The Dinner and the Dean
In March 1924 — 100 years ago this year — Charles S. Johnson approached Alain Locke about hosting a dinner party bringing together young Black writers with the established White cultural influences in an event that would give birth to the Harlem Renaissance.
In this excerpt from The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart captures this pivotal moment in history.
This piece has been modified from the original.
“We want you to take a certain role in the movement,” wrote Charles S. Johnson to Alain Locke on 4 March 1924, and thereby changed his life and the future of Negro literature forever. “I may have spoken to you of a little group,” Johnson continued, “which meets here [at the offices of Opportunity] with some degree of regularity, to talk informally about ‘books and things.’” That group included a number of young people Locke already knew well: Countee Cullen, Jamaican-born aesthete Eric Walrond, budding Symbolist poet Gwendolyn Bennett, and Cullen confidant Harold Jackman, as well as Crisis literary editor Jessie Fauset, her friends Eloise Bibb Thompson and New York City Librarian Regina Anderson, along with Johnson himself. On one level, such meetings were little more than a New York version of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “Saturday Nighters.” But because Charles S. Johnson hosted the New York meetings, they were something more. Johnson saw the literary group as a new answer to the question, what should the Negro do? Write — without propaganda or special pleading for the Negro cause — but with confidence that creative writing by Black people would ultimately help liberate a people. One way to instill such confidence was to meet regularly.
There have been some very interesting sessions and at the last one it was proposed that something be done to mark the growing self-consciousness of this newer school of writers and as a desirable time the date of the appearance of Jessie Fauset’s book [There Is Confusion] was selected, that is, around the twentieth of March. The idea has grown somewhat and it is the present purpose to include as many of the newer school of writers as possible, — Walter White (who in a sense is connected with this group), Jean Toomer, and yourself.
The collection of participants reflected the cleavages of the early Harlem Renaissance: the real members of the “new school” in New York were Hughes, Cullen, Walrond, and Bennett, while Toomer and Locke were Washingtonians, and thus slightly removed. Locke and Fauset were also a half-generation older in age than the rest. Locke must have been flattered to learn that he was included in the “new school” of writers when he had not published a poem or novel.
“But our plans for you were a bit more complicated,” Johnson continued. He wanted Locke to serve as “master of ceremonies” at “a dinner meeting, probably at the Civic Club, to which about fifty persons will be invited: Carl Van Doren, H. L. Mencken, Robert Morse Lovett, Clement Wood, Oswald Garrison Villard, Mary Johnston, Ridgely Torrence, Zona Gale, and about twenty more of this type. Practically all of these are known to some of us, and we can get them. We are also including persons like Dr. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Robeson, Montgomery Gregory, Georgia Douglas Johnson.” Interestingly, neither the group nor the meeting had been noted on the list Locke carried away from his January meeting with Johnson. Most likely, the idea of having the Civic Club meeting or Johnson’s decision to use Locke at the occasion had materialized later.
Johnson asked Locke to perform the most important role at a dinner that was the first of its kind — an interracial communion between Black writers and White custodians of American culture to break bread and try to find a common language to talk about a literary awakening in America built around Negroes writing poems, short stories, and novels about the Black experience in America. Johnson needed Locke to be more than simply an emcee for a dinner. In truth, these young Black writers were not yet a school or a movement of thought, but a younger generation of writers who, though less talented and untested, resembled the younger generation of White American writers, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, who were defining a new American literature independent of European models. United less by ideology than by a sense that as Negro writers they had something to say if only their race and their inexperience were not held against them, their reigning metaphor was the “new,” that they had something “new” to say, even if what that was remained a mystery. Johnson was asking Locke to come up with an interpretation acceptable to young writers, old race leaders, and tentative White literary allies so that they could find a common language to talk about the prospects for vital Negro literature. Locke’s academic credentials allowed him to validate the potential of these young writers to contribute valuably to American civilization.
[A]n interracial communion between Black writers and White custodians of American culture to break bread and try to find a common language to talk about a literary awakening in America built around Negroes writing poems, short stories, and novels about the Black experience in America.
Of course, the 1920s generation of writers was far from the first collection of Black writers to command national attention. This began in the eighteenth century with Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon and continued through the nineteenth with William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Francis Harper, and Charles Chestnutt. By the beginning of the twentieth century, some writers, such as Locke’s favorite, Paul Laurence Dunbar, had brought not only distinction to the race, but also promised to supply a new American language of the soul. But for the most part, these young writers of the early 1920s rejected Dunbar’s dialect poetry and were uncomfortable increasingly with the expectations of Black progressives like Du Bois that Black literature should be “representative” and bring “credit” to the race. Writing with a consciousness of the race responsibility felt like a burden to these young writers, which is one reason they gravitated to Johnson rather than Du Bois. Locke was sympathetic to their desires as well. Modernist literature in the 1920s was gritty, urban, sexually and psychologically complicated, and filled with unsavory characters — especially the literature emerging from Hemingway and Fitzgerald. If Black people in America were to make an impact in literature, they had to be in step with modernism in literature, but also free to create something new out of the mix of race, culture, and experimental fiction that was coming to the fore in 1924. Although it was unlikely that Johnson was aware of all of the literary subplots in his little group, he knew that moralizing control of Black literature was weakened and almost dead. Indeed, as he revealed in his letter to V. F. Calverton at the Modern Quarterly praising Locke: “He believes as I do,” Johnson wrote, “that the frank and unapologetic discussion of subjects long tabooed will be a distinct step in the direction of creating respect for ideas which is necessary to any sort of living together.”
Johnson’s agenda for the evening was to position Opportunity as the forum for this new “frankness.” But his decision to hand the master of ceremonies role over to Locke signaled Johnson’s sense of his own limitations and the riskiness of the role. He felt more comfortable orchestrating the evening from the wings and needed someone he could trust as its conductor. To assert this new freedom within the African American narrative could expose the writers to criticism, either from White literati, who might claim these young Black writers were not ready, or from the Du Bois intellectual camp at the Crisis, who would be jealous of Opportunity’s growing influence over the writers. Locke was sensitive to the romantic aspirations of the younger writers coming to maturity in the 1920s but concerned as well to uphold the Christian-Enlightenment project of their elders that art had meaning as part of society’s need to thwart racism. Locke was aesthetically ambiguous enough to be acceptable to the young artists and credentialed enough to have the respect of the White literati invited — at least in theory. For the other intangible personality ingredient that Johnson had taken into account was Locke’s temperament: he would have no problem standing in front of the White and Black intellectual elite of New York and asserting with wit and hauteur that this was the coming new wave in American literature.
For the other intangible personality ingredient that Johnson had taken into account was Locke’s temperament: he would have no problem standing in front of the White and Black intellectual elite of New York and asserting with wit and hauteur that this was the coming new wave in American literature.
Something in Locke’s antennae had picked up that this party was to be for Jessie Fauset and her novel of bourgeois manners, which he detested but favorably reviewed, and he wanted nothing to do with representing her novel as exemplary of the new literature. Once Johnson silenced that anyone in the Writers Guild might see it as a celebration of Fauset, Locke went along willingly, because Locke was an outsider and had been asked to be the leader in the arena he cared about deeply. After six months abroad and years of disconnect from the American scene, here was a chance to publicly identify himself with the new literary movement in a role conferred on him by Johnson, one of the few male leaders to ever have that kind of confidence in him.
Locke threw himself into the project now that the dinner was his “coming out party” as well. He reviewed Johnson’s invitation list and reminded him to invite Du Bois, who had been left off the list of invitees. Johnson explained the oversight as the result of there being two invitation lists, one for the Civic Club dinner and the other for “a dinner for Dr. Du Bois, which Miss Fauset is getting up.” Locke went on to try to get Jean Toomer to attend the dinner — without success. Johnson also relied on Locke to select the two people to be asked to give formal remarks at the dinner and most likely he was the one who suggested that Gwendolyn Bennett and Countee Cullen read their poems. Locke also recommended Johnson secure a notetaker to record the remarks made on the occasion. Johnson then sent an invitation to Albert Barnes, the eccentric Philadelphia millionaire chemist and African art collector, who agreed to attend.
Work on the program concluded, two of the smallest African Americans — Johnson was only 5´2˝ — proceeded to the Civic Club dinner, dressed to the nines that Friday evening. Locke began his remarks by arguing that a new sense of hope and promise energized the young writers assembled, because they “sense within their group — meaning the Negro group — a spiritual wealth which if they properly expound will be ample for a new judgment and re-appraisal of the race.” Although Locke’s optimism has led critics to claim that he promised Black literature would solve the race problem, his language was actually quite cautious. Negro literature would “be ample,” that is, sufficient, to contradict those Whites who claimed Blacks were intellectually inferior “if they [i.e., the Black writers] properly expound [it].” Their success would allow “for a new judgment. . .of the race” if Whites were willing to render it. But there are no guarantees.
More powerfully expressed was Locke’s belief that by avoiding a literature of racial harangue, the new group of writers could make a broader contribution than those who had come before them. Locke advanced a new concept, that of generation, to suggest this was a new cohort of Black writers possessed of a devotion to literary values that set them apart from their forerunners. For example, Locke introduced Du Bois “with soft seriousness as a representative of the ‘older school’” of writing. That seemed to put Du Bois slightly on the defensive and felt called upon to justify writers of the past as “of necessity pioneers and much of their style was forced upon them by the barriers against the publication of literature about Negroes of any sort.” Locke introduced James Weldon Johnson — a writer of poetry, music lyrics, and a novel — “as an anthologist of Negro verse” — another dig, since Johnson was a novelist, a lyricist, and a poet, in addition to editing The Book of American Negro Poetry and writing a powerful introductory essay. Locke did acknowledge him for having “given invaluable encouragement to the work of this younger group.” By defining these NAACP literary scions as elderly fathers and uncles, Locke implied that their virtual sons and daughters were Oedipal rebels whose writings rejected the stodginess of their literary parents. Against the backdrop of an ornate Civic Club dinner, with its fine china, polished silverware, and formally attired White patrons, Locke issued a generational declaration of independence for the emerging literary lions of the race.
The dinner was a modest success. Bringing Black and White literati together in one room, Johnson had facilitated the kinds of interactions that made publishing contracts and critical recognition more likely for the youngsters. Albert Barnes, who had also spoken briefly, later wrote to the philosopher John Dewey: “I don’t care how you spent Friday night, you could not have spent it as wonderfully as I did. I met a young man, Walrond, who is really first rate, and I want him to look you up as he aspires to enter Columbia University in the fall.” Those kinds of recommendations advanced careers. The dinner drew attention to the magazine as unique in fostering interracial contact and exchange over literature. Johnson and Locke had helped African American literature seem more marketable than it was before the dinner and gave a sense of recognition to a group of young writers testing the publishing waters with their first products. Negro literature now appeared to be as marketable as music and other cultural commodities that could be purchased by a growing White, largely urban public. Not surprisingly, Locke and Johnson were pleased with the outcome of the dinner.
Jeffrey C. Stewart is a Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen and 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African American History. The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and The National Book Award.
