley - The City and Its People in the Berkeley, California, City Hall, and Pittsburgh Recollections at the Gateway subway station in Pittsburgh, which is valued at $15 million. Bearden also did book illustrations and set designs for the Alvin Ailey Dance Company in Harlem. He wrote three books on African American art, and published numerous essays and reviews. In the early 1950's he was a songwriter, with his Sea Breeze being recorded by Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie. In 2003 Branford Marsalis recorded a CD of his songs. There is much musical imagery in Bearden's work, and his Harlem studio was above the Apollo Theater.

Bearden died in New York City on March 12, 1988 at the age of 76. The Romare Bearden Foundation was established two years later to preserve his legacy and to support young artists.

"I think the artist has to be something like a whale, swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs. When he finds that, he can start to make limitations. And then he really begins to grow." ~ Romare Bearden

Frank Horne

Kid Stuff

                                                                The wise guys

                                                                tell me

                                                                that Christmas

                                                                is Kid Stuff...

                                                                Maybe they've got

                                                                something there --

                                                                Two thousand years ago

                                                                three wise guys

                                                                chased a star

                                                                across a continent

                                                                to bring

                                                                frankincense and myrrh

                                                                to a Kid

                                                                born in a manger

                                                                with an idea in his head...

                                                                And as the bombs

                                                                crash

                                                                all over the world

                                                                today

                                                                the real wise guys

                                                                know

                                                                that we've all

                                                                got to go chasing stars

                                                                again

                                                                in the hope

                                                                that we can get back

                                                                some of that

                                                                Kid Stuff

                                                                born two thousand years ago.

Frank Horne was born August 18, 1899 in Brooklyn, New York. He began writing poetry while attending the City College of New York, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1921. He then attended the Northern Illinois College of Ophthamology, and practiced as an optometrist in Chicago and Harlem. 

Horne was part of the Harlem Renaissance, writing for the NAACP's Crisis and the National Urban League's Opportunity magazines. He won second place in Crisis's 1925 poetry contest with Letters Found Near a Suicide, a collection of 11 poems. He was primarily a reviewer for Opportunity, winning a top prize in 1924 for a critique including this advice to African American writers:

"Your task is definite, grand, and fine. You are to sing the attributes of a soul. Be superbly conscious of the many tributaries to our pulsing stream of life. You must articulate what the hidden sting of the slaver's lash leaves reverberating in its train -- the subtle hates, the burnt desires, sudden hopes, and dark despairs.... Sing, O black poets, for song is all we have!"

In 1926 Horne left New York to take a position on the faculty of Fort Valley High and Industrial School (now Fort Valley State University.) His essay I Am Initiated into the Negro Race describes his move to the south, saying ""From now on, I am the Enterer of Side Doors, and Back Doors, and sometimes No Door At All." Over the next decade he served as instructor, track coach, dean and acting president. He earned a master's degree from USC in 1932, researching the state of vocational education. Portions of his thesis were published in Opportunity containing the conclusion that

"As factors in training Negro youth to earn a livelihood in industrial America of today, the industrial schools of the South, except in a few rare instances, could practically all be scrapped without appreciable loss to any one....We are fiddling with 'man-and-plow' agriculture in the face of the gang-plow and the tractor; our home economics girls are in bodily danger in a modern kitchen; the language of collective bargaining, company unions and cooperatives is so much Greek to the ears of our industrial students."

Mary McLeod Bethune recruited Horne on 1936 to become her assistant at the National Youth Administration. He later served in the Federal Housing Authority, succeeding Robert Wagner as Director of the Office of Race Relations, responsible for addressing issues of equality in public housing. After Wagner became Mayor of New York City, Horne became director of the city's Commission on Intergroup Relations and served as a consultant to the NYC Housing Redevelopment Board.

Horne continued to write poetry throughout his life, bridging the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Power Era with work such as He Won't Say Put ("and mighty Martin Luther King / he ain't go no Santy this year"). He died on September 7, 1974 at the age of 75. He was the uncle of singer Lena Horne, who lived with his family in Georgia for several years.

Letters Found Near a Suicide

from The Crisis (November 1925)

by Frank Horne

To All of You

My little stone
Sinks quickly
Into the bosom of this deep, dark pool
Of oblivion . . .
I have troubled its breast but little.
Yet those far shores
That knew me not
Will feel the fleeting, furtive kiss
Of my tiny concentric ripples . . . . .
* * *

To Lewellyn

You have borne full well
The burden of my friendship–
I have drunk deep
At your crystal pool,
And in return
I have polluted its waters
With the bile of my hatred,
I have flooded your soul
With tortuous thoughts,
I have played Iscariot
To your Pythias . . . . .
* * *

To the Poets:

Why do poets
Like to die
And sing raptures to the grave?

They seem to think
That bitter dirt
Turns sweet between the teeth.

I have lived
And yelled hozannas
At the climbing stars

I have lived
And drunk deep
The deceptive wine of life. . . .

And now, tipsy and reeling
From its dregs
I die . . .

Oh, let the poets sing
Raptures to the grave.

Arabesque

from Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea (1927)

by Frank Horne

Down in Georgia
a danglin’ nigger
hangin’ in a tree
. . . kicks holes in the laughing sunlight–
A little red haired
Irish girl . . . grey eyes
and a blue dress–
A little black babe
in a lacy white cap . . .
The soft red lips of the little red head kiss so tenderly
the little black head–
grey eyes smile
into black eyes
and the gay sunlight
laughs joyously
in a bust of gold . . . 
Down in Georgia
a danglin’ nigger
hangin’ in a tree
. . . kicks holes in the laughing sunlight–”

Charles S. Johnson

"There is no domestic problem in America which has given thoughtful men more concern than the problem of the relations between the white and the Negro races." ~ The Negro in Chicago, 1922

The leading African American sociologist of his generation, Charles Spurgeon Johnson was born on July 24, 1893 in Bristol Virginia. He earned a bachelor's degree from Virginia Union University in Richmond and a doctorate from the University of Chicago where he studied under Robert E. Park. His studies were interrupted by World War I. He served in France in the 103rd Pioneer Infantry Division and achieved the rank of sergeant major.

In the aftermath of the 1919 riots he served on the Chicago Commission on Race Relations and co-authored the commission's report, published as the 700-page book The Negro in Chicago. Although critics felt the report did not place adequate responsibility for the riot on the white Jim Crow-era culture of the day, it has prevailed as the classic model of race relations reports.

From 1922 to 1928 Johnson was research director for the National Urban League in New York. During this time he founded and edited the league's Opportunity magazine, at the time a major voice of the Harlem Renaissance. He also edited the anthology Ebony and Topaz, containing the works of the premier poets, essayists and social scientists of the times.

Wanting to return to the South and to academic life, in 1928 he became chairman of the sociology department of Fisk University in Nashville and in 1946 he became Fisk's first African American president. He established the Fisk Institute of Race Relations, the first "think tank" at a historically black university, and published several books on the culture of the South with the most notable being Shadow of the Plantation (1934) and Growing Up in the Black Belt  (1940). He was able to attract faculty members such as Arna Bontemps, James Weldon Johnson, and Aaron Douglas.

In 1930 Johnson was part of a three-man League of Nations team investigating labor practices in Liberia. He later served as a consultant to President Hoover's Conference on Negro Housing and under President Roosevelt served on the TVA and consulted with the Department of Agriculture on farm tenancy. After World War II he was part of a UNESCO delegation sent to Japan to make recommendations about the country's educational system.

Johnson was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He died in Nashville on October 27, 1956 at the age of 63.

Gwendolyn Bennett

"Texans feel they have a claim on her and that the beautiful and poignant lyrics she writes resulted partially from the impression of her early Texas surroundings. ~ J Mason Brewer, folklorist

To a Dark Girl

I love you for your brownness,
And the rounded darkness of your breast,
I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice
And shadows where your wayward eyelids rest.
Something of old forgotten queens
Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk
And something of the shackled slave
Sobs in the rhythm of your talk.
Oh, little brown girl, born for sorrow's mate,
Keep all you have of queenliness,
Forgetting that you once were slave,
And let your full lips laugh at Fate!

Gwendolyn Bennett was born July 8, 1902 in Giddings, Texas between Austin and Houston. She spent her childhood on the Paiute Indian Reservation in Nevada where her parents taught for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in Washington DC, and in New York City. She graduated from both Columbia University and the Pratt Institute in 1924 and for one year taught design and crafts at Howard University. She attended the Academie Julian and Ecole du Pantheon in Paris.

The Pipes of Pan
by Gwendolyn Bennett

Bennett's first published work was in the NAACP's Crisis Magazine in November 1923. She later designed covers for the magazine. Her work also appeared in Opportunity, the magazine of the National Urban League, and she became its assistant editor in 1926. There, she wrote a column entitled "The Ebony Flute" showcasing artists of the Harlem Renaissance, and co-founded the literary journal Fire, where her best-known short story "Wedding Day" was published. She also started a support group for young writers such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston. 

She married in 1927 and moved to Florida but returned to New York when she was widowed in 1936. She led the Harlem Community Art Center and was on the board of the Negro Playwrights Guild. She also helped develop the George Washington Carver Community School and worked for the Consumers Union during the later years of her life. She died in Pennsylvania on June 30, 1981.