Filosofická Fakulta Masarykovy Univerzity
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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies Literatures in English Mgr. et Mgr. Jan Beneš, M.A. Black Empire of the Air: Black Aviation in the Harlem Renaissance and George S. Schuyler’s Serialized Fiction Dissertation Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph.D. 2018 I declare that I have worked on this dissertation independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph.D. for his kind patience, support, and invaluable advice. I also want to express my gratitude to Dr. Kateřina Prajznerová, Dr. Amy Earhart, Dr. Ira Dworkin, Dr. Violet Johnson, the Czech Educational Foundation of Texas, and my family who have all supported and guided me through the writing process and my studies at Masaryk University and Texas A&M University. Table of Contents INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................... 1 1. THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THREE BLACK NEWSPAPERS ........................................ 25 2. AVIATION’S MESSAGE OF GOODWILL WITH MILITARY THREAT IN THE BLACK PRESS ................................................................................................................................. 32 2.1 Origins of Black Aviation’s Goodwill Message ......................................................... 36 2.1.1 Aviation as Military Threat: The Tulsa Race Riot, Marcus Garvey, and the Black Press .............................................................................................................................. 37 2.2 Bessie Coleman: Black Aviation’s Joan of Arc ......................................................... 42 2.3 Coleman’s Successors: Joel “Ace” Foreman and Hubert Fauntleroy Julian ........ 49 2.3.1 Hubert Julian’s Goodwill Message ..................................................................... 52 2.4 Lindbergh, the Black Press, and Aviation Editorials ............................................... 58 3. THE AVIATION CAMPAIGN: EDUCATION, ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES, AND REPRESENTATION ........................................................................................................... 68 3.1 William J. Powell’s Creation of and Contribution to the Aviation Campaign ...... 68 3.2 Educating Harlem: Black Aviation in New York and the South ............................ 96 3.3 Black Aviation Education in Chicago: John C. Robinson, Female Aviators, and Military Displays ...................................................................................................... 104 3.6 Flying the Distance: Breaking Geographical and Racial Barriers ....................... 146 3.6.1 The Loudest Voice of Black Aviation: Hubert Julian ....................................... 149 3.6.2. Flying Haiti ....................................................................................................... 162 3.6.3 Writing the First Transcontinental Flight and Erasing Another Boundary ....... 173 3.6.4 Forsythe and Anderson’s Goodwill Flights for Interracial Understanding ....... 180 3.7 The Next War Will Be Fought In the Air: Black Aviation’s Military Dimension .................................................................................................................................... 194 3.7.1 Ethiopia’s Significance for Black Aviation ....................................................... 199 3.7.2 Black America’s Fascination with Ethiopia ...................................................... 202 3.7.3 From Chicago to Ethiopia ................................................................................. 210 3.7.4 John C. Robinson’s Ethiopian Endeavors in the Black Press ........................... 214 3.7.5 Showing Off: John C. Robinson’s Technical Expertise on Display ................. 218 3.7.6 A Hero’s Welcome ............................................................................................ 223 3.8 I’m Flying to Memphis: John C. Robinson’s Untold Mission ............................... 226 3.9 The Writing in the Sky .............................................................................................. 230 4. BLACK EMPIRE OF THE AIR: READING AVIATION IN GEORGE S. SCHUYLER’S SERIAL FICTION .......................................................................................... 233 4.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 233 4.2 Educating the Black Internationale’s Army and Putting it to Work ................... 242 4.3 Revenge and Fury Raining from the Sky ................................................................ 250 4.4 Control of the Air: Armed Liberation, Decolonization, and Survival .................. 266 4.5 Black Empire in the Context of Frederick Douglass’ and Booker T. Washington’s Treatments of Technology ....................................................................................... 281 4.6 Love is in the Air ........................................................................................................ 300 4.7 The Flying Ethiops in Revolt in Ethiopia ................................................................ 306 CONCLUSION: THE SKY IS THE LIMIT ............................................................................... 324 WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED .......................................................................................... 336 INTRODUCTION In 1926, the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing. Knopf released Langston Hughes’s first collection of poems The Weary Blues and Boni & Liveright published Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death; Walter White’s Flight also came out that year. Alain Locke’s The New Negro: An Interpretation, published in 1925, triggered an inspired intellectual debate about the merits of black literature and art throughout 1926 – George S. Schuyler, for example, penned “The Negro-Art Hokum” for The Nation, in which he expressed skepticism toward the existence and the development of “new art forms expressing the ‘peculiar’ psychology of the Negro” (122). A week later, Langston Hughes challenged Schuyler’s views in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” claiming that “for the American Negro artist [there is] a great field of unused material ready for his art” (156). W.E.B. DuBois joined in later in the year with “Criteria of Negro Art,” famously declaring that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be.” And a group of young artists – Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Langston Hughes – published a controversial new magazine Fire!!, “devoted to younger negro artists,” in the fall of 1926. Essays, poems, novels, and magazines by black Americans were thriving. Few more so than Urban League’s academic magazine, the Opportunity, which held its prestigious annual award dinner on May1, 1926. As Harlem Renaissance’s leading non- Garveyite newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier and the New York Amsterdam News, informed, “some of the most distinguished persons of both races in the field of the arts, letters and music” witnessed as Arna Bontemps took the Alexander Puskin Poetry Prize and Countee Cullen received his fourth poetry award (“Win Contest Prizes for Literature,” “Opportunity Magazine Awards 22 Literature Prizes”). However, this exhilarating announcement of the progress of the Harlem Renaissance was overshadowed by another piece of news that day: the tragic death of Bessie Coleman, black America’s heroic aviatrix. Coleman’s face, the 1 photographs of her wrecked plane aflame, and the reports on her demise dominated the cover pages of black newspapers. Harlem, Chicago, and other black communities around the country mourned the loss of a creative, ingenious, internationally-recognized and internationally-minded figure, who embodied the spirit of the New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance – yet has rarely been discussed in the context of the period’s zeitgeist. Academic discussions and scholarship of the Harlem Renaissance have mostly revolved around the New Negro’s artistic expression in the literature, theater, music and dance, as well as the visual art of the era. Nathan Huggins’ seminal Harlem Renaissance (1971), for example, delves into the era’s “naïve assumptions about the centrality of culture” (303), while Genevieve Fabre and Michael Feith’s Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance (2001) emphasizes the rehabilitative aspect of New Negro art. The more recent Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem (2013) and A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (2015) explore the inter- and trans-national impact and inspirations of Harlem Renaissance art and its artists. Even paradigmatically groundbreaking monographs such as The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negro’s Western Experience (2012) or Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Cholocate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (2011) acknowledge the primacy of literature and art in their discussions of the era. Indeed, the ideologues of what Richard Wright originally referred to as the “Harlem school of expression” emphasized art as a means of redeeming the stereotypical image of black America; although, as Josef Jařab points out in Masky a Tváře Černé Ameriky, these redemptive attempts often resulted in new, but inverse stereotypes (21). James Weldon Johnson, for example, urged in the preface to The Book of