Study Guide for Infants of the Spring Student Matinee

by Priscilla Page and Shaila Schmidt

CONTENTS

Playwright’s Bio

Novelist’s Bio

Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Black Man by Ifa Bayeza

The N Word: History, Culture, and Context by Priscilla Page

Overview of Harlem Renaissance

Overview of The Jazz Age

Who’s Who of Harlem Renaissance

Race and Racial Violence: • Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith, 1915 • The Jim Crow Era Racial Violence in the North: How New York City Became The Capital of the Jim Crow North Black Organizing and Resistance: • NAACP • United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Glossary

Ifa Bayeza is an award-winning theater artist and novelist. Her critically acclaimed drama The Ballad of Emmett Till premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and was awarded a Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference fellowship and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Play. The Ballad made its West Coast premiere at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles, garnering six Ovation Awards, including Best Production; four Drama Desk Critics' Circle Awards, including Best Production; and the Backstage Garland Award for Best Playwriting. After numerous critically acclaimed regional productions, Bayeza expanded The Ballad into The Till Trilogy, recounting the epic Civil Rights saga in three distinct dramas. In June 2018, Mosaic Theatre in Washington DC will present for the first time all three plays, The Ballad of Emmett Till, benevolence and That Summer in Sumner. Other innovative works for the stage include Ta'zieh – Between Two Rivers; Welcome to Wandaland; String Theory and Homer G & the Rhapsodies in The Fall of Detroit, for which she received a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award. Musicals include Charleston Olio, a Fred Ebb Musical Theatre Award finalist, and Kid Zero with music by Grammy-nominee Harvey Mason. Bayeza is also a novelist, debuting with the "gorgeous" (NY Times), "magical" (Elle), "dazzling" (Essence) Some Sing, Some Cry, co-authored with her sister Ntozake Shange. A graduate of Harvard University and formerly Distinguished Artist-in-Residence and Sr. Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Africana Studies, Brown University, she was named 2014 Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Playwriting Fellow. Currently, she is pursuing her MFA in Directing and Dramaturgy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she will be directing her adaptation of Wallace Thurman's Harlem Renaissance classic novel Infants of the Spring, premiering at UMass Amherst Rand Theater in March 2018.

Wallace Thurman was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on August 16, 1902 to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. He was reared by his maternal grandmother, Emma Jackson, who was among the founders of Calvary Baptist Missionary Church—the first black church in Utah. Young Thurman lived for a time in Boise, Idaho, Chicago, Illinois, and Omaha, Nebraska before returning to Salt Lake City when he was 12. Despite his family’s residence in a state politically and culturally dominated by the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormon), Thurman was recognized for his brilliance at West High School and the University of Utah, where he was a pre-med major.

In 1922, he transferred to the University of Southern California to study journalism but dropped out without receiving a degree. While in Los Angeles he worked at the post office where he met aspiring novelist Arna Bontemps. Thurman and Bontemps worked together on The Pacific Defender, a black newspaper, and they started an artistic journal, Outlet.

Relocating to Harlem in 1925, in part as a result of his friendship with Bontemps, Thurman founded a second magazine, The Looking Glass, and became managing editor of The Messenger, the journal of Harlem’s radical Socialists led by Asa Philip Randolph. Thurman also worked as a ghost writer for the magazine, True Story. In 1928 Thurman became the first black reader at Macaulay, a major New York publishing company.

Thurman’s writings soon propelled him into the vanguard of the “New Negro Renaissance.” Together with Aaron Douglas, Bruce Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, Wallace in 1926 founded his third journal: Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett were among the first contributors to Fire!! For many critics of the period, Fire!!, not Alain Locke’s edited anthology, The New Negro (1925), launched the Harlem Renaissance. Wallace Thurman published three novels: The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores intra-racial conflicts related to skin color; Infants of the Spring (1932), which satirizes the Harlem Renaissance and its leading artists; and The Interne (1932), co-authored with A.L. Furman. His play, “Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life in Harlem” (written in collaboration with William Jourdan Rapp), reached Broadway in 1929 to mixed reviews.

Nonetheless by the early 1930s Wallace Thurman was acknowledged as one of the leading novelists, critics, poets, and playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance although he, in his own works, questioned and debunked its existence. Wallace Thurman died in New York City on December 22, 1934. By the time of his death at the young age of 32 from tuberculosis, Thurman had established himself as a pioneer and literary revolutionary who left an enviable written record as a legacy. www.blackpast.org/aah/thurman-wallace-1902-1934

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG BLACK MAN

An Historic Work; A Contemporary Drama

By Ifa Bayeza

Harlem Renaissance novelist Raymond Taylor, after a meteoric debut, struggles to create under the weight of history and the toll of expectation. He staves off anxiety by entertaining his white, downtown colleagues with erudite, witty tours of black Harlem nightlife and mocking caricatures of fellow roomers in the boarding house of eccentrics where he lives, affectionately christened “Niggerati Manor” by his fellow tenant Paul Arbian, the only artist Ray deems worthy of begrudging respect.

When Stephen Jorgenson, his Danish visitor, expresses total fascination with the black cultural Mecca, Raymond challenges him to “try living here” and see what it’s really like. No one realizes the revelations that will result. Ray discovers that he has been wrong about everyone, as blind to their true identities as he is to his own. The childlike Pelham gets arrested for rape, Stephen’s fascination gives way to a loathing he can’t explain, Ray’s girlfriend Lucille falls for a roustabout, and the arrogant, self-possessed Paul commits suicide.

Only when Raymond’s world collapses does he begin to see, only when he has lost everything does he realize the novel he was seeking to write, only when he has lost everyone, does he comprehend his love for them.

The novel ends with an image of dominating white light – a metaphor not only of the white power structure, that is simultaneously invading, controlling, exploiting and disparaging black people and their culture, but of Raymond’s own internalized hatred, as well, the veiled white gaze that all along has existed behind his eyes.

From spring to winter, confidence to desolation, joy to despair, community to solitude, innocence to awareness, Infants of the Spring is a story of the fall from an imperfect paradise where life is chaotic, crazy, wild, effulgent and strange to a desolate and lonely place beneath the stark clarity of a winter night.

The N-Word: History, Culture and Context By Priscilla Page

Excerpt from “History, Amnesia, and the N-Word” by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

It’s easier to debate whether libertinism in language is racist than to address the Big Dilemma: the extent to which racial disparities of the past are culpable for racialized class disparities today and what kinds of correctives may be appropriate. It’s easier to argue language than to argue the world we live in; language, however, always has and always will reflect the world we live in. Our befuddlement over appropriate language mirrors a general befuddlement over the route by which American society has passed from legalized segregation to economic resegregation, without ever having clearly established its ethics vis-à-vis race, class, and economics. Confusion over the N-word pinpoints the importance of preserving and conveying the past in ways that are relevant in the present.

(published in Dissent, the Foundation of the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Winter 2008)

II

From “The Etymology of Nigger: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North” by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

The best place to begin a conversation about the term nigger is in the late 1820s, a moment when it already reverberated with white belonging and black exile. Yet, to presume the word was always and had only ever been a slur misses the point of its virulence. Instead, it was a word with multiple vantage points, a word whose meanings were complicated by the race and class of the person who spoke it. This is a fact exemplified by a close look at how David Walker used it in his famous 1829 manifesto Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Walker, a free man of color who penned his abolitionist pamphlet when he lived in Boston, used his writing as a forum to indict U.S. whites for slavery and their demeaning treatment of free people of color in the North. In the scope of his writing, he invoked the word nigger four times, twice in the body of the work and twice in separate footnotes. Walker’s most familiar description confirms what modern readers already know. The word, he said, had Latin roots and had once designated ‘‘inanimate beings . . . such as soot, pot, wood, house, etc,’’ as well as animals. But Walker argued that by 1829, it had become the purview of U.S. whites who spat it out at ‘’Africans, by way of reproach for our colour, to aggravate and heighten our miseries, because they have their feet on our throats.’’ With this description, Walker signaled that nigger had become a powerful anti-black epithet, whites used it with intention, and its essence could only be illuminated through the use of a violent metaphor. (208) The black use of nigger was more complicated than one simple explanation can neatly convey. Instead of thinking of nigger purely as a word that African Americans borrowed and mimicked from white English, it is more accurate to conceptualize it as a word and a social identity that black laborers ultimately shaped for themselves. (212) It is vital to think of nigger as part of a black vocabulary, rather than just a word and a form of violence thrust upon African descended people. Doing so helps to explain its vitriol—as opposed to less damaging racialized terms such as ‘‘slave,’’ ‘‘African,’’ ‘‘darky,’’ ‘‘black,’’ or ‘‘sable.’’ But perhaps even more crucially, understanding the history of the word helps unlock the secret of its undeniable staying power in the vocabulary of African Americans into the twenty-first century. (214)

(Published in the Journal of the Early Republic, Volume 36, Number 2, Summer 2016, pp. 203-245) III

As I began to work on this play, I was struck by the whirlwind of stories that swirled in and around the infamous Nigeratti Manor of Harlem in the 1920s. Playwright Ifa Bayeza takes her time introducing us to a cadre of Black artists, their admirers and adversaries, some revelers, and a few hangers-on in the first half of the play. As they traipse through each scene, their lives come into sharper focus and we learn details of their trials and tribulations. The play moves from spring to winter and its tone shifts with the seasons. At some of the darker points, we are confronted with various forms of violence enacted by and upon some of the characters. We also see them tackle fundamental questions about life and the purpose of art against the backdrop of Jim Crow era racism. This play is as much about joy and expressions of freedom as it is about race relations of its time (which mirror race relations of our time). Bayeza and I spoke about the care that we needed to take with the undergraduate actors as they stepped into their roles in this play.

Early in the rehearsal process, we addressed the use of the N-word and the instances of violence called for in the text. I asked the actors to think about how they could each approach their characters in ways that would honor them, flaws and all. I asked the actors to think about how they could maintain a sense of dignity for their characters AND I told them that they needed to balance this with a sense of dignity for themselves. I acknowledged that all actors open themselves up to a certain kind of vulnerability on stage and I told them I recognized their commitment to do so in these roles. With this mixed-race cast, I asked them to consider how Black actors are doubly vulnerable as the targets of racism and violence in certain scenes. Lastly, I asked that everyone involved maintain an awareness of these layers as they worked together on this play so that they could take care of themselves and each other.

As opening night approached, I began thinking about the impact of this play on audience members. Bayeza and I discussed the potency of language and the few times that the n-word appears in the play. Scholar Jabari Asim provides a thorough account of the history of the word and troubles through private and public uses of it in his book The N Word: Who Can Say it, Who Shouldn’t, and Why. He writes about the fear of “language police (or any kind of police) patrolling our kitchens, bedrooms, and parlors” as he declares “No speech is improper under one’s roof.” (230) But he also shares that the term “rightly belongs to the realms of art, scholarship, journalism, and history, none of which can be effectively pursued without critically engaging the word.” (233) As I considered our theater production at a predominantly white institution in a liberal New England state, I began considering ways to publicly discuss the use of this word with audience and community members. I decided to call Professor Judyie Al-Bilali, my friend and colleague in the Department of Theater for her advice. Her words helped me immensely:

Priscilla: I’m organizing a public conversation on the use of the N-word in art and literature. Would you be part of this talk? Judyie: What do we need to talk about? When I’m with black folks, I can say the word; when I’m with white folks, I don’t. And no, white people, you can’t say it.

OVERVIEW OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

SATURDAY NIGHT, Archibald Motley Jr. (1935)

“This is a period when the majority of black people in the United States are born as free people — the first generation when they're not largely born as slaves,” says Minkah Makalani, assistant professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/02/03/black-history-harlem- renaissance/22825245/

Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the Harlem Renaissance is considered a golden age in African American culture, literature, music, performance, and art.

It gets its name from the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, which was meant to be an upper-class white neighborhood in the 1880s, but rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and desperate landlords seeking to fill them. In the early 1900s, a few middle- class black families from another neighborhood known as Black Bohemia moved to Harlem, and other black families followed. Some white residents initially fought to keep African Americans out of the area, but failing that many whites eventually fled. From 1910 to 1920, African American populations migrated in large numbers from the South to the North, with prominent figures like W.E.B. Du Bois leading what became known as the Great Migration.

In 1915 and 1916, natural disasters in the south put black workers and sharecroppers out of work. Additionally, during and after World War I, immigration to the United States fell, and northern recruiters headed south to entice black workers to their companies. By 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the South had moved north, and Harlem was one of the most popular destinations for these families.

The end of Harlem’s creative boom began with the stock market crash of 1929 and by 1935 many pivotal Harlem residents had moved on. That same year, a riot broke out following the arrest of a young shoplifter, resulting in three dead, hundreds injured, and millions of dollars in property damage, as well as serving as a marker of the end of the Harlem Renaissance. While the Harlem Renaissance did not achieve the sociopolitical transformation for which some had hoped, today it is clear that this movement marked a turning point in black cultural history: it helped to establish the authority of black writers and artists over the representation of black culture and experience, and it created for those writers and artists a continually expanding space within Western high culture. www.history.com/topics/black-history/harlem-renaissance

Dr. Alain Locke, scholar and professor of philosophy, published The New Negro in 1925 and in it he defined the artistic and social goals of the New Negro Movement. Because the book was written so closely to the movement, some people say that it helped to create the movement. Some call it a manifesto for the movement.

The New Negro Movement is also referred to as the Harlem Renaissance and the Negro Renaissance and it began in the early 1920’s. The name Harlem Renaissance is something of a misnomer because this was a national movement with particular localized expressions in cities such as Washington D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and New York.

Artists and writers expressed the intellectual and cultural aspects of the life and struggles of Black people in the U.S. In his book, Dr. Locke described the movement as “representing a new spiritual outlook and as having inner objectives.”

Not two decades earlier, W.E.B. Du Bois had written a book titled The Souls of Black Folk (1903). A famous quote from that book is “for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line”. Setting out to show to the reader “the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century,” Du Bois explains the meaning of the emancipation, and its effect, and his views on the role of the leaders of his race.

The cultural products of this time period were many: plays, journals, magazines, poetry, music, dance, and visual art. Two important journals of this time were Crisis, published by the NAACP (1910) and Opportunity: The Journal of Negro Life, published from 1923- 1949 and edited by Charles S. Johnson.

OVERVIEW OF THE JAZZ AGE

Key Words

Explosion of Culture A New Music Blasts onto the scene A Tornado A stirring of African and Indigenous and European influences Congo Square in New Orleans quickly spread to Chicago, New York, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and out into the world

Important Bands and Musicians to know:

Original Dixieland Jazz Band King Oliver's Creole Jazz New Orleans' Rhythm Kings Jelly Roll Morton Louis Armstrong Sydney Bechet Fletcher Henderson Duke Ellington Bessie Smith Clarence Williams, Louisiana, organizer of improvisers

Famous Clubs in Harlem The Cotton Club The Savoy Ballroom

Jazz Becomes

This is an excerpt from an essay by Will Friedwald, liner notes for Masters of Jazz: Traditional Jazz Classics, Rhino Records, 1996

Most new art forms come into the world via a slow, developmental process, but jazz’s birth was marked not so much by evolution as by explosion.

In that sense, the origin of jazz is tantamount to a series of blasts. The ingredients of this new music began stirring in a melting pot of African and European influences, which could have only found each other in the American South at the end of the 19th century. (Not coincidentally, that’s around the same time that jazz’s brother music, the more European-inspired ragtime and the more African-based blues, were also experiencing conception.) The mixture finally fermented in New Orleans at the dawn of the 1900s where the legendary cornetist Buddy Bolden blended blues, ragtime, and the brass band tradition, becoming the music’s first (albeit unrecorded) superstar.

From the Crescent City, this music spread everywhere at once: to Chicago, to New York, to Kansas City, Los Angeles, and, before the teens were over, London, Paris, and all points east. Jazz swept through each of these far-flung locales like a tornado, completely changing the lives of everyone it came in contact with. It’s no coincidence that the first jazz records were made roughly at the same time as America’s entry in World War I: the new country with the new music was becoming an international political and military presence at the same moment that it began at assert itself as a cultural force.

Ten years after those first jazz discs were made, the music had reached a watershed moment. In that first decade, jazz had found its first great soloists and solo style setters (Sydney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Earl Hines, Jack Teagarden), its first major collectives (King Oliver’s Creole Jazz, New Orleans Rhythm Kings, The Hot Fives, the Eddie Lang-Joe Venuti chamber groups), its first great composers and orchestrators (Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson, and Duke Ellington) organizers and entrepreneurs (Clarence Williams and Red Nichols), dozens of great bands, and the single most significant figure in the history of the music, Louis Armstrong. It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of Armstrong throughout all of jazz— indeed, all American music—and the formative years in particular. More than anyone else, he was what jazz was, and he determined what this music would sound like.

Armstrong’s greatest bequest to world culture was to look at a number of directions that jazz was already beginning to move in and solidify them. For instance, solo improvisations were to some degree a key component of jazz from the beginning, but Armstrong single-handedly glamorized the soloist into the single most dynamic figure in the music. New Orleans players were already beginning to play in 4/4 time, and Armstrong established this as the definitive time signature for all of jazz. More than anything else, Armstrong codified the rhythmic swing of the music, the essential element that makes it different from any other form. Armstrong also invented the whole of jazz singing, which was hardly the least of his miracles. Armstrong perfected the feel of jazz: as Dizzy Gillespie later put it, all future jazz musicians owed their livelihood to the man they called “Pops.”

However much Armstrong improved the music, it still had reached a formidable point at the time it was first recorded. The Original Dixieland Jazz (earlier “Jass”) Band, as their title implies were the first jazz group to come out of New Orleans and make it big in the North. Creating a sensation in the New York, ODJB soon made the first jazz records, some of which were the biggest sellers the phonograph industry had yet known. In addition to inspiring millions of youngsters to take up the music (most famously the great Bix Beiderbecke), the group established much of the repertoire of early jazz, introducing and in some cases composing such widely recorded pieces as “Tiger Rag,” “Fidgety Feet,” and “Singin’ The Blues.”

While the quintet was later attacked by critics who thought it inappropriate that a white band should be the first superstars of what was and is primarily black music, the ODJB had an energy and a rambunctiousness that established the tone for early jazz in record studios, nightclubs, and vaudeville. The group’s jointly copyrighted perennial “Tiger Rag,” recorded when the fivesome briefly reunited in 1936, shows how much the band’s playing, particularly cornetist-leader Nick LaRocca and star clarinetist Larry Shields, had held up and even improved 20 years later.

Still, the ODJB couldn’t hold a candle to the first great black group from New Orleans to record, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Among other benefactions the KOCJ brought the 21-year-old out of New Orleans and introduced him to the world as half of the most powerful two-trumpet (or cornet rather) team in history. Still their most powerful member was their leader, a masterful blues player who virtually wrote the book on the uses of mutes and growl effects in jazz brass playing. Despite the aptness of his official nickname, Joseph “King” Oliver was more widely known as “Papa Joe” particularly to his protégé, Armstrong. Evidencing both a stronger sense of swing and a greater grounding in the blues than their predecessors, the Creole Jazz Band, which also included clarinet and drum greats Johnny and Baby Dodds and Armstrong’s second wife, Lil Hardin on piano, set a standard for drive and force in jazz that has rarely been equaled (and which comes through in spite of the recording era’s primitive recording equipment). Oliver’s original Sugar Foot Stomp (Dipper Mouth Blues) remained a jazz staple long into the big band era right down to banjoist Bud Scott’s hearty declamation of “Oh, play that thing!”

WHO’S WHO OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

LANGSTON HUGHES

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born February 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon gold medal for literature.

He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing. His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period, Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself. www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/langston-hughes

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Zora Neale Hurston was born January 7, 1891, the spirited daughter of former slaves, and was a seminal and controversial icon of the Harlem Renaissance. It's said that Hurston—with her brazen wit, affable humor, and charm—waltzed into the Harlem scene, easily befriending actress Ethel Waters, and poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.

Her second book, 1937’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, faced backlash from some of her Harlem Renaissance peers. As the movement evolved, Harlem Renaissance writers had been debating how African-Americans should present their people and culture in their art. Should they devotedly fight against the negative stereotypes long established by Caucasian writers? Should their work be penned as progressive propaganda intended to expose the racism of modern America as a means to provoke change? Or should African- Americans create without the constraints of a political or creative ideology? Hurston sided with the last group, and saw her novel criticized for its embrace of the vernacular of the black South, its exploration of female sexuality, and its absence of an overt political agenda. mentalfloss.com/article/73895/retrobituaries-zora-neale-hurston-genius-harlem- renaissance

BRUCE NUGENT

An artist, writer, actor, dancer, dilettante, and bohemian of 1920s Harlem, Nugent was born to middle class Washington, D.C. socialites. Despite his ubiquitous presence in Harlem and intimate friendships with leading figures of the Renaissance, Nugent remained a minor player among the giants of that cultural movement. He nonetheless established a place for himself among Renaissance stars when he became one of the co-editors of Fire!!!, a short-lived avant-garde journal which would represent the true voice of the younger generation of African Americans writers.

Unlike his more closeted renaissance peers, including, Hughes, Thurman, Hurston, and Claude McKay, Nugent was an unabashedly happy, openly same sex loving man, an identity that may have cost him a more prominent publishing career. Nevertheless, Nugent’s credits included publication in the journals Crisis and Opportunity as well as in Locke’s New Negro anthology, a role on Broadway in Du Bose Heyward’s Porgy from 1927 to 1928 which included the London cast of the play, and much later as Co-Chair of the Harlem Cultural Council in the 1960s.

www.blackpast.org/aah/nugent-richard-bruce-1906-1987

W.E.B. DU BOIS

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, better known as W.E.B. Du Bois was born February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. While growing up in a mostly European American town, W.E.B. Du Bois identified himself as "mulatto," but freely attended school with whites and was enthusiastically supported in his academic studies by his white teachers.

In 1885, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend Fisk University. It was there that he first encountered Jim Crow laws. For the first time, he began analyzing the deep troubles of American racism. After earning his bachelor's degree at Fisk, Du Bois entered Harvard University. In 1895, he became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. In 1903, Du Bois published his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of 14 essays. In the years following, he adamantly opposed the idea of biological white superiority and vocally supported women's rights. In 1909, he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and served as editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis.

W.E.B. Du Bois died on August 27, 1963 — one day before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington — at the age of 95, in Accra, Ghana, while working on an encyclopedia of the African Diaspora. www.biography.com/people/web-du-bois-9279924

CLAUDE MCKAY

Claude McKay was born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica. The son of peasant farmers, he was infused with racial pride and a great sense of his African heritage and eventually became a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems challenging white authority in America, and from generally straightforward tales of black life in both Jamaica and America to more philosophically ambitious fiction addressing instinctual/intellectual duality, which McKay found central to the black individual’s efforts to cope in a racist society.

His novel, Home to Harlem—with its sordid, occasionally harrowing scenes of ghetto life—proved extremely popular, and it gained recognition as the first commercially successful novel by a black writer. Published in 1928, it was his glimpse into the “unsavory aspects of New York black life” that was prized by readers—and condemned by such prominent black leaders as W.E.B. Du Bois. www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/claude-mckay

MARCUS GARVEY

Born in Jamaica, Marcus Garvey became a leader in the black nationalist movement and aimed to organize blacks everywhere. He achieved his greatest impact in the United States, where he tapped into and enhanced the growing black aspirations for justice, wealth, and a sense of community. After arriving in New York in 1916, he founded the Negro World newspaper, an international shipping company called Black Star Line and the Negro Factories Corporation. During the 1920s, his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was the largest secular organization in African-American history.

Garvey’s movement was the first black attempt to join modern urban goals and mass organization. Although most subsequent leaders did not try to create black economic institutions as he had, Garvey had demonstrated to them that the urban masses were a potentially powerful force in the struggle for black freedom. www.history.com/topics/black-history/marcus-garvey

PAUL ROBESON

Paul Robeson was the epitome of the 20th-century Renaissance man. He was an exceptional athlete, actor, singer, cultural scholar, author, and political activist. At seventeen, he was given a scholarship to Rutgers University, where he received an unprecedented twelve major letters in four years and was his class valedictorian. After graduating he went on to Columbia University Law School, and, in the early 1920s, took a job with a New York law firm. Racial strife at the firm ended Robeson’s career as a lawyer early, but he was soon to find an appreciative home for his talents. Returning to his love of public speaking, Robeson began to find work as an actor. Throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, he was a widely acclaimed actor and singer, and was one of the first black men to play serious roles in the primarily white American theater. www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/paul-robeson-about-the-actor/66/

AARON DOUGLAS

Aaron Douglas, often called “the Father of Black American Art,” was an African-American painter and graphic artist who played a leading role in the Harlem Renaissance. He contributed illustrations to Opportunity, the National Urban League's magazine, and to The Crisis, put out by the National Association for the Advancement Colored People. Douglas created powerful images of African-American life and struggles, and won awards for the work he created for these publications. His first major commission, to illustrate Alain LeRoy Locke's book, The New Negro, prompted requests for graphics from other Harlem Renaissance writers. Douglas had a unique artistic style that fused his interests in modernism and African art.

www.biography.com/people/aaron-douglas-39794

ALAIN LEROY LOCKE

Alain Leroy Locke, a leading black intellectual during the early twentieth century and an important supporter of the Harlem Renaissance. A gifted and talented student, Locke attended Harvard University in 1904. Locke excelled at his studies and became the first African American to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

Alain Locke has been widely regarded as the originator of the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance. His main contribution to both movements was the promotion and emphasis on values, diversity, and race relations. He challenged African Americans to acknowledge and promote their cultural heritage while at the same time, making the effort to integrate into the larger society and appreciate the mores and customs of other ethnic groups. He also was a firm believer in W.E.B DuBois' Talented Tenth philosophy, yet, unlike DuBois, he remained socially attached to the general African American population and staunchly resisted any form of elitist behavior. While Locke was never open about his homosexuality, his sexuality contributed to his various sensibilities and would frequently manifest itself in his works. www.blackpast.org/aah/locke-alain-1886-1954

DUKE ELLINGTON

Considered one of the greatest jazz composers of all time, Duke Ellington had an enormous impact on the popular music of the late 20th century. With more than two thousand songs, for almost fifty years he toured the world as a band leader and piano player. Today his recordings remain among the most popular jazz of the big-band era.

By 1927, Ellington’s band had found a small base of fans and secured an engagement at Harlem’s famous Cotton Club. This proved to be a major turning point in Ellington’s career, providing him with access to larger audiences through radio and recordings. In his more than fifty years as a professional musician, Ellington had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, awarded a doctor of music degree from Yale University, given the Medal of Freedom, and, most importantly, built the foundations from which much of the best American music consequently grew. www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/duke-ellington-about-duke-ellington/586/

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

Louis Armstrong was a trumpeter, bandleader, singer, soloist, film star and comedian. Considered one of the most influential artists in jazz history, he is known for songs like "Star Dust," "La Vie En Rose" and "What a Wonderful World."

Nicknamed "Satchmo," "Pops" and, later, "Ambassador Satch," was born in 1901 in New Orleans, Louisiana. An all-star virtuoso, he came to prominence in the 1920s, influencing countless musicians with both his daring trumpet style and unique vocals. Armstrong's charismatic stage presence impressed not only the jazz world but all of popular music. www.biography.com/people/louis-armstrong-9188912

BESSIE SMITH

Bessie Smith, born Elizabeth Smith, was an American singer and one of the greatest blues vocalists of her time.Smith grew up in poverty and obscurity. She may have made a first public appearance at the age of eight or nine at the Ivory Theatre in her hometown. About 1919 she was discovered by Ma Rainey, one of the first of the great blues singers, from whom she received some training. She made 160 recordings in all, in many of which she was accompanied by some of the great jazz musicians of the time, including Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong. Bessie Smith’s subject matter was the classic material of the blues: poverty and oppression, love—betrayed or unrequited—and stoic acceptance of defeat at the hands of a cruel and indifferent world. The great tragedy of her career was that she outlived the topicality of her idiom. In the late 1920s her record sales and her fame diminished as social forces changed the face of popular music and bowdlerized the earthy realism of the sentiments she expressed in her music. Her gradually increasing alcoholism caused managements to become wary of engaging her, but there is no evidence that her actual singing ability ever declined. www.britannica.com/biography/Bessie-Smith

MA RAINEY

Ma Rainey was the first popular stage entertainer to incorporate authentic blues into her song repertoire and became known as the "Mother of the Blues." She performed during the first three decades of the 20th century and enjoyed mass popularity during the blues craze of the 1920s. Rainey's music has served as inspiration for such poets as Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. Described by African-American poet Sterling Brown in Black Culture and Black Consciousness as "a person of the folk," Rainey recorded in various musical settings and exhibited the influence of genuine rural blues. She is widely recognized as the first great female blues vocalist. www.biography.com/people/ma-rainey-9542413

MAMIE SMITH Actress and performing artist Mamie Smith made music history in 1920 when she stepped into a studio to lay down “Crazy Blues,” considered by industry scholars to be the very first blues recording. Smith was a glamorous and multi-talented entertainer, performing on stage and in film. Her pioneering musical career paved the way for more successful female blues and jazz artists like “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith (no relation), and Billie Holiday. While “Crazy Blues” is cited as the first blues recording, it also represents the emergence of black female singers into popular music culture. The record was purchased by black and white consumers and was recognized as a lucrative marketing segment by studios and record company executives. Smith found herself suddenly wealthy, and she spent much of her earnings on clothes, jewelry, real estate, and servants. She toured with the Jazz Hounds, recorded a number of follow-up records, and performed in New York theaters. She also appeared in a series of low-budget African American films during the early 1940s. www.blackpast.org/aah/smith-mamie-1883-1946

Racism and Racial Violence

Birth of a Nation, Film by D.W. Griffith, 1915 A controversial, explicitly racist, but landmark American film masterpiece - these all describe groundbreaking producer/director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). The domestic melodrama/epic originally premiered with the title The Clansman in February, 1915 in Los Angeles, California, but three months later was retitled with the present title at its world premiere in New York, to emphasize the birthing process of the US. The film was based on former North Carolina Baptist minister Rev. Thomas Dixon Jr.'s anti-black, 1905 bigoted melodramatic staged play, The Clansman, the second volume in a trilogy whose other titles were: The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900 and The Traitor. Its release set up a major censorship battle over its vicious, extremist depiction of African Americans, although Griffith naively claimed that he wasn't racist at the time. Unbelievably, the film is still used today as a recruitment piece for Klan membership - and in fact, the organization experienced a revival and membership peak in the decade immediately following its initial release. And the film stirred new controversy when it was voted into theNational Film Registry in 1993, and when it was voted one of the "Top 100 American Films" (at # 44) by the American Film Institute in 1998. Film scholars agree, however, that it is the single most important and key film of all time in American movie history - it contains many new cinematic innovations and refinements, technical effects and artistic advancements, including a color sequence at the end. It had a formative influence on future films and has had a recognized impact on film history and the development of film as art. In addition, at almost three hours in length, it was the longest film to date. However, it still provokes conflicting views about its message. Director Griffith's original budget of $40,000 (expanded to $60,000) quickly ballooned, so Griffith appealed to businessmen and other investors to help finance the film - that eventually cost $110,000! The propagandistic film was one of the biggest box-office money-makers in the history of film, partly due to its exorbitant charge of $2 per ticket - unheard of at the time. This 'first' true blockbuster made $18 million by the start of the talkies. [It was the most profitable film for over two decades, until Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). The subject matter of the film caused immediate criticism by the newly-created National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for its racist and "vicious" portrayal of blacks, its proclamation of miscegenation, its pro-Klan stance, and its endorsement of slavery. As a result, two scenes were cut (a love scene between Reconstructionist Senator and his mulatto mistress, and a fight scene). But the film continued to be renounced as "the meanest vilification of the Negro race." Riots broke out in major cities (Boston, Philadelphia, among others), and it was denied release in many other places (Chicago, Ohio, Denver, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Minneapolis, eight states in total). Subsequent lawsuits and picketing tailed the film for years when it was re-released (in 1924, 1931, and 1938). The resulting controversy only helped to fuel the film's box-office appeal, and it became a major hit. Even President Woodrow Wilson during a private screening at the White House is reported to have enthusiastically exclaimed: "It's like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all terribly true." To his credit, Griffith later (by 1921) released a shortened, re-edited version of the film without references to the KKK. In its explicitly caricaturist presentation of the KKK as heroes and Southern blacks as villains and violent rapists and threats to the social order, it appealed to white Americans who subscribed to the mythic, romantic view (similar to Sir Walter Scott historical romances) of the Old Plantation South. Many viewers were thrilled by the love affair between Northern and Southern characters and the climactic rescue scene. The film also thematically explored two great American issues: inter-racial sex and marriage, and the empowerment of blacks. Ironically, although the film was advertised as authentic and accurate, the film's major black roles in the film -- including the Senator's mulatto mistress, the mulatto politician brought to power in the South, and faithful freed slaves -- were stereotypically played and filled by white actors - in blackface. [The real blacks in the film only played in minor roles.] Its climactic finale, the suppression of the black threat to white society by the glorious Ku Klux Klan, helped to assuage some of America's sexual fears about the rise of defiant, strong (and sexual) black men and the repeal of laws forbidding intermarriage. To answer his critics, director Griffith made a sequel, the magnificent four story epic about human intolerance titled Intolerance (1916). A group of independent black filmmakers released director Emmett J. Scott's The Birth of a Race in 1919, filmed as a response to Griffith's masterwork, with a more positive image of African-Americans, but it was largely ignored. Prolific black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux's first film, the feature- length The Homesteader (1919), and Within Our Gates (1919) more effectively countered the message of Griffith's film. The Jim Crow Era and “Separate, But Equal” (1877-1966) Introduction: Immediately following the Civil War and adoption of the 13th Amendment, most states of the former Confederacy adopted Black Codes, laws modeled on former slave laws. These laws were intended to limit the new freedom of emancipated African Americans by restricting their movement and by forcing them into a labor economy based on low wages and debt. Vagrancy laws allowed blacks to be arrested for minor infractions. A system of penal labor known as convict leasing was established at this time. Black men convicted for vagrancy would be used as unpaid laborers, and thus effectively re- enslaved.

The Black Codes outraged public opinion in the North and resulted in Congress placing the former Confederate states under Army occupation during Reconstruction. Nevertheless, many laws restricting the freedom of African Americans remained on the books for years. The Black Codes laid the foundation for the system of laws and customs supporting a system of white supremacy that would be known as Jim Crow.

The majority of states and local communities passed "Jim Crow" laws that mandated "separate but equal" status for African Americans. Jim Crow Laws were statutes and ordinances established between 1874 and 1975 to separate the white and black races in the American South. In theory, it was to create "separate but equal" treatment, but in practice Jim Crow Laws condemned black citizens to inferior treatment and facilities. Education was segregated as were public facilities such as hotels and restaurants under Jim Crow Laws. In reality, Jim Crow laws led to treatment and accommodations that were almost always inferior to those provided to white Americans.

The most important Jim Crow laws required that public schools, public facilities, e.g., water fountains, toilets, and public transportation, like trains and buses, have separate facilities for whites and blacks. These laws meant that black people were legally required to: attend separate schools and churches use public bathrooms marked "for colored only" eat in a separate section of a restaurant sit in the rear of a bus

Background: The term "Jim Crow" originally referred to a black character in an old song, and was the name of a popular dance in the 1820s. Around 1828, a minstrel show performer named Thomas "Daddy" Rice developed a routine in which he blacked his face, sang and danced in imitation of an old black man in ragged clothes. By the early 1830s, Rice's character became tremendously popular, and eventually gave its name to a stereotypical negative view of African Americans as uneducated, shiftless, and dishonest.

Beginning in the 1880s, the term Jim Crow was used as a reference to practices, laws or institutions related to the physical separation of black people from white people. Jim Crow laws in various states required the segregation of races in such common areas as restaurants and theaters. The "separate but equal" standard established by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Fergurson (1896) supported racial segregation for public facilities across the nation.

A Montgomery, Alabama ordinance compelled black residents to take seats apart from whites on municipal buses. At the time, the "separate but equal" standard applied, but the actual separation practiced by the Montgomery City Lines was hardly equal. Montgomery bus operators were supposed to separate their coaches into two sections: whites up front and blacks in back. As more whites boarded, the white section was assumed to extend toward the back. On paper, the bus company's policy was that the middle of the bus became the limit if all the seats further back were occupied. Nevertheless, that was not the everyday reality. During the early 1950s, a white person never had to stand on a Montgomery bus. In addition, it frequently occurred that blacks boarding the bus were forced to stand in the back if all seats were taken there, even if seats were available in the white section.

The Beginning of the End of Segregation

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Louise Parks (February 4, 1913 - October 24, 2005), a resident of Montgomery, Alabama refused to obey bus driver James Blake's demand that she relinquish her seat to a white man. She was arrested, fingerprinted, and incarcerated. When Parks agreed to have her case contested, it became a cause célèbre in the fight against Jim Crow laws. Her trial for this act of civil disobedience triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation in history, and launched Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the organizers of the boycott, to the forefront of the civil rights movement that fostered peaceful protests to Jim Crow laws.

During the early 1960s numerous civil rights demonstrations and protests were held, particularly in the south. On February 1, 1960, in a Woolworth department store in Greensboro, N.C, four black freshmen from North Carolina A & T College asked to be served at the store's segregated lunch counter. The manager refused, and the young men remained seated until closing time. The next day, the protesters returned with 15 other students, and the third day with 300. Before long the idea of nonviolent sit-in protests spread across the country.

Building on the success of the "sit-ins," another type of protest was planned using "Freedom Riders." The Freedom Riders were a volunteer group of activists: men and women, black and white (many from university and college campuses) who roade interstate buses into the deep south to challenge the region's non-compliance with U.S. Supreme Court decisions (Morgan v. Virginia and Boynton v. Virginia) that prohibited segregation in all interstate public transportation facilities. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsored most Freedom Rides, but some were also organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

These and other civil rights demonstrations moved President John F. Kennedy to send to Congress a civil rights bill on June 19, 1963. The proposed legislation offered federal protection to African Americans seeking to vote, to shop, to eat out, and to be educated on equal terms.

To capitalize on the growing public support for the civil rights movement and to put pressure Congress to adopt civil rights legislation, a coalition of the major civil rights groups was formed to plan and organize a large national demonstration in the nation's capital. The hope was to enlist a hundred thousand people to come to attend a March on Washington DC. Eventually, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act made racial segregation and discrimination illegal. The impact of the long history of Jim Crow, however, continues to be felt and assessed in the United States.

Hansan, J.E. (2011). Jim Crow Laws and Racial Segregation. Social Welfare History Project. Retrieved 31 January 2018 from http://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/civil- war-reconstruction/jim-crow-laws-andracial-segregation/ How New York City Became The Capital of the Jim Crow North: Racial injustice is not a regional sickness. It's a national cancer. By Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis August 23, 2017 Jim Crow segregation and racism had a strange and robust career outside of the South, especially in that supposed bastion of liberalism, New York City. Citizens at every level of New York society gave it life: journalists at national newspapers, wealthy suburban homeowners, working-class renters, university bureaucrats, police commissioners, mayors, union leaders and criminal court judges.

Many did so at the same time they condemned racism in the South. Indeed, one of the longest-standing facets of Northern racism and segregation was the constant deflection to the problems in the South. “Ultraliberal New York had more integration problems than Mississippi,” Malcolm X observed. “The North’s liberals have been for so long pointing accusing fingers at the South and getting away with it that they have fits when they are exposed as the world’s worst hypocrites.”

Slavery arrived in New Amsterdam, the colony now home to Manhattan, in 1626. It remained intact during and after the American Revolution, when slaves still represented 20 percent of New York’s population. The state outlawed new racial slavery in 1799, but masters still had use of their slaves, and their children, for 28 more years.

Nor are the city’s hands clean when it comes to the Civil War. New York was a stronghold of abolitionism, but it also bred pro-slavery sentiments and anti-immigrant white nationalism. The majority of city voters did not vote for Abraham Lincoln in 1860 (nor in 1864) because the city’s economy, its ports and its banks were wedded to slavery. In July 1863 a bloody Civil War battle actually happened in New York City (although we rarely recognize it as an official battle in the war) when immigrant artisans rebelled against the Union Army’s mandatory draft. They attacked draft offices, Republican newspapers and black people, killing random African Americans in the streets and even burning down the colored orphanage.

Nor did the end of the war and slavery bring racial reconciliation to New York. Just as Jim Crow segregation laws spread throughout the South in the 1890s and early 1900s, black people in New York suffered from written and unwritten rules against racial mixing in marriage, public accommodations and housing. Racial violence broke out in New York City over brutal encounters between black people and police officers in 1900, 1935 and 1943. Not even the nation’s fight against the Nazis eliminated Jim Crow practices from New York City. When the city’s master builder, Robert Moses, expanded construction of housing, parks, playgrounds, highways and bridges in the decades following World War II, he adhered to ethnic composition rules for urban planning. This practice exacerbated the racial segregation that already existed in the city’s neighborhoods. The Federal Housing Authority’s neighborhood rating system and city zoning policies meant that New York City schools and neighborhoods grew even more segregated after the war.

The building of Stuyvesant Town, a residential development in New York City, shows how both private decisions and public policy shaped the Jim Crow North. Made possible by the city’s use of eminent domain to clear the area, the reversion of public streets and land to private ownership and a 25-year tax abatement, Stuyvesant Town opened in 1947 completely racially segregated. (Moses, who had championed the project, had directly opposed inserting a provision into the city contract that would have opposed discrimination in tenant selection.) When black people sued, the New York Supreme Court protected segregation and sided with the developer’s claim that the development was private — despite all the public money used to make it possible — and therefore entitled to discriminate as it sees fit.

With the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, black parents and civil rights activists thought desegregation would finally come to the city’s separate and unequal schools. But city leaders, many white New Yorkers and the city’s newspapers repeatedly demurred. Schools superintendent William Jansen directly instructed his staff to refer to New York City’s segregated schools as “separate” or “racially imbalanced”: “The use of the word ‘segregation’ in releases is always unfortunate.”

After a decade of meetings, rallies and black parent organizing, on Feb. 3, 1964, over 460,000 students and teachers stayed out of school to protest the lack of a comprehensive desegregation plan for New York City schools — the largest civil rights demonstration of the era, far outstripping the March on Washington. But the city bowed to white parents’ pressure not to desegregate.

As that episode suggests, opposition to civil rights activism was fierce in New York. In 1964, a year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, in a poll conducted by the New York Times, a majority of white people in New York City said the civil rights movement had gone too far. Respondents spoke of black people receiving “everything on a silver platter” and of “reverse discrimination” against whites. Nearly half said that picketing and demonstrations hurt black people’s cause.

Civil rights opponents in New York weren’t trumpeting segregation at the schoolhouse door. Rather they laid blame for black poverty, over-policing of black communities, educational disparities and black uprisings at the foot of black people’s “cultural deprivation,” not the histories of segregation and discrimination that had shaped this city’s political, economic and social life since the 17th century. Which makes it unsurprising that a sold-out audience cheered Alabama Gov. George Wallace at Madison Square Garden, when he campaigned in New York City in 1968. More recently, New York City became a primary practitioner of the racially discriminatory policing practice called “stop, question and frisk.” Such tactics targeted nearly 4.5 million individuals for no reason other than the color of their skin and the neighborhood they were walking through. Only one word exists for that: racism.

When racism is portrayed only through spitting and screaming, tiki torches and vigilante violence, many people rest easy, believing they share little responsibility for its maintenance. But systemic racial discrimination has long existed across the country and worked through multiple means: through language that disguised it, through government bureaucracy and the leveraging of political power and law enforcement that enabled it, and through arguments about cultural dysfunction that justified inequity and the need for punitive approaches.

Statues of Confederate soldiers and generals who rose up in rebellion against the United States need to come down. But when they do, we will still have to grapple with the history of racism in our country, especially in the Jim Crow North, where we have yet to recognize how deep our history of racial segregation is and yet to do the necessary work of removing its destructive practices and effects.

Black Organizing and Resistance:

NAACP Banner, Manhattan Office, 1936-1938

NAACP Silent Protest Parade on July 28, 1917 on 5th Avenue. This parade came about because of the violence acted upon African Americans, including race riots and lynching in Texas, Tennessee, and Illinois. One incident in particular, the East St. Louis Massacre, was a major catalyst of the silent parade. This horrific event drove close to 6,000 Black people from their own burning homes and left many dead. http://www.blackpast.org/aah/naacp-silent-protest-parade-new-york-city-1917

The United Negro Improvement Association, from Robin D.G. Kelley "Dreams of a New Land" in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 2002.

Marcus Garvey founded the UNIA with his first wife, Amy Ashwood, in his native Jamaica in 1914. It began as a benevolent association, but when they moved to Harlem in 1916, Garvey transformed the UNIA into a mass-based, global, black nationalist movement intent on redeeming Africa and establishing a homeland for the black world. In some ways the UNIA resembled an army preparing for battle, which might be expected of any nationalist movement born in the midst of the greatest European nationalist conflict of all time: World War I. Yet like most race leaders at the time, Marcus Garvey was heir to an older warrior tradition rooted in the Old Testament.

The UNIA never actually waged war anywhere, but World War I militarism had a profound impact on the organization's gender politics, according to the historian Barbara Bair. Garveyite parades, pageants, poetry, and songs, as well as speeches und documents, drew on metaphors of war that defined gender roles within the movement. Black men assigned to the UNIA's African Legion performed military drills, symbolizing assertiveness, readiness, and self-defense. UNIA leaders wore elaborate uniforms resembling European imperial designs, therefore reversing the dominant image of black men as subordinate. Garveyite leadership exuded strength, dominance, and nationhood. The Black Cross nurses symbolized the nurturing role of women by ministering to the needs of soldiers and the community as a whole. They wore white habits that, likewise, reversed the dominant image of black womanhood. Challenging stereotypes of black women as hypersexual Jezebels, the Black Cross nurses were "angels of charity and mercy," holy sisters united in purity and devotion lo their own community and to the greater redemption of Africa.

Xenophobia

The Immigration Act of 1924, signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge provided a quota for immigrants entering the U.S. which was set at two percent of the total of any given nation’s residents in the U.S. as reported in the 1890 census. After July 1, 1927, the two percent rule was to be replaced by an overall cap of 150,000 immigrants annually and quotas determined by "national origins" as revealed in the 1920 census. College students, professors and ministers were exempted from the quotas. Initially immigration from the other Americas was allowed, but measures were quickly developed to deny legal entry to Mexican laborers. The clear aim of this law was to restrict the entry of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, while welcoming relatively large numbers of newcomers from Britain, Ireland, and Northern Europe. The 1921 law had used the 1910 census to determine the base for the quotas; by changing to the 1890 census when fewer Italians or Bulgarians lived in the U.S., more of the "dangerous` and "different" elements were kept out. This legislation reflected discriminatory sentiments that had surfaced earlier during the Red Scare of 1919-20. (http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1398.html) Harlem/135th Street – Founded by Dutch settlers in 1650s, the large, northern borough of Manhattan has had a predominantly African-American community since the early 20th century. The block of 135th Street to the west was one of Harlem’s first African-American enclaves after Philip A. Payton broke the color barrier by offering apartments to NYC’s Black citizens. The northwest corner of this intersection was once Speakers’ Corner, where charismatic activists like Marcus Garvey and A. Philip Randolph extolled passersby from atop their soapboxes. www.walksofnewyork.com/blog/harlem-new-york

Prohibition and Speakeasies – Prohibition took effect on January 17, 1920 and it wasn’t repealed until 1933. People wanting to drink had to buy liquor from licensed druggist for medicinal purposes, clergymen for religious reasons or illegal sellers known as bootleggers. Another option was to enter private, unlicensed barrooms, nicknamed “speakeasies” for how you had to speak the password in order to gain entry so as not to be overheard by law enforcement. At the height of Prohibition in the 1920s, there were 32,000 speakeasies in New York. The competition for patrons in speakeasies created a demand for live entertainment. The already popular jazz music, and the dances it inspired in speakeasies and clubs, fit into the era’s raucous, party mood. With thousands of underground clubs, and the prevalence of jazz bands, liquor- infused partying grew during the “Roaring Twenties,” when the term dating—meaning young singles meeting without parental supervision—was first introduced. prohibition.themobmuseum.org/the-history/the-prohibition-underworld/speakeasies/ art deco – originating in Paris, it is a modernist style manifested across the spectrum of the visual arts: from architecture, painting, and sculpture to the graphic and decorative arts. Art Deco works are symmetrical, geometric, streamlined, often simple, and pleasing to the eye. This style is in contrast to avant-garde art of the period, which challenged everyday viewers to find meaning and beauty in what were often unapologetically anti-traditional images and forms. [www.theartstory.org/movement-art-deco.htm]

Oscar Wilde – author and playwright known for his works, including The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as his brilliant wit, flamboyant style and infamous imprisonment for homosexuality [www.biography.com/people/oscar-wilde-9531078]

William Blake - an English engraver, artist, poet, and author. Blake has been regarded as the earliest and most original of the Romantic poets, but in his lifetime, he was generally neglected or dismissed as mad. [www.britannica.com/biography/William-Blake]

Arthur Rimbaud - It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry on subsequent practitioners of the genre. His impact on the Surrealist movement has been widely acknowledged and he was a major figure in symbolism. [www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/arthur-rimbaud]

Edgar Allen Poe - American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the gruesome. His The Raven (1845) numbers among the best-known poems in the national literature. [www.britannica.com/biography/Edgar-Allan-Poe]

Walt Whitman - America’s world poet—a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. Whitman is regarded as one of America’s most significant 19th-century poets. [www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/walt-whitman]

James Abbott McNeill Whistler - One of the most significant figures in American art and a forerunner of the Post-Impressionist movement, his paintings, etchings, and pastels epitomize the modern penchant for creating "art for art's sake." They represent one of the earliest shifts from traditional representational art to abstraction that is at the heart of much of modern art. [www.theartstory.org/artist-whistler-james-abbott-mcneill.htm]

Symphony in White, No.1: The White Girl (1862)

Paul Gaugin - one of the most significant French artist, schooled in Impressionism, but pioneered a new style of painting broadly referred to as Symbolism. He experimented with new color theories and semi-decorative approaches to painting developing a new style that married everyday observation with mystical symbolism, a style strongly influenced by the popular, so-called "primitive" arts of Africa, Asia, and French Polynesia. www.theartstory.org/artist-gauguin-paul.htm Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch) (1892)

Pablo Picasso - the most dominant and influential artist of the first half of the twentieth century. Associated most of all with pioneering Cubism, he also invented collage and made major contributions to Symbolism and Surrealism. His behavior has also come to embody that of the bohemian modern artist in the popular imagination. [www.theartstory.org/artist-picasso-pablo.htm]

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

Ignacio Zuloaga - Spanish genre and portrait painter noted for his theatrical paintings of figures from Spanish culture and folklore. Self Portrait

www.britannica.com/biography/Ignacio-Zuloaga

International House – a private, nonprofit residence and program center for graduate students, scholars engaging in research, trainees and interns in New York City. Residents live in a diverse residential community that promotes mutual respect, friendship, and leadership skills across cultures and fields of study. Students attend various universities and schools throughout the City of New York, including Columbia University, Juilliard School, and New York University, among others. [www.ihouse-nyc.org/about/]

Niggerati Manor - the word “Niggerati” is a combination of “nigger” and literati.” Wallace Thurman started the group of young intellectuals. The group consisted of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Wallace Thurman, and many other people. Hughes, Hurston, and Thurman enjoyed the shock value of referring to themselves as the Niggerati. Hurston’s biographer Valerie Boyd described it as “an inspired moniker that was simultaneously self-mocking and self-glorifying, and sure to shock the stuffy black bourgeoisie”. Hurston was actually the coiner of the name and nicknamed herself as the “Queen of the Niggerati”. blackthen.com/the-niggerati-publishers-of-the-journal-fire-during-the-harlem-renaissance/

Juno – Roman goddess equivalent of Hera, queen of the gods

Amazonian – as in women of the Amazon: big, strong warrior-like (from Greek mythology)

New York Urban League – The mission of the New York Urban League is to enable African Americans and other underserved ethnic communities to secure a first-class education, economic self-reliance, and equal respect of their civil rights through programs, services, and advocacy in our highly diversified city. [www.nyul.org/meet-the-league/mission/]

FIRE!! A Quarterly for Young Negro Artists! – an African-American literary magazine published in 1926. The publication was started by Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, Langston Hughes and many others. After it published one issue, its quarters burned down, and the magazine ended. Conceived to express the African-American experience during the Harlem Renaissance in a modern and realistic fashion, using literature as a vehicle of enlightenment, the magazine's founders wanted to express the changing attitudes of young African Americans. [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire!!]

Greenwich Village - Historically, Greenwich Village has always been a mecca for artists, a bohemian capital, and the center for the LGBTQ movement. Famously regarded as an epicenter for the American Bohemia movement of the early and mid-20th century, it was known as an artist’s neighborhood with eclectic and avant-garde residents. It was also a home to many political and social movements of the time, and a haven for progressive ideas. In 1925, New York’s oldest-running off-broadway theater, Cherry Lane Theater, was opened. It became the center of downtown theater and was a place where up-and-coming playwrights could exhibit their work. theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/new-york/articles/a-brief-history-of-greenwich-village-nyc/

NAACP – (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation’s oldest, largest and most widely recognized grassroots-based civil rights organization. Their mission is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination. [www.naacp.org/oldest-and-boldest/]

YWCA – (Young Women’s Christian Association) Their mission is to eliminate racism, empower women, stand up for social justice, help families, and strengthen communities, and are one of the oldest and largest women's organizations in the nation, serving over 2 million women, girls, and their families. [www.ywca.org/site/c.cuIRJ7NTKrLaG/b.7515891/k.C524/History.htm]

Socialism – Socialism is a socioeconomic ideal that calls for public ownership and control the production of goods and service. It emphasizes community contribution and stands in opposition to capitalism, which is based on private ownership and free markets. Socialists believe that capitalism leads to unfair and disproportionate control and wealth in society. www.britannica.com/topic/socialism

Karl Marx - a key figure in the Socialist/Communist movement “Red” – term used to describe someone who has communist ideals. sedition – conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a government

“gives ‘em the gleet” – gleet is a slang term for gonorrhea, it could also be slang for flashing a smile or giving someone the eye juniper – type of berry which gives gin its flavor manna (fall from the heavens) – edible substance which, according to the Bible, God provided for the Israelites during their travels in the desert during the forty-year period following the Exodus.

Pavlova – a Russian ballerina

[www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/movies/when-a-great-ballerina-tried-acting-in-film.html]

“rotogravure” supplement – high quality image reproductions included in the Sunday edition of The New York Times

Carnegie Hall – one of the most prestigious classical and popular music venues in the world spirituals – type of religious folksong most closely associated with the enslavement of African people in the American South. It constitutes one of the largest and most significant forms of American folksong. [www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197495/]

Roland Hayes – the highest-paid tenor in the world during the late 1920s and first African- American man to win international fame as a concert performer. His concerts always included spirituals, which Hayes called Aframerican religious folk music and, as early as 1924, he performed at least one concert before a desegregated audience in Atlanta. [www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/roland-hayes-1887-1977]

Rigoletto – Italian opera composed by Giuseppe Verdi that has become a staple in the operatic repertoire [www.theopera101.com/operas/rigoletto/] Franz Schubert – Austrian composer who bridged the worlds of Classical and Romantic music, noted for the melody and harmony in his songs (lieder) and chamber music. www.britannica.com/biography/Franz-Schubert

Robert Schumann – German Romantic composer renowned particularly for his piano music, songs (lieder), and orchestral music. Many of his best-known piano pieces were written for his wife, the pianist Clara Schumann. www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Schumann

George Frideric Handel – German-born English composer of the late Baroque era, noted particularly for his operas, oratorios, and instrumental compositions. He wrote the most famous of all oratorios, Messiah (1741). www.britannica.com/biography/George-Frideric-Handel

Johannes Brahms – German composer and pianist of the Romantic period, who wrote symphonies, concerti, chamber music, piano works, choral compositions, and more than 200 songs. Brahms was the great master of symphonic and sonata style in the second half of the 19th century. www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Brahms

Ludwig van Beethoven – German composer, the predominant musical figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras. Widely regarded as the greatest composer who ever lived, he dominates a period of musical history as no one else before or since. He revealed more vividly than any of his predecessors the power of music to convey a philosophy of life without the aid of a spoken text; and in certain of his compositions is to be found the strongest assertion of the human will in all music, if not in all art. www.britannica.com/biography/Ludwig-van-Beethoven

Ezekiel Saw the Wheel – spiritual folk song covered by artists like Louis Armstrong, Woody Guthrie, and Paul Robeson.

Dadaism – artistic and literary movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland. Its output was wildly diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage. Dada's aesthetic, marked by its mockery of materialistic and nationalistic attitudes, proved a powerful influence on artists in many cities. [www.theartstory.org/movement-dada.htm] lithograph reproductions – type of printing process used to reproduce original works of art. It is an authorized and many times originally crafted work by the artist or craftsman but does not require metal etchings like traditional prints do. Instead, they are made on a stone table or metal plate using various chemicals to duplicate the work. [baterbys.com/what-is-a-lithograph/]

Mount Olympus – the highest mountain in Greece and known in Greek mythology as the home of the Gods

“Water boy! Water boy!” – African-American traditional folk song built on the call "Water boy, where are you hidin'?" It is one of several water boy calls in cotton plantation folk tradition. [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboy_(song)] “a coon’s age” – a long time Jack Johnson – American boxer who, at the height of the Jim Crow era, became the first African American world heavyweight boxing champion. [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Johnson_(boxer)]

All God’s Chilluns Got Wings – a Negro spiritual song that inspired the Eugene O’Neill play of the same name

Claude Debussy – French composer whose works were a seminal force in the music of the 20th century. He developed a highly original system of harmony and musical structure that expressed in many respects the ideals to which the Impressionist and Symbolist painters and writers of his time aspired. www.britannica.com/biography/Claude-Debussy

Richard Strauss –an outstanding German Romantic composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His symphonic poems of the 1890s and his operas of the following decade have remained an indispensable feature of the standard repertoire. www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Strauss

Paul Whiteman – American bandleader, called the “King of Jazz” for popularizing a musical style that helped to introduce jazz to mainstream audiences during the 1920s and 1930s. He allowed little room for improvisation in his arrangements and greatly simplified jazz rhythms. He was successful as a composer of popular songs during the 1920s and led his orchestra in Broadway musicals. www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Whiteman

Maurice Ravel – French composer of Swiss-Basque descent, noted for his musical craftsmanship and perfection of form and style. www.britannica.com/biography/Maurice-Ravel blue stocking – intellectual or literary woman

François Villon – Most of what is known about Villon has been gathered from legal records and gleaned from his own writings. Villon was born to a young, poor French couple in 1431. His father died when he was a small boy, and he and his mother were left in a poverty made worse as Paris suffered through English occupation, civil war, and famine. Little is known about his life after receiving his Master of Arts degree, but on June 5, 1455, Villon was arrested for killing the priest Philippe Sermoise in a bar brawl in Paris. www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/fran%C3%A7ois-villon

Fyodor Dostoevsky – Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart, together with his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had an immense influence on 20th-century fiction. He is usually regarded as one of the finest novelists who ever lived. In 1849, a Russian court sentences Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for his allegedly anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group. www.britannica.com/biography/Fyodor-Dostoyevsky

Howard University – Founded in 1867, Howard (a historically black university) ranks among the highest producers of the nation's Black professionals in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, engineering, nursing, architecture, religion, law, music, social work and education. [www2.howard.edu/about/history]

Black Bottom (dance) - Originating among African Americans in the rural South, the Black Bottom eventually was adopted by mainstream American culture and became a national craze in the 1920s.

Charleston (dance) – popular dance of the 1920s, danced by both young women and men that Charleston involves the fast-paced swinging of the legs as well as big arm movements [www.thoughtco.com/the-charleston-dance-1779257]

Man Friday – male helper

Black Star Line – steamship corporation established in 1919 by Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. It was part of a larger effort on the part of Garvey to encourage black self-determination and economic independence. Garvey saw that blacks across the globe were largely being exploited and left out of the global economy. The BSL would partly remedy that situation by facilitating the shipment of goods amongst the far-flung people of the African Diaspora, thereby fostering the growth of a self-reliant and resilient global black economy. The BSL would also transport emigrants to Africa for the establishment of a black nation-state. [www.blackpast.org/aah/black-star-line-1919-1923]

The New York Call – socialist daily newspaper published in New York City. The Call was the second of three English-language dailies affiliated with the Socialist Party of America. [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Call]

Tower of Babel – in biblical literature, structure built in Babylonia. The story of its construction, given in Genesis 11:1–9, appears to be an attempt to explain the existence of diverse human languages. According to Genesis, the Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a mighty city and a tower “with its top in the heavens.” God disrupted the work by so confusing the language of the workers that they could no longer understand one another. The city was never completed, and the people were dispersed over the face of the earth. [www.britannica.com/topic/Tower-of-Babel]

minstrel men –theatrical form, popular from the early 19th to the early 20th century, that was founded on the comic enactment of racial stereotypes. The earliest minstrel shows were staged by white male minstrels (traveling musicians) who, with their faces painted black, caricatured the singing and dancing of slaves. [www.britannica.com/art/minstrel-show] “coon” – dehumanizing slur for a black person

Bellevue – America’s oldest public hospital, located in New York. It housed the city’s first morgue and it was the first hospital in America to run a maternity ward. It’s infamously known for its psychiatric care. [www.atlasobscura.com/places/bellevue-hospital]

Indian summer – period of unseasonably warm weather that typically occurs in the fall

Shah of Persia (ruler) – Reza Shah Pahlavi was the Shah of Iran (Persia) from 1925 until he was forced to abdicate by the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941. He introduced many social, economic, and political reforms during his reign, ultimately laying the foundation of the modern Iranian state. His legacy remains controversial to this day. His defenders assert that he was an essential modernizing force for Iran (whose international prominence had sharply declined during Qajar rule), while his detractors assert that his reign was often despotic, with his failure to modernize Iran's large peasant population eventually sowing the seeds for the Iranian Revolution nearly four decades later which ended 2500 years of Persian monarchy. [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reza_Shah]

Gabriele D’Annunzio – controversial Italian poet, novelist, dramatist, short-story writer, journalist, military hero, and political leader, the leading writer of Italy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. [www.britannica.com/biography/Gabriele-DAnnunzio] a little coin - refers to money, a bribe in this context pass for white – light-skinned African Americans who would willfully conceal their African lineage to gain social and economic advantage by reinventing themselves, usually as Caucasian but also as Latino, Native American, and Asian. [www.blackpast.org/perspectives/passing-passing-peculiarly-american-racial-tradition- approaches-irrelevance] May yo’ chirrens escape the tar brush. –referring to the “touch of the tar brush,” meaning: real or suspected African or Asian ancestry in a person of predominantly Caucasian ancestry. [en.wiktionary.org/wiki/touch_of_the_tarbrush] the Fifties – Midtown Manhattan where landmarks like Times Square, Rockefeller Center, and the Empire State Building are located

Spanish Delegation – the embassy of Spain which houses diplomatic ambassadors to the country

You win the fur-lined bathtub –a sexual reference to a woman’s body

Queen Sappho/Isle of Lesbos – an ancient Greek poet who infused her works with intense emotions - especially love, desire, longing, and their companion, suffering. She crafted her poems primarily as a tribute to the private world of women, something from which we are generally excluded in Greek literature. Lesbos is a Greek island named for the patron god Lesbos. [www.loggia.com/myth/sappho.html]

Mandarin robe – a silk robe; kimono

Batik scarf – a type of fabric that is treated with wax and dye. In Indonesia, batik is part of an ancient tradition, and some of the finest batik cloth in the world is still made there. [www.batikguild.org.uk/batik/what-is-batik]

Kabuki (red makeup under eyes) – Kabuki is a style of traditional Japanese theater that includes music, dance, and drama. Makeup is one of the most important parts of Kabuki theater. Each actor applies his own makeup, with the process of applying makeup allowing the actor to get to know the character he plays. For supernatural heroes and villains, which appear frequently in Kabuki plays, there is a special style of makeup called kumadori. Kumadori is made up of dramatic lines and shapes applied in different colors, each representing different qualities. The most commonly used colors are dark red, which represents anger, passion, or cruelty, and dark blue, which represents sadness or depression. [www.fashionencyclopedia.com/fashion_costume_culture/Early-Cultures-Asia/Kabuki- Makeup.html]