THE EMERGENCE OF “THE HARLEM SCHOOL”

“Harlem Renaissance” was neither a term nor a concept used by those who lived and wrote during the years it is now said to describe. Some came close to coining such an honorific. The Howard University philosopher Alain Locke referred to the neighborhood as “the sign and center of the renaissance of a people” in the much-read issue of the Survey Graphic that he edited in March 1925. Still, as his biographers have noted, “the preferred name for it, as far as Locke was concerned, was the New Negro Movement.”Footnote ¹² Locke's preference was shared by many of his contemporaries, whose methods of interpreting artistic and cultural events were rooted in nineteenth-century notions of aesthetic traditions, as their persistent references to movements and schools testified. All of which meant that the only Harlem Renaissance discussed in the early twentieth century was one of the neighborhood's most celebrated nightspots—Harlem's Renaissance theater and ballroom at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 137th Street.

The Renaissance theater was one of the few cultural institutions in Harlem that permitted blacks entry, unlike many of the other “cabarets and restaurants that [barred] black folk,” and which the writer Eric Walrond called attention to in his essay “The Black City” (1924). Walrond's essay, like that of Wallace Thurman's three years later, contrasted Harlem “North of 125th Street” with other black cities like Atlanta and Chicago, describing it as a “city of paradoxes,” not one of revival.Footnote ¹³ Only in the work of the book reviewer John Chamberlain, and the influential literary critic Carl Van Doren, was cultural production directly coupled to the creation of Harlem as an African American neighborhood. “The historian of th[is] episode will trace its roots to Harlem,” Van Doren boldly insisted in 1926.Footnote ¹⁴ “[T]he renascence . . . went hand in glove with the development of Harlem,” Chamberlain added retrospectively, declaring the literary “movement” to be “coeval with the growth of Harlem.”Footnote ¹⁵ “The pullulation of energy that built a Negro town of Harlem has flowed into the novel, into poetry, into the short story,” he continued, pointing out the social freedom and creative inspiration the neighborhood had provided black artists. These were some of the clearest signs that among a small group of influential, predominantly white, commentators the idea of Harlem as a place of and influence on black cultural achievement was conceptually contemporaneous with the developments they were describing.Footnote ¹⁶

The closest that black writers and critics came to Van Doren and Chamberlain's associations of Harlem with cultural production was in their gradual recognition of a “Harlem school” of writing, or, as Richard Wright would describe it in 1937, “the so-called Harlem school of expression.”Footnote ¹⁷ This was a style of interpretation that grouped artists together on the basis of aesthetic values and traditions, not temporal ones. Writing around the same time as Wright's dismissive essay was published, the literary critic Benjamin Brawley called attention to a “new school” of writers that came about in the aftermath of the First World War when “as never before attention was directed to Negro life and Negro themes.” Writing in his work The Negro Genius (1937), Brawley believed that the likes of Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay constituted an artistic group—“the new realists”—because their work shared certain common features, notably a “sharp staccato” prose, a “fondness for the vagabond or roustabout,” and a “strong emphasis on the racial idea.”Footnote ¹⁸ While an impressionistic essay by the African American novelist Charles Chesnutt, written a few years earlier, seemed to diverge from this trend with its title, “Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem,” and to imply that the neighborhood enjoyed some currency as a shorthand for describing black cultural achievement, the title was in fact only an allusion to Chesnutt's belief that Harlem had potential as “a new field for literary exploration.”Footnote ¹⁹ No one in these years referred to a “Harlem Renaissance,” nor even possessed such a concept, because such ways of thinking were incongruent with a discourse conducted around aesthetic traditions, genres, and schools.Footnote ²⁰

In fact it is the alternative ways in which contemporaries gathered up the pieces that stand out most clearly. When a reviewer for the New York Times read Claude McKay's memoir, A Long Way from Home, in 1937, he insisted on its importance, “even in these post-Van Vechten days,” taking the name of the white writer and socialite, Carl Van Vechten, as a shorthand for recalling a cultural moment.Footnote ²¹ Evolutionary metaphors figured even more prominently in what commentators said when pressed to explain the achievements of their contemporaries. The activist Walter White sketched the contours of contemporary African American literature for John Macy's landmark anthology, American Writers on American Literature (1931), and said only that “Negro literature has begun to come into its own only during the last decade.”Footnote ²² The 1920s, White added, had been “the period of gestation” for African American writers. It was a time distinguished by the “growth of Negro literature from adolescence to manhood.”Footnote ²³ White's root metaphor was one of evolution, and he cast his interpretation of the development of black literature in terms of the continuation of traditions rather than of the primacy of a particular moment. He was not alone in doing so.

White's essay was published amid protracted debates among literary critics and writers about the appropriate ways in which texts should be interpreted, and literary histories written. It was amid such discussions that the critic and theorist René Wellek suggested that literature and the arts were best interpreted through a “concept of historical evolution,” indeed through a method akin to phylogenetic theories of evolution in biology. Wellek's approach was indebted to the work of the Italian historiographer Benedetto Croce, who taught that interpretations of art and literature should not be done through laws or collective labels, and prompted Wellek to oppose the reduction of literature and the arts “to any other activity,” particularly political and social modes of periodization.Footnote ²⁴ Wellek explained this view in his influential work Theory of Literature (1949), where he insisted that scholars pay attention to “aesthetic conventions,” and proposed the “theory of genres” as a valuable “principle of order.”Footnote ²⁵ It would be along these lines that Alain Locke, and many others, would interpret African American literature in the first part of the twentieth century.

When Locke addressed the elite of Washington, DC in the mid-1920s, he told them that “the public mind has not perceived this ‘growing up’ of the Negro. It is still thinking of him in terms of the Civil War.”Footnote ²⁶ In the special issue of the Survey Graphic that he edited in March 1925, and the landmark anthology that he shepherded into print eight months later, Locke provided the materials to correct such outdated interpretations. The publication of both works provided a salt lick of racial pride for contemporaries. More than 30,000 copies of the Survey Graphic special issue were sold, and more importantly some reviewers took the resulting anthology as evidence that “the Negro Grows Up,” imbibing Locke's characterization of the volume as indicating a shift from “cultural adolescence and the approach to maturity.”Footnote ²⁷ This was broadly in keeping with Locke's original idea for the special issue, which had sought to “bring the younger generation out in front somewhat,” and in the resulting issue he characterized this generation as joined together “not because of years only, but because of a new aesthetic and a new philosophy of life.”Footnote ²⁸ This conception of a generation, as both a biological group and a cultural one of shared experience, represented an emergent mode of historical consciousness, evident in Frederick Allen's bestselling Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen Twenties (1931). It could also be found in F. Scott Fitzgerald's essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931), which, despite its title, was similarly organized around “the generation that had been adolescent during the war.”Footnote ²⁹

It was Locke's co-editor, the white social reformer Paul Kellogg, whose vision for the special issue of the Survey Graphic most closely attached Harlem to the general outpouring of literary works by African Americans. “The northward migration of the southern Negroes . . . has something of this epic quality to it and we hit upon the idea of taking Harlem as the stage in order to visualize it,” he told the educator Will Alexander in early 1925. Following previous special issues on the “renascent countr[ies]” of Ireland, Russia, and Mexico, Kellogg was keen to produce a similar volume that “interpreted the cultural renaissance among American Negroes.”Footnote ³⁰ In February 1925, he shared his vision with Locke, telling him that the special issue should aim to “interpret[. . .] a racial and cultural revival in the new environment of the northern city.” The short essay that Locke wrote, entitled “Harlem,” which framed the resulting issue, showed his support for this approach.Footnote ³¹

This emphasis on Harlem would be muted in Locke's resulting anthology, The New Negro. In fact the short introductory essay that he had written for the Survey Graphic was one of the “noticeable losses” from that collection, a casualty of its publisher's wish “not to bring out the Harlem number in book form . . . but [to publish] . . . a much more formidable volume.”Footnote ³² “The scope of the book [publisher Albert Boni] has in mind is not Harlem, but the cultural revival as a whole,” Kellogg relayed.Footnote ³³ The foreword to the latter volume made clear the adjustment: “although there are few centers that can be pointed out approximating Harlem's significance, the full significance of that event is a racial awakening on a national and perhaps even a world scale,” Locke dutifully wrote.Footnote ³⁴ There is no evidence of what he thought of this change, but fourteen years later, in 1939, as he began to update the anthology, Locke made no attempt to include an essay on Harlem. Moreover, his broader writings on African American literature and culture in these years continued to interpret the field using those older idioms of evolution, leading him to declare on a later occasion “that the ‘New Negro’ movement is just coming into its own after a frothy adolescence and a first-generation course.”Footnote ³⁵

Where figures like Locke did employ collective appellations these tended to the generational, not the geographic. It was the black sociologist Charles S. Johnson who encouraged Locke's thinking along these lines, but it was another Johnson, the polymath James Weldon Johnson, who would do the most to promote the neighborhood of Harlem in the first decades of the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁶ In his classic work, Black Manhattan (1930), and the autobiography he published three years later, Along This Way (1933), Johnson established a vein of work that celebrated and historicized the neighborhood of Harlem. Both projects were begun while Johnson was on a sabbatical from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and were supported by the Julius Rosenwald Fund.Footnote ³⁷ But when Johnson drafted what would become his landmark study, he referred to it under a number of titles, including Looking Backwards from Harlem, a title that suggested that his prevailing metaphor was also one of social evolution, as the later text confirmed it was.Footnote ³⁸

Nowhere in any of the drafts Johnson wrote of these works did he mention being part of a Harlem Renaissance. When his autobiography was published in 1930, the writer and activist remembered only his role “in creating the new literary Harlem,” and he referred to the neighborhood as “the Harlem of story and song,” using a phrase he possibly lifted from W. E. B. Du Bois's work Souls of Black Folk (1903).Footnote ³⁹ While our hunt for this term could continue ad nauseam, we have sufficiently established at this point both that this phrase did not enjoy any salience in the years it is now said to describe, and, moreover, that a framework of aesthetic values that grouped works into schools, and explained change as the steady evolution of styles and genres, likely inhibited the development of such temporal modes of organization. Indeed, when the black novelist Richard Wright wrote about Harlem for the Federal Writers’ Project in 1938, he only grazed “what is sometimes termed the ‘literary renaissance’ of Harlem.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet by the time Wright's best-selling novel Native Son (1940) was published, some were referring explicitly to a “Harlem Renaissance.”

THE CREATION OF “TWO HARLEMS”

The term “Harlem Renaissance” came into existence erratically between 1940 and 1947. One of the first to use the term was the journalist St Clair T. Bourne, father of the future filmmaker. Writing in a series of essays in the New York Amsterdam News, in January 1942, Bourne reminded his readers that “during the 1920’s, Harlem was one of the flourishing centres of cultural activity. That was what has been called the ‘Harlem renaissance’ period.”Footnote ⁴¹ “Times were good then,” Bourne continued, “the Harlem of those days was a scintillating, glamorous place,” his pointed use of the past tense suggesting how the rising use of the term “Harlem Renaissance” to imagine the neighborhood's past abetted an accompanying sense of its present, and future, as in decline.Footnote ⁴² The coinage of the term “Harlem Renaissance” to describe the neighborhood's past and the growing contemporary sense that Harlem was in decline were therefore mutually constitutive concepts. Bourne was among the first to describe Harlem in this way, but a growing chorus of black writers soon absorbed this way of thinking. The origins of this term therefore suggest that Harold Cruise's familiar verdict, that “representatives of another minority [had] dictate[d the] cultural standards,” was not true for these black writers and intellectuals.Footnote ⁴³

In his long-awaited autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), Langston Hughes also used this term to draw the area's past into relief with its present. Published in September 1940, Hughes's work argued that 1929 “was the end of the Harlem Renaissance.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In the first edition of The Big Sea, “Harlem Renaissance” enjoyed no monopoly over how Hughes described the post-World War moment, and jostled with “Manhattan's black Renaissance,” “New Negro Renaissance” and “the New Negro era in Harlem.”Footnote ⁴⁵ While drafting the manuscript, such hesitation occasionally provoked comment. When Hughes received galleys for the work in June 1940, he was uncertain how to render some of these words:

Initial ambivalence about such terminology—stylistic and, occasionally, ideological—would be evident in some subsequent accounts that Hughes wrote about the period and the neighborhood of Harlem. The historian John Hope Franklin, another in the Knopf stable, would follow Hughes's lead in this and other respects, writing in 1947, “the movement . . . has been variously called the ‘Harlem Renaissance,’ the ‘Black Renaissance,’ and the ‘New Negro Movement.’”Footnote ⁴⁷

Perhaps some of Hughes's hesitancy in employing this new term was related to the doubts his publisher had expressed about his focus on the neighborhood of Harlem. When Blanche Knopf first read a draft of the autobiography, she told Hughes that she was “really delighted with what it is and what it is going to be.” But after praise came reservation: the work, she feared, might become “a sort of Harlem Cavalcade, which is wrong.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Only after Van Vechten had explained to her that such passages were “an essential part of the book's integrity” did she soften her opinions. The day after she had instructed Hughes to cut all such material, she retreated, allowing him to retain those pages “where you personally came in contact or were affected by people or things, or where the material is historical and so of historical importance.”Footnote ⁴⁹ With characteristic congeniality Hughes reassured his publisher that he had already cut “about thirty five pages out of a hundred in the Harlem Renaissance section,” showing that he thought of this section through that terminology. But Hughes also clarified why he had included such an elaborate account of the subject in his original draft:

Throughout the remainder of his career, and until his death in 1967, Hughes continued to write about Harlem, and to do so with relish. He was not alone in this respect.

Appearing a matter of weeks after Hughes's autobiography, in October 1940, the poet and writer Claude McKay published his own account of the neighborhood, Harlem: Negro Metropolis. As well as its publication date, McKay's work also shared with Hughes's autobiography the same habit of shuffling through a number of terms in an attempt to characterize earlier years. “The jazz age,” “bohemian Harlem,” and, less positively, “the capital of clowns” were the terms that McKay alternated between in an attempt to explain how “Harlem became more than locally famous as an amusement center.”Footnote ⁵¹ Despite his talents and reputation, McKay's book sold slowly.Footnote ⁵² Still, appearing in the wake of Wright's novel Native Son, Harlem: Negro Metropolis was one of the clearest indications that some publishers were willing to gamble that there was sufficient interest in Harlem to justify such projects. Ann Petry and Chester Himes's best-selling novels of the 1940s and 1950s would accentuate this view, though even then publishers would reject certain genres of work about Harlem, such as the “prose anthology on Harlem” that Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes assembled in the spring of 1948, and continued to revise until 1962 when it was finally forgotten.Footnote ⁵³

Publishers looked more favorably in these years on those writers who wished to write more general surveys about black life. The journalist Roi Ottley published two such studies, New World A-coming: Inside Black America (1943), and Black Odyssey: The Story of the Negro in America (1948). Yet in neither of them did he mention a Harlem Renaissance. His avoidance of that term was fairly common, and the term was also missing from Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944), and St Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's compendious study Black Metropolis (1945). At least in New World A-coming Ottley gave his readers a sense that “Negro life began to assume new dimensions in the decade following the first World War.” But the new dimensions that most impressed him were the exploits of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association. The period may have been one when “the rhythm of life seemed to beat to the clink of glasses and the thump of drums,” but the bulk of Ottley's narrative was concerned with matters he considered more political.Footnote ⁵⁴ Five years later, in 1948, Ottley expanded these sparse descriptions, elaborating on the processes by which African Americans began “to appear actively in the world of art, literature, music and theater. What happened seemed at first to be a sudden awakening rather than a development, which perhaps explains why people referred to it as the ‘Negro Renaissance.’”Footnote ⁵⁵ Ottley's translation of “renaissance” to mean awakening rather than revival, or “development,” was instructive, certainly not idiosyncratic, and suggested historical rupture rather than the continuity connoted by the idiom of genre. Indeed, the slight mid-century preference for using “awakening” as a synonym for “renaissance”—generally so in the work of the historian F. O. Matthiessen, particularly in that of Bontemps—was one way in which apprehensions of the past were represented through a language that stressed the harder edges of the past rather than the smoother ones of traditions.

It is not wrong to think of Ottley as having avoided mention of the Harlem Renaissance when he composed his two accounts in the 1940s. We know that he was aware of the term, for he had used it when he reviewed John Hope Franklin's From Freedom to Slavery (1947). In his review for the New York Times, Ottley offered a typically prickly verdict—one that Franklin would later admit had “stung.” Ottley directed his irritation at Franklin's account of African American literature and art, which he said had been “done in the dated terms of the ‘Harlem Renaissance.’” He underlined the criticism with the suggestion that “Negro writing, painting, sculpture and music reached solid stature in the late Thirties and Forties,” the decades when Ottley himself rose to prominence.Footnote ⁵⁶

Somewhere between the writing of Franklin's book in the summer of 1946, and Ottley's testy review in October 1947, the term “Harlem Renaissance” moved clearly into popular literary discourse. Quickly the term was used ex post facto, as happened when an editor for the Negro Story wrote that the North Carolinian novelist Charles Chesnutt had “deplored the period called the Harlem Renaissance,” despite Chesnutt having died eight years before the term was coined.Footnote ⁵⁷ Across the various editions of Franklin's textbook, the meaning and rendering of this term did not remain static. In the original manuscript Franklin titled chapter 26 “A Harlem Renaissance.” Little was said about Alain Locke, or the anthology he edited. These did not become firm fixtures in the Harlem Renaissance convention until the years following Locke's death, in June 1954, encouraged in part by the Festschrift that was organized for him by his former Howard colleagues, and at which Franklin spoke. It was possibly at this meeting that Franklin met the eminent Dutch scholar J. W. Schulte Nordholt, whom the Fulbright program had funded to spend a year at Vanderbilt University, and who would become the first European scholar to deploy the new terminology in his work Het Volk dat in Duisternis Wandelt (1956).

It was not until the fourth edition of Franklin's work, in 1974, that the historian made substantive revisions to his chapter. Between 1966 and 1974 these revisions, which Franklin said were “extremely difficult” to undertake, began when he changed the chapter's title.Footnote ⁵⁸ After 1974, anyone who picked up the latest edition of the work would read only about “The Harlem Renaissance.” All earlier references to the “Negro Renaissance” disappeared, and hesitant quotation marks fell away. The greater confidence that Franklin now invested in this vocabulary was more widely evident in the revisions Harry A. Ploski made to his The Negro Almanac, and that Rayford Logan made to The Negro in the United States.Footnote ⁵⁹

Still, not everyone welcomed these new terms of debate. Of those who opposed them, few were better placed than the poet and Howard University professor of English Sterling Brown. As someone who had spent much of the 1920s roaming Virginia, Missouri, and Tennessee on short-term teaching posts, and who did not publish his best-known work until 1932, Brown had good reason to challenge those who were now associating black literary success with Harlem and the 1920s. At the Festschrift to celebrate the legacy of his former colleague, Locke, Brown contested the promotion of the term “renaissance,” and, implicitly, its association with Harlem. According to Charles S. Johnson, he was “the most vocal heckler from the floor, denying that there was any such movement.”Footnote ⁶⁰ “The Harlem Vogue, 1920–1930,” was the greatest concession Brown would make, and one he retreated from when his lecture was published in the proceedings as “The New Negro in Literature (1925–1955).”Footnote ⁶¹

If Brown disliked terms like “Harlem Renaissance,” his stance was not straightforwardly borne from an opposition to periodization. Indeed, the coinage and popularization of this term in the years around mid-century was congruent with how a growing number of scholars and popular writers approached the past. This was a moment when an interest in periodization was becoming widely evident among Anglo-American scholars. It was in 1938 that the Oxford English Dictionary first recorded “periodization,” and defined it as a “division into periods of time . . . for the purpose of discussion and evaluation.”Footnote ⁶² Yet the term figured unevenly within disciplines. While philosophers like the Johns Hopkins professor George Boas used it hesitantly, historians, and certainly those at the session on “Criteria of Periodization in History” at the 1954 American Historical Association conference deployed it with confidence. Literary scholars were just as familiar with periodizing as historians, a fact that begins to explain why they were among the first to embrace the practice. These were the years when the Oxford historian A. L. Rowse began his study of “the Elizabethan Age,” and in which the Harvard professor of history and literature, F. O. Matthiessen, did likewise for mid-nineteenth-century American literature. In his much-celebrated study, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), Matthiessen encouraged not only a particular way of understanding the “half-decade” between 1850 and 1855, but also a particular way of interpreting the past.

One of those influenced by the innovations of American Renaissance was Matthiessen's colleague and former student Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Schlesinger cited the American Renaissance in his Pulitzer Prize-winning study The Age of Jackson (1945), and attributed the work's success to the way it organized the historical record of mid-nineteenth-century literature. Both works certainly expressed their periodicity through the same trope, with both scholars, and others, using that older formulation of “the age of” rather than more specific units of time that would later become fashionable. The publication of both these works at this time thus paralleled the emergence of the term “Harlem Renaissance.” These were also the years when historian Rayford Logan described the fin de siècle as the “Nadir of American race relations,” and when Eleanor Flexner's classic work Century of Struggle (1959) popularized the early twentieth century as the “doldrums” of women's suffrage.Footnote ⁶³ It was a period of conscious periodizing, especially in the US. That it was owed much to the belief, expressed by Wallace Ferguson, that periodization was “an intellectual tool,” without which “the historian cannot think, much less talk or write about the past.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Ferguson, like most, readily conceded the “arbitrariness” of such man-made impositions, but he insisted on the conscious creation and supple usage of periodizing categories, because, like the Wesleyan historian Louis Mink, he believed that “synthetic interpretation” was the chief duty of historians, and that periodization assisted in this endeavor.Footnote ⁶⁵ Broader conceptualization of the past would help scholars make sense of “the infinitude of isolated facts,” sort out what mattered and why it did so, and provide a common address for the growing number of specialists within the discipline. Ferguson's opinion was shared by many, including Meribeth Cameron, the historian of China, who urged “such large-scale groupings and divisions unless our historical knowledge is to remain inchoate and meaningless.” These were opinions that bore passing resemblance to that older, Beardian notion of the unity of historical interpretation, and suggest that unlike in Britain, where, as Michael Bentley has shown, a preference for taut, “source-led” accounts prevailed, periodization suited American historians wishing to offer generalization, as well as those keen to address a wider audience.Footnote ⁶⁶

Most of those who used the Harlem Renaissance concept in the years around mid-century certainly shared these assumptions, even though they were not always affiliated with the academy. In this respect, the term's early promoters were closer to those feminist activists who, in the years between 1968 and 1971, started the practice of thinking of women's history in terms of “waves,” than they were to professional historians like Matthiessen and Schlesinger.Footnote ⁶⁷ Still, if those working in the popular arena coined the term, it was transported to the academy by a new generation of African American intellectuals, like Arna Bontemps, who was appointed as a librarian at Fisk University in 1943, and who introduced the term to the institution's catalogue, as well as to the broader literary lexicon.Footnote ⁶⁸

The reflective essays and reviews that Bontemps wrote for popular periodicals in these years were also influential in shaping contemporary ideas about Harlem. One of the first essays Bontemps wrote about the neighborhood, in the spring of 1945, identified the existence of “Two Harlems.” That essay, much like one Rudolph Fisher had published twenty years before, described what Bontemps encountered when he returned to the neighborhood after many years away. “The Harlem we found in 1942 and 1943 was another place,” he recorded eerily. The cultural and intellectual elite that had once defined the neighborhood was now gone, having left Harlem in preference for the supposed comforts of Long Island and Westchester. When “the young intellectuals who came to Harlem in the middle ‘twenties’” returned to view the neighborhood where they had come of age two decades earlier, they discovered “a black ghetto and a slum, a clot in the American bloodstream.” “Where poets went about singing in the days of the new awakening,” Bontemps wrote with deliberate exaggeration, “now angry, frustrated boys prowled.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The elevation of the concept of the Harlem Renaissance thus helped to create the interpretive framework within which contemporary critiques of the neighborhood, and, more generally, the state of black America, occurred.

If in the postwar years some Americans came to associate the neighborhood of Harlem with the “angry, frustrated boys” who roamed its streets, they likely did so not because of what Bontemps wrote, but because of what the young black photographer Gordon Parks captured on film. Parks's photographs of the young black men and women he found on Harlem's streets depicted them with sympathy and nuance, but the text that accompanied his images did not. Published in Life magazine in November 1948, Parks's photographs were described as evidence of the “the cluttered, dreary streets of Harlem.” A Life copywriter guided readers to see that “in the anarchy of youthful Harlem, 500,000 people live, crammed into a ghettolike section built originally to hold less than half that number.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Within days of Parks's work appearing in Life magazine, James Baldwin's essay on Harlem was published in the newly established Jewish periodical Commentary. It too never referred directly to Harlem as ghetto. But those who glimpsed or remembered only the title of Baldwin's essay—probably chosen by the magazine's editor, Robert Warshow—would have been excused for thinking otherwise. The piece was entitled “The Harlem Ghetto: Winter 1948.”Footnote ⁷¹

What was only casually insinuated in the pages of Life and Commentary magazines was fully articulated elsewhere. Robert Clifton Weaver's study The Negro Ghetto (1948) was the first attempt to analyse the formation of northern black ghettoes, and the work took Harlem as symbolically representative of this trend. Instructively it began by quoting a passage about “the wild Twenties,” from Johnson's Black Manhattan. Thus while it called time on what Weaver believed was the delusory tendency of seeing only “the Harlem of story and song,” it did so within a framework of Renaissance/ghetto.Footnote ⁷² This stood in contrast to how the neighborhood had been described two decades earlier by the likes of Johnson and Locke, both of whom had focused on “what distinguishe[d] Harlem from the ghettos with which it is sometimes compared.”Footnote ⁷³ When the historian David Levering Lewis interviewed George Schuyler in 1974, the former voice of black conservativism told him that during the 1920s “nobody referred to Harlem as a ghetto then,” though he forgot to mention that no one referred to a Harlem Renaissance either.Footnote ⁷⁴ The two concepts were intertwined.

Only in the aftermath of the urban riots of the mid-1960s did black urban communities begin to be described predominantly as ghettoes. Yet it is clear that such descriptions were made from the mid-1940s on.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the case of Harlem such characterizations rested largely on the contrast that commentators drew between the neighborhood's past, present, and the future they imagined for it. Bontemps's writings revealed this best, often relating the notion of a Harlem Renaissance to the sense that the contemporary neighborhood was in decline. Even those writers who avoided these new terms, like McKay and Ottley, organized their work in ways that created a relief between Harlem's past and present. Ottley placed a passage in which he discussed “the total effect of Negro cultural activity in the Twenties” strikingly next to one describing the tumultuous Harlem riot of 1935, for example.Footnote ⁷⁶ This usage of the Harlem Renaissance, to draw a distinction between past and present, would persist into the mid-1960s, when younger black artists and writers overwhelmingly invoked the term to contrast their own work and politics with it.

It has not just been writers and artists who have used the term “Harlem Renaissance” in this way. Those urban planners and politicians who contributed to the Plan for New York City (1969) also mentioned “Harlem's brightest period” as a précis to their discussion of the neighborhood's subsequent decline, a narrative arc they hoped would legitimate their policies of urban renewal.Footnote ⁷⁷ Similar assumptions continue to operate within the Getty Images archive, where a series of photographs of urban blight taken in the mid-1990s are retrieved through the keyword “Harlem Renaissance.” The cataloguing card that accompanies the photographs reads, “Harlem reached its cultural peak in the 1920s, but has since become an example of urban decay.”Footnote ⁷⁸ From its coinage and through its early popularization, this term, and others like it, has influenced more than just scholarship, helping both to recompose popular apprehensions of the past, and to rationalize certain types of intervention in present-day urban communities.Footnote ⁷⁹ While the term's later popularity among scholars was facilitated by the general embrace of historicist modes of interpretation in the study of culture, the hardening of this category in the popular realm prompted much unease within the academy. Examining this context further will strengthen our understanding of shifting historiographical stances in the late twentieth century.

A COMMANDING CATEGORY

If the term “Harlem Renaissance” was coined in the popular arena, and initially appeared most frequently in discussions about the contemporary condition of that neighborhood, it became a commanding category of American historiography through the fact and manner in which it was institutionalized in academic scholarship. While it gained added purchase with the creation of black studies programs in the early 1970s, it owes its present-day range and recognition to a series of less obvious changes in the way the humanities were reorganized in the last third of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸⁰ These changes included the gradual displacement of aesthetic values by temporal ones in interpretations of culture, a shift in the way bibliographic collections were catalogued, and the rising authority of historians in discussions of art and literature.

As a librarian at Fisk University and, briefly, at Yale, Arna Bontemps understood sooner than most the interest that students took in the Harlem Renaissance.Footnote ⁸¹ He hinted at such in the introduction to his collection American Negro Poetry (1963), recalling letters from undergraduates in San Diego, and conversations with graduate students from Ohio. It was largely because of these connections that he was able to assemble one of the first anthologies on the subject, The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972), one of a number of such collections that appeared at this time, as students demanded greater coverage of the subject, and scholars persuaded their publishers that such studies would sell.Footnote ⁸²

It was in the newly created black studies programs that an interest in the Harlem Renaissance took root, though not all these discussions began in the classroom. In 1975, Mary Washington helped students at the University of Detroit to stage a dramatic performance of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, for instance.Footnote ⁸³ Nevertheless most undergraduates would have encountered the subject within survey courses that contained a single session or series of sessions on the subject, a reminder of the role that the postwar expansion of undergraduate education played in encouraging the use of periodizing terms, with some instructors calling periodization “the backbone of the organization of instruction.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Individual sessions on the Harlem Renaissance within broader survey courses were offered at Cornell, Yale, and Howard universities in the late 1960s, and this remained the case for students at UC–Santa Barbara through the early 1980s.Footnote ⁸⁵ Only a few courses were taught in the late 1960s devoted entirely to the subject, including Nathan Huggins's seminar at Columbia, and similar courses at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, Vassar College and the University of Florida.Footnote ⁸⁶ Gradually these more specialized courses appeared at other institutions. By the late 1970s, they were evident at California's Claremont colleges, Brandeis, CUNY–Richmond, and Fordham, and by the mid-1980s had become as common as the earlier tendency of dealing with the subject within broader courses.Footnote ⁸⁷ But undergraduate teaching also shaped how this periodizing concept and others were represented, most often leading to the addition of dates. At Harvard, for instance, the poet J. Newton Hill divided her course into “the ante-bellum period to the First Renaissance (about 1925) . . . the period of transition (1925–1945) . . . the Second Renaissance (1945 to the present).”Footnote ⁸⁸

One consequence of these changing teaching interests was the shift it brought to scholars’ research priorities. Nathan Huggins was one of those whose research interests were reshaped by his teaching duties. Upon his appointment to a professorship at Columbia in 1970, Huggins, previously a leading scholar of American attitudes towards the poor, offered an undergraduate colloquium on the Harlem Renaissance that soon served as the basis of his best-known work.Footnote ⁸⁹ Published in the fall of 1971, Huggins's Harlem Renaissance won immediate acclaim: praised by critics, nominated for the National Book Award, and, according to Arnold Rampersad, it “virtually invented a sub-field in American and African-American intellectual history.”Footnote ⁹⁰ It was a sub-field that Huggins was keen to promote, particularly beyond the academy, giving public talks on the subject, and, on pleasant afternoons in the fall, leading tourists on “A Walk through Langston Hughes’ Harlem.”Footnote ⁹¹ It was one further instance of how scholars’ embrace of this term was closely shaped both by academic audiences and a wider, public one.

What these public acts concealed, though, was Huggins's private hesitation about the increasingly rigid use of organizing concepts, like Harlem Renaissance, doubts that chimed with what Peter Novick has characterized as a moment of “epistemological crisis” in American historiography in the early 1970s.Footnote ⁹² While it is true that a much greater skepticism towards periodization developed in these years than had been evident earlier, it is important to remember that even at mid-century most scholars had recognized the imaginative origins and heuristic purposes of such terms. Huggins certainly seems to have thought in this way. He called the Harlem Renaissance “a convenient fiction,” and generally embraced it as many of his colleagues did, as an intellectual tool, “to give focus to a process.”Footnote ⁹³ His former Harvard colleague David Blight remembered him as someone who “insisted on a broad self-consciousness about the [historical] craft,” and it was thus understandable that he was made uncomfortable by the term's steady ossification.Footnote ⁹⁴

Despite Huggins's doubts, the scale of interest in the Harlem Renaissance was clear by the mid-1970s. The legion of literary anthologies that were published in these decades incorporated the new vocabulary, interspersing it with the older set of alternatives, just as Hughes had once done. Arthur P. Davis and J. Saunders Redding mentioned both a “Harlem Renaissance” and “A New Negro Renaissance” in their anthology The Cavalcade (1971), for example, though they organized the relevant section of the collection under the heading “The New Negro Renaissance and Beyond, 1910–1954.” It was a concept that Davis had long used to organize his courses at Howard, and that he now deployed publicly as an argument.Footnote ⁹⁵

Four years after the second edition of The Cavalcade was published, Davis collaborated on a more specialized anthology with his former graduate student, Michael Peplow, then a professor in rural Pennsylvania. Writing in the work's introduction, Davis argued that his preference for “the phrase ‘New Negro [Renaissance]’ to ‘Harlem [Renaissance]’” derived from his sense that “it seems more historically accurate.”Footnote ⁹⁶ On the principle that Davis had “lived through the Renaissance and knew many of its leading figures,” he recoiled from the growing popularity of the term “Harlem Renaissance” “because it implies certain limitations.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Still, Davis conceded that “recently it has become more fashionable to talk about the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ than about the ‘New Negro Renaissance.’”Footnote ⁹⁸ This was probably a concession to Peplow, who had first proposed the collaboration and had written to Oxford University Press in April 1973 to suggest a work he described as The Harlem Renaissance: An Anthology. Oxford editors had politely declined the proposal, but they liked the idea enough to start their own rival anthology, believing “the book could sell quite well.” They quickly approached Huggins in the hope he would edit the volume.Footnote ⁹⁹

When Huggins agreed to take on the project, he immediately told his editors that he would make his anthology superior to its competitors, by “mak[ing] the most that we can of the art section.” But the press's reviewers proposed an alternative strategy: make it historical. “[T]he structure of the book follows historical contours,” Yale's Alan Trachtenberg told the press. What the junior professor of American studies could see was that Huggins's anthology would appeal not just to “all Afro-American programs,” but also to scholars of “20th century American literature and intellectual/cultural history” too. At a critical juncture in the anthology's production, in the anxious weeks after Holt, Reinhart and Winston had published Peplow and Davis's anthology, Donald Gibson, a professor of literature at Rutgers, reassured OUP editors in the same way. “The Huggins introduction is significantly different from the Davis/Peplow one,” he told the project's editor. “It is more extensive and it places the period under consideration in broader historical context . . . historians will choose Huggins.” Whether they did so or not, most American historians will have seen one of the advertisements that the press took out for Huggins's anthology when it appeared in late 1976. Those entrusted with marketing the volume shrewdly spent most of their budget advertising with the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, and the Journal of Negro History, as well as Nathan Hare's Black Scholar.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It was a decision that helped to poach the study of the Harlem Renaissance from literary and cultural arenas, and establish it firmly within historical ones.Footnote ¹⁰¹

It would be the work of another historian, Tony Martin, a fledgling expert on Marcus Garvey, which would confirm the disciplinary diffusion of these interests. Conceived around the same time that Huggins's anthology was sent to the printers, Martin's short study, Literary Garveyism (1983), also continued the expansion of this field through its insistence that Garvey's newspaper, Negro World, “be elevated to a position of major importance in the literary epoch of what is popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance.” If Martin's argument was unique and provocative, the sources he consulted, and his motivations for doing so, came from a more conventional place. As Martin explained in the work's preface, “the Garvey movement articulated a Black aesthetic quite different from that usually associated with the Renaissance—an aesthetic with a strangely contemporary ring, given its affinity with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s.”Footnote ¹⁰² This attempt to draw relevance from the past to engage contemporary issues was a common claim made by those who helped to establish early black studies programs.Footnote ¹⁰³ Discussions of the Harlem Renaissance, of course, prompted such claims not least because of the resemblance many found with the contemporary Black Arts Movement. When the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Hortense Thornton $15,000 to study the Harlem Renaissance, the literary scholar told a reporter that “the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s leads directly into the Black arts aesthetic movement of the 1960's and 1970’s.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

While many contemporary black artists, hostile to what they saw as the earlier generation's naivety, would have disagreed with Thornton's assessment, a few, like the novelist John A. Williams, would at least admit to finding some utility in knowing about that early generation. Writing in November 1970, in a special issue of the journal Black World, Williams noted, “the Harlem Renaissance . . . gave us an example . . . we do not need to make the same mistakes its members made.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Arna Bontemps also wrote an essay for the same special issue, adapting an earlier address he had given to the Teachers’ Union of the City of New York on “the significance for the whole country and in particular for teachers of ‘The Negro Renaissance.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It was in the course of giving that address, in 1962, that Bontemps came to realize the ambiguity of these terms, understanding that “the ‘Negro Renaissance’ [he] had described . . . was not at all the one [his hosts] had in mind.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Where he thought the ‘Negro Renaissance’ referred to the achievements of an earlier group of black writers, his hosts on that occasion understood the term to apply to their contemporaries. “Harlem Renaissance” at least had the virtue of preventing such embarrassments, while also fitting better with the shift away from the term “Negro” in the popular racial lexicon. As Bontemps told his friend, the librarian Margaret Perry, “Harlem [as the movement's appellation] identifies it more precisely . . . gave it unity . . . located it in time and place.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ It was perhaps because of this incident that Bontemps soon introduced “Harlem Renaissance” to Fisk University's library catalogue.

Fisk was unusual in this regard. In fact the one precinct where this term did not appear with such immediacy or impact was in bibliographic catalogues. Very few bibliographies published in this period arranged African American collections under periodizing headings. This was a practice largely in keeping with the cataloguing traditions of the postwar library sciences, which had long organized humanities collections not by period, but by genre, a trend mirrored by the organization of most academic courses, where, as Cheryl Wall has noted, “the very idea of a ‘period’ course in black literature [in the early 1970s] seemed anomalous.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Popular bibliographies, like the Negro Book Club's Guide to African American Books (1969), did not mention any permutation of renaissance then, instead grouping materials by an author's name or by genre.

One of the few bibliographies to categorize material under a heading of “The Harlem Renaissance” in these years was, significantly, produced by historians and literary scholars. Published by Doubleday as Blacks in America: Bibliographic Essays (1972), the work began as the bibliography for a Princeton undergraduate course, “The Negro in America,” which had been taught since 1966, and provided further testament to the influence undergraduate teaching had on the formalization of periodizing terms. It was not until the mid-1990s, though, and the publication of the thirteenth edition of The Library of Congress Subject Headings, that “Harlem Renaissance” appeared as a recognized cataloguing term. This was a development congruent with broader trends in the library sciences, which saw periodizing terms steadily rise in the last third of the twentieth century, as for instance happened in the history of science where materials were no longer solely organized by discipline or person.Footnote ¹¹⁰

At the same moment as these new terms began to show up in bibliographies, objects flowed into collections that were described by them. In October 1973 a private collector from Boston wrote to Jean Blackwell Hutson, director of New York's Schomburg Library, to tell her that he was selling an autograph book for $1,000. “The book has 65 pages of signatures, some of which are pasted in,” he explained. “Many are familiar names from the Harlem Renaissance,” though “many are from the art, theater and music worlds with which I am not familiar.”Footnote ¹¹¹ So while this term was starting to feature increasingly in ordinary speech, its usage, indeed the subjects to which it was applied, could be troublesome. One scholar who was familiar with these other areas, and whose work helped to make them a part of canonical interpretations of the Harlem Renaissance, was the historian David Levering Lewis. During 1973 Lewis assembled a book proposal, aimed at the “popular market,” that promised to place the Harlem Renaissance in a “wide focus.”Footnote ¹¹² When Knopf published the work as When Harlem Was in Vogue in May 1981, it was just one of a number of ways in which this term gained application outside the precincts of literature and history.

What was striking about the early 1980s was the way in which the Harlem Renaissance figured not only in discussions of African American literature, but in more diffuse works of cultural commentary. Gradually the term travelled into the visual arts, and, eventually, the fields of music and dance, its path eased by the reorganization of those disciplines around temporal divisions and modes of intepretation.Footnote ¹¹³ When curators at New York's Museum of Modern Art had organized the controversial Harlem on My Mind exhibition in 1969, they made no obvious mention of the Harlem Renaissance.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Yet by the early 1980s Harlem Renaissance was clearly evident in the professional discourse of museum and gallery curators, featuring as the subject of a number of celebratory exhibitions, including the 1987 Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. This was a pattern in keeping with the general rise in contextualism and temporal modes of organization, evident, for example, in the history of art's embrace of Michael Baxandall's interpretive concept of the “period eye” in the mid-1970s.Footnote ¹¹⁵

While the diffusion of historicist modes of interpretation helped to facilitate the spread of terms like “Harlem Renaissance” to neighboring disciplines, publishers encouraged this term's absorption in the public realm. OUP released a paperback edition of Lewis's book as part of its attempt to break “new ground in both archival research and current thought in black studies,” and republished Huggins's anthology six years later.Footnote ¹¹⁶ OUP's strategy helped to consolidate this academic field, with series by Norton and Edinburgh University Press also subsequently strengthening the division of modern American history into decades, just as print culture had encouraged the concept of the “century” in eighteenth-century British historical consciousness. It is a reminder that, as the early modern historian C. S. L. Davies has shown with the Tudors, non-academic institutions, like publishers and curators, have often been crucial in entrenching certain ways of understanding the past, for both general readers and scholars alike.Footnote ¹¹⁷ But such processes worked to harden this category, and in turn to transform it from being an imaginative tool of historical interpretation into a historical object in its own right, and accordingly drew criticism from a number of directions.