Movements – Music Is Fuel for Fire

Chapter III: Movements – Music is Fuel for Fire

A new assertiveness in the movement for black rights in America appeared following the First World War. Northern leftist whites became more proactive in helping the black cause and blacks became more proactive in helping themselves. In September of 1919, a coalition of black sharecroppers met in eastern Arkansas to protest the low payment they received from their employers for cotton produce. With a fear of blacks upsetting the state of race relations in the post World War I South, local white officials and troops wished to dispel the coalition and the idea that had compelled it. Hundreds of blacks and a handful of whites were killed in what would be the beginning of aggressive race relations on the labor front in the 1920s.1 Now known as the Elaine Massacre, this reaction to black political action is indicative of the attitudes white Southerners had toward black activism.2 Since overt resistance led to violent repercussions, it is small wonder that the best means of political expression were in songs that posed as weary complaints.

Three movements of the 1920s and 1930s used the rich collection of folk music that emerged at the time for their own particular purposes. First, the CP took to helping African-

Americans in their quest for equality. Through the use of the folk song in their publications and meetings, the Party adopted black cultural art into its political propaganda.3 The CP’s shortcomings were in pitting national expression against proletarian politics and marginalizing spiritual tradition as a form of protest. While the Party showed appreciation for black seculars, especially those that critiqued organized religion, they dismissed some of the more Christian black songs in their elucidation of black culture as propaganda. Second, beginning with the writings of W.E.B. DuBois the NAACP used middle class activism that erred in ignoring 1 Barbara Foley. Spectres of 1919, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. 13. 2 Foner & Shapiro. American Communism and Black Americans, p. 4. 3 James Smethurst, The New Red Negro: the literary left and African American poetry, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 30-31. seculars in favor of uplifting spirituals as quintessential protest. Competing for headline support of the Scottsboro defense, the NAACP and the CP effectively splintered the black protest movement into middle class black and working class at large. Third, the effort on the part of New Deal liberals to commodify black culture in a form marketable to northern whites included Lomax’s campaign of concerts from D.C. to New York; the WPA effort to produce plays and albums; and café society’s enjoyment of black music in an aristocratic setting.

The CP was just beginning to gather steam in the late 1920s and early 1930s when an interest in the folk song of African-Americans began to pick up as well. Many poor blacks in the South and the North were discontent with the state of affairs in the “bourgeois” NAACP, and sought help from the working class promises of the CP. Likewise antiracist Communists, especially in the North, found it crucial to gain the backing of a large coalition of blacks. In

New York, the Harlem Renaissance turned out many supporters of the CP cause: Langston

Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Richard Wright all wrote or performed in the spirit of the Party.

However, it would be more difficult to carry this message to the South, since there was such a racial rift, and the shambles in which the Civil War had left it were only aggravated by lynch mobs and forced labor. Even many poor whites blamed blacks for their being poor, joining the Ku Klux Klan. Black-only organizations, like the 1919 Arkansas sharecroppers union, could not hold off the reactionary tide sweeping across the South.4 It soon became clear that blacks did not have the political impetus to change the South overnight.

The CP saw this struggle as an opportunity to gain a constituency in the American

South, where almost all blacks were conceived as an “oppressed nation.”5 In order to attract blacks, they not only had to overcome the stigma of whites being oppressive, but also appeal to what blacks desired. Obviously, blacks desired to attain some equality and political

4 Sullivan, Days of Hope, p. 15. 5 Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), p. 13. representation in a place where they had long been downtrodden. However, it was questionable how large of a part blacks wanted whites to play in their forward progress. Until the 1920s, leftist groups had stayed out of the realm of race relations. James Smethurst, in his text The New Red Negro, states that “[O]lder radical groups, when they took up the issue of race at all, argued against racism as destructive to class consciousness, but did not see any special considerations necessary beyond those of class unity.”6 In order to gain the backing of a large population of blacks in the American South, the CP would have to change on this issue. Thus, the International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal arm of the CP, turned its concern to lynching, peonage, and the chain gang as potent areas of propaganda.7 The ILD would use the Scottsboro case, where nine black men were falsely accused of rape, as a soapbox for their anti-lynching policy in the early 1930s.8 Towards the end of the 1930s, their concern for the workers enslaved by peonage would bring them into the court of law for many of the downtrodden peons.9 Ultimately, all of this concern the CP claimed to have for blacks would be well substantiated if the Party understood black American culture.

Song, poetry, and literature all found themselves at the fore of the left’s tactics of bridging racial gaps and cultivating understanding through art forms. Smethurst discusses the access points found in Communist journals like New Masses and The Daily Worker, which included reviews of African-American music in the North first and later in the South by carrying the reviews of Lawrence Gellert. Gellert began running his column “Negro Songs of

Protest” in the New Masses in 1930 and spoke to all readers about the wretched state of black convicts in the South. Folk artists’ offering of material to the left allowed for the utilization of the impoverished Southern identity in journals to authenticate a link between Northern

6 Smethurst, The New Red Negro, p. 18. 7 Solomon, The Cry was Unity, 8 Sullivan, Days of Hope, p. 87. 9 Daniel, Shadow of Slavery, p. 195. activists and the Southerners that needed help. Smethurst notes, “The work of the more radical of these folklorists not only argued for an already existing tradition of overt expressions of social struggle in southern African-American folk culture that could be utilized by black (and white) writers but also provided models to writers and their audiences by which a certain vernacular ‘authenticity’ could be measured.”10 Gellert headed this effort and commented on the songs as evidence of the spirit of protest in the Southern black convict.

In an early edition of Gellert’s “Negro Songs of Protest,” he notes a departure from the accommodating spiritual themes of the past found in the secular realist protests he collected in his study of the American South.

“These new songs of the Negro differ from the well-know spirituals. Whereas the latter as a group are prayer songs—a racial heritage, part of the old, dead past – grooved and set, and now sung practically without variation throughout the temporary racial environment—the peonage poverty and degradation.”11

Blacks would not be attracted to the CP if they were simply objects whites felt motivated to save, in a patronizing fashion reminiscent of 19th century abolitionists. Their humanity had to be drawn out and emphasized through repeated references to the higher art forms they had that showed their human equality to whites. Despite the fact that they received less education and were stigmatized as uncivilized, they could still produce beautiful art. This was the nature of Gellert’s work in “Negro Songs of Protest” –Southern black culture in the raw. While trying to abstain from excessive editorial comments, he showed that with this art, African

Americans manifested the pain, protest, and motivation for change resulting from centuries of white abuse. Most of his articles introduced songs with “I heard this one from a convict in

Georgia…” or “I heard this one from a group sing on a plantation…” Ultimately, he portrayed blacks as being sick and tired of their poor desperation and determined to change

10 Smethurst, The New Red Negro, p. 31. 11 Gellert, “Negro Songs of Protest,” New Masses, (May, 1933), p. 15 their state in whatever ways possible. They were workers victimized by the meat grinder of

American industry, just like the union workers of the North. Gellert’s view of black culture proved compatible with the CP’s program. Thus, the CP believed it had an obligation to help black convicts and peons through the efforts of the ILD, especially in the South.

These articles led to many academics requesting more copies of songs from his collections and even a couple of plays, one of which was performed under the WPA Federal

Theatre Project. “How Long Brethren” included chain gang songs in its score and was all about the life of the poor black and the organized protest in which they sought to do something about it. This dramatic dance interpretation of convict labor songs won praise for its emotional climax led by Helen Tamaris, a dancer for the WPA Federal Theatre.12 This was just one of the many ways that the music of the oppressed reached a wide audience during the

1930s while being portrayed as protest.

Philip Schatz of the Young Communist League (YCL) also commented on the important role that secular black cultural art had to play in the struggle to overcome American poverty and racial discrimination. However, Mark Solomon, in The Cry Was Unity, comments on how Schatz ignored the protest elements of the Negro spiritual, “But with all his uncommon awareness of black folklore, Schatz’s rigidity blinded him to the revolutionary implication of that ‘sweet chariot coming for to carry me home.’”13 Too often, CP writers felt that only black secular songs were powerful vehicles of protest culture. However, a wealth of black culture was entwined with Christianity and elements of organized religion. In fact, following emancipation, the Negro church was one of the major safe havens for American blacks. However, the CP was uninterested in associating with religion. Thus, Gellert and

Schatz alike were apt to ignore or lampoon song and poem that spoke to the religion of slave

12 Hallie Flanagan, Arena, (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pierce, 1940), p. 199. 13 Solomon, The Cry was Unity, p. 276. masters. There was then a clash between the old guard blacks who drew on spirituality as the answer and the anti-organized religion blacks who were drawn to the CP and rejected

Christianity. However, as the movement transpired these two forces would have to work closer together and recognize they both aimed at the same end.

Examples of CP-supported black functions, where Negro spirituals were certainly sung, prove that the opinions of radical journalists like Philip Schatz did not stop blacks from holding to more traditional songs while seasoning them with learned CP propaganda. The black Youth Communist League organizer from Harlem, James Ashford, helped create the

Southern Negro Youth Congress in 1936. In 1939, the congress held the largest meeting of black political activism up to that point – a Birmingham meeting where common themes of citizenship and equality were emphasized. In his text, Hammer and Hoe, on the rise of the CP among Alabama blacks, Robin Kelley, describes the scene, “The first day began with four

Birmingham choral groups performing, ‘songs of the Negro people, the traditional spirituals, and work songs, and arrangements of contemporary Negro composers.’”14 Those organizations established in alliance with the CP encouraged black expression as a means of progress. In CP songs of the 1930s, a work song clearly influence by Party propaganda exemplifies this adoption:

No mo’ KU-KLUX KLAN with their burnin’ crosses. No mo’ chain-gangs, we’s no dogs no’ ho’ses. The NAACP, God no’ Moses Can stop us blackies fightin’ the bosses…

Negroes ain’ black—but RED! Teacher Lenin done said Brother all oppressed an’ po’ Ain’t it so? Sho!15

Certainly, blacks may have been given quite a lot of assistance by the CP, but it seemed that

14 Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, p. 201. 15 Kelly, Hammer and Hoe, p. 92. the more involved the blacks became with lower class causes, the more they lost their own racial identity.

A major problem with the CP associating with the black equality movement was marginalizing the black cause as a mere offshoot of the party. As the CP’s primary goal was to overcome the economic barrier the proletariat had before it, racial issues were often marginalized. Of course black members of the CP, like Cyril Briggs, did not feel the same way, but high up powers in the party often glossed over questions particular to blacks. Writers like

Richard Frank even proclaimed that the black struggle had not existed prior to the formation of the CP. Since the CP used the black cause to provide political impetus to the working class at large, their primary concern simply was not that of racial equality but class equality.16

Additionally, when the day would come that the CP went under, if the black cause had leaned too much on the assistance of the Party, they would be hung out to dry. If the CP was to be routed out, then all blacks associated with it would be more susceptible to political imprisonment and blacklisting. Essential to the political advancement of any group is the active participation in its members.

To bridge the gap between blacks and whites in the CP that had been frustrated by acts of bigotry, mostly on the part of whites, the CP took up the cause of the Scottsboro case in the early 1930s. Motivated by growing competition between themselves and the NAACP and the desire to have a large black constituency, the Party had to find ways to emphasize its devotion to the black cause. In addition to organizing an active legal counsel for the nine men being tried for rape, there were several songs added to the American communist canon about the Scottsboro boys. Some of these were provided by Gellert from the convict camps, as the following was:

16 Solomon, The Cry was Unity, p. 68-91. Set down on your knees askin’ Lawd please send my due Sure keep you on your knee till turkey buzzard git through with you Whatcher gonna do ain’t nothin’ like what I said Stand up Alabama boys and win or be found dead.17

Publishing songs like these was a means of convincing blacks that the whites of the CP were united with a cause that they were quite concerned about. For Scottsboro was not simply putting nine black men from south Alabama on trial, but the majority of impoverished black people in the South. It would come to represent a struggle between the Old South bigotry of the past and the progress in race relations many hoped would be the future.

The NAACP also intended to help out the Scottsboro boys. While still quite a middle class organization in the early thirties, they intended to bridge the gap by helping these poor

Southerners. However, of the $12,000 raised for their assistance by the association in 1932, none of it found its way to actually defending their innocence.18 In Stories of Scottsboro, James

Goodman writes of the concerted effort of the NAACP to not only help the Scottsboro boys, but do so better than the CP did. Clergymen members of the NAACP spoke from their pulpits against the CP and would not allow the ILD to meet in their churches.19 They believed that only the Association belonged in Alabama helping blacks. However, not all members of the clergy felt this way; Goodman writes, “The members of the Cooperative Business League, an auxiliary of Chicago’s Pilgrim Baptist Church, voted to split the money it had raised for the

Scottsboro defense between the NAACP and the ILD.”20 Yet, Association stalwarts remained resistant to CP influence in the South. In 1932, in a symposium on communism in The Crisis,

Willis Cole, editor of the Louisville Leader, asked, “if black people could possibly make themselves at home among men who ‘hated god and all forms of religion.’”21 So much

17 Gellert papers, Box 1, “Song Lyrics,” Folder 3, p. 25. 18 Solomon, The Cry was Unity, p. 219. 19 James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), p. 67. 20 Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro, p. 68. 21 Ibid, p. 71. discourse between the CP and NAACP involved simply who was more helpful to poor blacks that little assistance was ever given to poor blacks.

In an article by journalist Eugene Gordon, this ignoring of the black poor is exposed.

“…[T]hese ‘big’ Negroes are not concerned about him and his future. He is beginning to see that some white men may honestly wish to help him,”22 he wrote. While the CP may have seen itself as helping blacks by disengaging them from the upper class, this served to splinter the solidarity of African Americans. While the Scottsboro case could have been an event that tied together assistance to convicts, blacks, and the impoverished quite nicely, it resulted in quite a bit of political squabble.

While the Communist led ILD intended to arrive in Alabama and immediately be accepted as legal counsel for the Scottsboro boys, this was not the case.23 Not only did racist whites fight the CP presence in the South all the way, but the NAACP would not stand for the CP entering their territory. “The Birmingham branch of the NAACP assailed the

Communists for their refusal to recognize the color line,” says Kelley.24 While this could have been a great opportunity for the two biggest national supporters of poor blacks to work together, it turned into a battle.

Meanwhile, on the artistic front of the CP, many writers continued to contribute to the effort of involving the black art form in political activism. Langston Hughes published several of his poems in journals, including one about “helpful” white politicians and the bourgeois blacks who ignored the uneducated cries of impoverished Southerners posing as aids to the blacks in an article simply entitled ‘4 Poems’

Voices crying in the wilderness At so much per word From the white folks: 22 Eugene Gordon, “Black Capitalists in America,” New Masses, (July, 1931), pp. 6-7. 23 Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, p. 79. 24 Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, p. 109. ‘Be meek and humbled, All you niggers, And do not cry Too loud.’25

Hughes once again reveals the attitude of many members of the CP and poor blacks outside of the CP that political leaders were not coming to their aid. Not only did they rarely help, but when they did, they would then ask blacks to settle their spirit of protest. To not cry too loud is to ask blacks to deny their inner most feelings of pain, sorrow, and abandonment they had felt since day one in America.

The writings of NAACP cofounder (1909), W.E.B. Dubois hints at some of the attitudes behind its members, or at least the spirit of the association. When W.E.B. DuBois wrote The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, his intention was to portray the pain and struggle of blacks through history and how they dealt with it through time. In his opening chapter he states, “…[F]ew men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the

American Negro for two centuries.”26 Thus, the Christian God of the white man posed by the

CP as an enslaver of blacks may have only been a façade slaves advanced to veil the emancipation they sought. Rather than God being a big guy, in their spirituals, the deity was the ideal of pure freedom. Although the attitude that the only freedom worth hoping for is that of death may be depressing, the sorrowful mantra brought solace to a weary life on earth.

Considering the lyrics Dubois quotes, “Dust, dust and ashes, fly over my grave/But the Lord shall bear my spirit home,” freedom fits well as a manifestation of “the Lord.”27 Therefore, in their sentimental holding to the past, the NAACP did not wish to render themselves eternally subservient to the white man or even the poor black subservient to them. They wished to learn from their past and build on this identity in hopes of achieving further growth upon the

25 Langston Hughes, “4 Poems,” New Masses, (July, 1930), p. 7. 26 W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk, (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), p. 3. 27 Dubois, Souls of Black Folk, p. 140. path towards ultimate freedom from economic, political, and physical slavery.

When The Crisis began publication in 1911, it did not include a wide variety of Negro songs in its pages. An early article claimed that composer Antonin Dvorak in his “American

Symphony” had stolen traditional Negro songs for some of his melodies without giving due credit.28 Seemingly, this is a high culture departure from the work songs that even Odum was discussing at this point in time. In a September 1918 article, a version of “America the

Beautiful” is included to the music of black composer, R. Nathaniel Dett.29 This is despite much of the racial oppression that even black American soldiers were receiving upon return from the war.30 In response to criticism for being too accommodating an association, an article appeared in 1919 which stated, “The CRISIS does not believe in violence as a means of social reform. It does not believe in Revolution.”31 Yet, as the 1920s began, and it became clearer that speaking out as aggressively as possible would be necessary to draw attention, The

Crisis included work of the nature of this following poem by Elma Erhlich Levinger, a critique of the sentimentality it had carried not long before:

That’s right: keep on singing, ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.’ I ain’t heard it since Miss Lucy’s little girl used to sing it, In the parlor, when I took mamma’s washing ‘round the back way: It’s a fine song—for the white folks.

‘There’s where the birds warble sweet in the springtime.’ That’s where it used to stink most down in nigger town; We slept six in a room and the drains never worked right; Lots of scarlet fever on account of them drains, But folks got to expect it; My little sister, she died of it in the springtime.

‘There’s where I labored so hard for old Massa.’ And he took his shot gun to me once and run me off the place, When I argued about the price he give me for my cotton; My buddy, Jake Stone, who went to France with me, talked too big: They got Jake one night over by the creek…… I ain’t goin’ to forget in a hurry what they done to him.

28 The Crisis, Feb. 1911, p. 12. 29 The Crisis, Sept. 1918, p. 68. 30 Foley, Spectres of 1919, p. 119. 31 The Crisis Dec. 1918, p. 46. ‘No place on earth do I love more sincerely Than old Virginny, the place where I was born—‘ It’s a fine place—for white folks: But you’d have to carry me to get me back there.32

Perhaps the journal wanted to prove its devotion to change and equality over a sentimental link with the past. Into the 1930s, the journal began to carry more protest articles than it had at first, and this may have been because the writers’ sense of urgency or audacity increased, or it may have been to compete with the rising tide of CP black protest journalism.

In conjunction with many of these CP journalists’ work, especially during the emergence of what Michael Denning calls “The Cultural Front,” when leftism infiltrated popular culture, was the commodification of black protest culture.33 Record albums by Lomax and Gellert, WPA Theatre shows like “How Long Brethren,” and an emergent café society that involved rich socialites in metropolises like New York enjoying performed black culture all represented a move to consume this protest as exotic entertainment. Lomax’s albums sold much better than Gellert’s because they were not as guilt-invoking – Gellert’s tended to point fingers at barons of industry as a societal cancer.34 Ironically, it was capitalism and industry that allowed the widespread consumption of the record albums containing songs that complained about it. The theatre, as has been mentioned was a Northern phenomenon and allowed at least a glimpse at the Southern pastoral culture that still existed in the American

South and allowed exploitation of blacks. The best known black theatre was the American

Negro Theatre begun in 1940, which would launch the career of many young Harlem actors.35

However, the venue where a wide variety of black song performance found its way to leftist

32 Ehrlich Levinger, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” The Crisis, July 1924, p. 226 33 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: the laboring of American culture in the twentieth century, (New York: Verso, 1996), pp. 338-361. 34 Alan Lomax Afro-American worksongs, spirituals, and ballads [sound recording], (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress Recording Laboratory, 1940). vs. Gellert, Negro Songs of Protest [sound recording]. 35 Denning, The Cultural Front, pp. 369-370. white ears was café society.

Café society represented a move toward an attempt at bourgeois sympathy for the downtrodden. Black performers would come and the aristocrats of New York and Chicago showed their lack of racial prejudice by listening to the beautiful voice of the best Afro-

American singers of the 1930s. Billy Holliday, Lena Horne, and Josh White were names particularly popular in many of the café circuits. Despite the nice glossy exterior, many of these cafés resulted in merely promulgating the cycle of racism. Many of them would allow black performers to entertain the clients but not serve them drinks or allow them to sit afterwards. In an effort to combat this hypocrisy, an establishment ironically named “Café

Society” was opened in New York and touted an informal image, where customers did not take themselves so seriously. The doorman was dressed in tatters, performers were allowed to sit with the guests, and attendants were not as snooty as those as say the more conservative

Stork Club. With its liberal leanings, it was no surprise that Café Society was associated with the CP.36 Many of the guests were party members and rumors proliferated that the owner was also a member. Ultimately, the ring of NYC cafes would not stand for this leftist establishment mocking their serious attempt at maintaining good old fashioned white values, and the authorities were eventually clued to raid the place. Reactionary efforts had diffused any political activism that Café Society might promulgate, like many developments in support of black equality in the 1940s.

During this time, Alan Lomax’s touted claim to political activism was dragging

Leadbelly throughout the northeast, in the late 1930s, performing his songs of the imprisoned.

Although Gellert was harshly critical of Lomax for only assisting a subservient black,

Leadbelly’s appearance made quite an impression on the crowds to whom he performed with

36 David W. Stowe, “The Politics of Café Society,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 84, No. 4 (Mar., 1998), pp. 1384-1406. his poor man outlaw look.37 Often entertaining his crowds dressed in a prison jumper, he would play his acoustic guitar and sing about the oppression of his bossman or the things he had to enjoy in life. Lomax spoke about Leadbelly’s fascination with New York City and his adept mastery of the guitar, but rarely spoke of the oppression of blacks at large symbolized by his image.38 Alan Lomax wrote, in his introduction to a collection of Leadbelly’s songs,

“Leadbelly was the performer everyone thought of when they wanted honesty, authenticity, and power.”39 John Lomax, however, had a different impression of Leadbelly, one that did not speak to the spirit of protest, but of paternalism with a racist nature:

I am disturbed and distressed at his beginning to show off in his songs and talk when his money value is to be natural and sincere as he was while in prison: of course as this tendency grows, he will lose charm and become only an ordinary, low ordinary, Harlem nigger.40

No doubt, this is not the attitude of a man that wishes blacks to advance beyond their place of subservience. Since his father and long-time mentor, John Lomax, had racist tendencies, Alan

Lomax may have struggled to not be racist himself.

In December 1940, on the 75th anniversary of the 13th Amendment, Alan Lomax organized a concert with the Golden Gate Quartet and Josh White to sing spirituals, blues, and chain gang songs – held in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress.41 There were also nights of classical music and poetry readings surrounding the main folk music event.

Interestingly, the classical music included compositions by both Anton Dvorak and Robert

Nathaniel Dett appeared in the two nights before the folk music event.42 Prior articles of The

37 Filene, “Our Singing Country,” p. 611 38 Alan Lomax: Select Writings, 1934-1997, pp. 51-53. 39 Ibid, p. 199. 40 John Lomax. Letter to his wife (1934), Tyehimba Jess, “lomax v. leadbelly in new york: letters to home, 1934,” Callaloo, Vol. 27, No. 2, (2004), p. 406. 41 Alan Lomax, Freedom: a concert in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States [sound recording], (New York: Bridge, 2002). Seventy Five Years of Freedom [concert program], Library of Congress, Dec. 18, 1940. 42 “The Festival of Music in the Coolidge Auditorium: Programs – Wednesday Evening and Thursday Evening,” Seventy Five Years of Freedom [concert program], pp. 1-3. Crisis had criticized the composers for not aptly recognizing their black folk music influences.43 Concert organizers showed the correlation of the classical to folk music in presenting both in the performance’s duration.

Though the concert was for entertainment purposes as much as it was for political activism, it exposed the emotional pain present through the lyrics of the songs especially when sung by Josh White. Lomax could have picked anyone, but he picked political activist White, in a show of sympathy towards the cause of black rights, not just interest in the singing of blacks. Also, since the concert commemorated the end of legal slavery, it was no surprise that

White sang many songs associated with illegal enslavement practices that still existed in the

South like Poor Lazarus and Trouble.44 In addition to Lomax, speakers Sterling Brown and Alain

Locke spoke in between sets about the historical and social importance of the songs being performed. While Lomax held onto an “art for art’s sake” point of view, Brown and Locke spoke to the protest and pain obvious in each style of song from spiritual to work song to blues. In their discussions, each scholar represented three schools of black folk music analysis:

Locke leaned more toward the spiritually concerned wing politically represented in the

NAACP; Brown represented the leftist secular group concerned with protest; and Lomax was the connoisseur intent on commidifying folk music for appreciation by the masses.

Alain Locke, known for being the first black Rhodes Scholar from 1907-1910, was a professor of philosophy at Howard University from 1918 to 1952. His research was in linking black folk culture to its African roots and edited the anthology The New Negro in 1925 during the Harlem Renaissance.45 His comments on the Negro spiritual point out how important he believed they were to black consciousness and American consciousness:

43 The Crisis, Feb. 1911, p. 12. The Crisis, Sept. 1918, p. 68. 44 Sterling Brown, “Blues, Ballads, and Social Songs,” Seventy Five Years of Freedom [concert program]. pp. 22-25. 45 Eugene C. Holmes, “Alain Leroy Locke: A Sketch,” The Phylon Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1st Qtr., 1959), pp. 82-89. The spirituals are the taproot of our folk music, stemming generations down from the core of the group experience in the body and soul suffering of slavery, and expressing for the race, for the nation, for the world the spiritual fruitage of the hard experience.

But, they are not merely slave songs or even Negro folk songs, the very elements that make them spiritually expressive of the Negro make them at the same time deeply representative of the soil that produced them. They constitute a great and now increasingly appreciated body of regional American folk song and music as unique spiritual products of American life.46

Locke explained that blacks are connected to their spirituality through slavery. The spiritual accesses this unique aspect of black history. Since slavery had long been illegalized at this point, it would have been difficult for Locke to evoke compassion in the audience for the victims of the Peculiar Institution. Thus, he took the standpoint of raising the slave spiritual up as a work of art that should be admired as uniquely American.

Sterling Brown, on the other hand, dealt with a song genre sung by people who still suffered seventy five years after freedom. Oppressed blacks in the American south were not only the workers upon the railroad or in the fields, but also black civilians living in townships that were continually abused by racist whites. Brown was also a Howard professor as Locke was, but of English, known for writing poetry.47 Comparing Negro folk blues to Tin Pan Alley blues, he pointed out that the former is more commercial and not necessarily reflective of the authentic feeling of black folk song:

The fundamental difference between the Negro folk blues and the Tin Pan Alley blues is that, in the Tin Pan Alley blues, the grief is feigned, but, in the Negro folk blues, the gaiety is feigned.48

His point here was that not all songs that claim to be blues truly express the emotions that initially birthed the black folk song, and they capitalize on a form that is meant to be an

46 Alain Locke “Spirituals,” Seventy Five Years of Freedom [concert program], p. 8. 47 Joyce A.A. Camper, “Sterling Brown: Maker of Community in Academia,” African American Review, Vol. 31, No. 3, (Autumn, 1997), pp. 437-441. 48 Sterling Brown, “Blues, Ballads, and Social Songs,” Seventy Five Years of Freedom [concert program], p. 17. expressive lament of the black people. Too often people are concerned with songs much more than people, as we see in the story Brown related of black blues great Bessie Smith:

In 1937, the year of her death, [Bessie Smith] was not so well taken to heart in America. In her native Deep South, the victim of an automobile accident, this fine American folk artist was denied entrance to a Southern hospital because she was a Negro, and she was finally allowed a hospital many miles further along the road, but it was too late for anything to be done. There seems to me to be something of a profound blues poem in that.49

Brown expressed an authentic concern for the singers of black folk songs, and wished to show the audience the humanity of those that perform.

Speaking about the more politically motivated songs, speaking on the subject of black worker exploitation by their white bosses, Brown continued to plea with the audience to make certain they know the songs are not fiction:

The social song came from the exploited, the outcasts, from the labor camps, from the chain gangs, from the places where brutality, and injustice and fear stalk at will. These are the sorrow songs of a bitter present.50

As an extended introduction to the performance of two social songs by Josh White, Brown’s comments were only reaffirmed when White began to sing of the sad state of coal miners suffering from dust inhalation in ‘Silicosis Blues:’

Now, silicosis, you made a mighty bad wreck of me, I said, silicosis made a mighty bad wreck of me. Robbed me of right to live and I'm worried as I can be.

Now I'm diggin' in that tunnel, makin' only six bits a day, I'm diggin' in that tunnel, makin' only six bits a day. Didn't know I was diggin’ my grave, silicosis eatin’ my lungs away51

Accenting every observation Brown made, White’s tender pained brooding spoke to the suffering of a people that made such beautiful music, the oppressed Southern black.

49 Ibid, p. 20. 50 Sterling Brown, “Blues, Ballads, and Social Songs,” Seventy Five Years of Freedom [concert program], p. 24. 51 Ibid, pp. 24-25. Finally, Lomax attempted to recall the roots of the black work song, and ended up confusing whether it was a creation of blacks themselves or an emulation of the American whites around them, as Allen, Ware, and Garrison had suggested 75 years earlier:

It is held on high authority on the one hand that some Negro work song melodies are probably derived from the tunes of the old shanties. On the other hand Joanna Colcord calls the Negro shanty man of the 19th century the best of all of the leaders of shanty singing.52

One must question precisely what Lomax wished to convey in this statement about the work song. Certainly, it was influenced by the slave spiritual, but Lomax did not address this glaring fact; he chose to highlight the shanty which may or may not have played a role in blacks singing songs while at work, but this was not as closely tied to their historical conscience as slavery.

In speaking about railroad songs, Lomax did not recognize the clear protest in their persistent complaints of hard conditions. Rather, he saw them more as the glue that held a work team together and ensured efficient action, claiming that, “the foreman is so tough and mean that they have to a have a tender voice to keep them all working together so they won’t get hurt on the job.”53 While he did point out the harsh foreman, Lomax did not recognize the sophisticated means of organized resistance present in this form of Negro folk music. He seems to be the least emphatic of the enormous capacity for black protest in the works of art displayed in his concert. However, the performance was well received and Lomax began to spread his folk work to wider and wider audiences, including radio and many more record albums.54

By 1940, black work songs had been used in three major forums of political activism: the NAACP, the CP, and café society. Though the two political organizations had continued

52 Alan Lomax, “Reels and Work Songs,” Seventy Five Years of Freedom [concert program], p. 29. 53 Alan Lomax, “Reels and Work Songs,” Seventy Five Years of Freedom [concert program], p. 32. 54 Elijah Wald, Josh White: Society Blues, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000) p. 69. to compete for control of the Scottsboro case and the trophy for most helpful to poor

Southern blacks, the journalism of both began to impact society at large, including their use of song as a means of expressive protest. Café society was in vogue at the beginning of the

1940s, but would not last long. While the 1930s had seen a wide array of people concerned with the state of poor blacks in America, little legal change had occur and would not until 30 years later.