“More than Equivalent to a Year of College”: Hubert Harrison and Informal Education in Harlem's New Negro Movement

2020 ◽  
Vol 122 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Amato Nocera
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Informal Education ◽  
Educational Practice ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Black Press ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Black Life

Background/Context Spurred on by the mass migration of African Americans from the South and blacks from the Caribbean, Harlem by the 1920s was defined by its association with New Negro culture and was widely known as the “mecca” of black life. The New Negro movement, as the period was called by contemporaries, has become a focus of scholars interested in black radical politics. Still, there has yet to be a focused study of the underlying educational experiences that helped create the New Negro movement and the mass political awakening that accompanied it. Focus of Study This paper takes as its focus Hubert Harrison, an Afro-Caribbean immigrant who arrived in New York City at the dawn of the New Negro movement and became a leading public intellectual and educator of the movement. In particular, it focuses on Harrison's participation and influence in several dimensions of the network of informal education that emerged as a part of Harlem life in the first part of the 20th century: street oratory, educational forums, and the black press. After a brief overview of Harrison and his political development, I examine each educational practice, discussing both Harrison's contribution and the wider culture of radical education he helped to create. I argue that at the foundation of the New Negro movement—and the burgeoning political consciousness among inhabitants of the uptown neighborhood in New York—was a system of education unlike anything that could be found inside a classroom. It was dynamic, democratic, and for many black residents moving into Harlem, inspirational. Research Design This paper uses archival materials from Hubert Harrison's papers at Columbia University. Those include newspaper clippings, diary entries, and pamphlets for talks and courses, among other material. It also draws upon newspapers and reports from the period as well as secondary literature on the topic. Conclusions/Recommendations While education scholars have often grappled with the limits of school as a mechanism for changing society, the history of Harrison and informal education in Harlem reveals the importance of political education outside the classroom in creating and sustaining social movements. For Harrison and the Harlemites of the 1920s, street oratory, educational forums, and a radical black press served as essential mechanisms for broadening what historian Robin D. G. Kelley has called the “black radical imagination.” Yet the educative experience of blacks arriving in Harlem is not so different from the experience of others who have participated in social movements in the 20th and 21st centuries. The challenge for scholars is not to identify and study political movements that can be linked to various forms of schooling, but to identify the educative dimensions of social uprising that take place beyond the walls of the classroom.

The Center Cannot Hold

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Ewing
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
West Indians ◽  
Black Leadership ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
The First World War ◽  
New Theater

This chapter explores racial politics during the First World War, which acted as a catalyst in which old and richly drawn contests of authority and power were shifted on their axis, disrupted, and transformed. From the ascendant black capital of Harlem, a militant “New Negro” movement had emerged, its proponents hoping to more dramatically leverage the “new theater” created by the war to reshape global relations of race and class inequality, to celebrate militant and respectable black masculinity, and to replace an old cadre of elitist and ineffectual black leadership with a new brand of uncompromising mass politics. Joining the stream of West Indians heading for New York, Marcus Garvey was a fortunate witness to the birth of the New Negro movement. By the end of the war, thoughts of returning to Jamaica forgotten, he had begun to pull the movement's center of gravity toward himself and his organization.

Enter the “New Crowd” Journalists

Race News ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Professional Relationships ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Marcus Garvey ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
News Events

The militant racial politics of the alternative black press and modernist sensibilities of the Harlem Renaissance seeped into the commercial black press in the 1920s as journalists reprinted and debated editorials, covered news events, and nurtured diverse professional relationships. The radical editors of the New Negro Movement – including Cyril Briggs, Marcus Garvey, Hubert Harrison, A. Philip Randolph – denounced capitalism and imperialism and promoted Pan-Africanism. Commercial newspapers normalized literary writers' modernist perspective by serving as an arena for contesting the conservative politics of respectability, as illustrated by George Schuyler’s columns. Many publishers reinforced this change in newswriting by shifting to tabloid sensationalism, the era's defining journalistic mode.

Spiral

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marissa H. Baker
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Art World ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists

Spiral was a collective of African American artists that briefly formed in New York City between 1963 and 1966. Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis were the main founders and leaders of the group. The first meeting convened in Bearden’s studio, with Charles Alston, Felrath Hines, Lewis, Richard Mayhew, William Prichard, Hale Woodruff, and James Yeargens in attendance. Later, Emma Amos, Calvin Douglass, Perry Ferguson, Reginald Gammon, Alvin Hollingsworth, William Majors, Earle Miller, and Merton Simpson joined the group. Prompted by a sense of momentum and urgency from the Civil Rights movement and the imminent March on Washington, which occurred during the summer of 1963, the group gathered to discuss the role of art in the struggle for equal rights. The artists were also eager to discuss racism and their exclusion from New York’s art world. Older artists such as Woodruff and Alston were influenced by the tenets of the New Negro movement—a movement in the early 20th century that encouraged African American artists to use art to achieve racial progress by refashioning the image of the Negro as self-assertive and urbane. Under their influence the question of a ‘‘black art’’ and ‘‘black aesthetic,’’ which put the artists’ racial identity at the center of the debate, remained central to the Spiral group.

Race News

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Carroll
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Press ◽  
World War ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Imperfect Coverage ◽  
White Press

Race News examines the political and professional evolution of black journalism in the twentieth century. In particular, Fred Carroll explores the commercial black press’ contentious working relationship with the alternative black press and its thorny interactions with a repressive federal government and hostile white media to explain how shifting toleration of progressive politics reconfigured how black journalists wrote and covered the news. From World War I to World War II, leading newspapers crafted a progressive newswriting template influenced by the racial militancy of the New Negro Movement, modernist sensibilities of the Harlem Renaissance, and communist critiques of the American political economy. Such newswriting established the parameters of acceptable political discourse for millions of African Americans. This style of reportage also coincided with staggering circulation increases that established newspapers of national and international significance, including the Baltimore Afro-American, Chicago Defender, and Pittsburgh Courier. However, this newswriting template unraveled during the Cold War as publishers distanced themselves from progressive influences to protect their businesses from the anticommunism movement. Commercial publishers confronted numerous competitive challenges in the postwar period. They witnessed circulation declines as the white press began to cover the Civil Rights Movement, and a revitalized alternative black press emerged to endorse the Black Power Movement. The fitful integration of white newsrooms eventually led to the U.S. media's fairer but imperfect coverage of minority concerns.

Winfield, Hemsley (1907–1934)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Paris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Dance Movement ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Charles Williams ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

An early initiator of Black modern dance, Hemsley Winfield first gained recognition as an actor and director of the New Negro Art Theater in New York City. Galvanized by his success, Winfield founded the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group in 1931. Like other emerging African-American exponents of the new dance, including Edna Guy, Alison Burroughs, Ollie Burgoyne, and Charles Williams, Winfield consciously drew on the philosophy of the New Negro movement, which promoted the use of art to advance racial consciousness and heritage during the Harlem Renaissance. Despite his premature death at age 26, Winfield set a significant starting point for Black modern dance at the crossroads of the Harlem Renaissance, American modernist primitivism, and the emergent modern dance movement. In so doing, Winfield modeled new possibilities for male dance artists, along with his contemporaries Harald Kreutzberg and Ted Shawn.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Abraham Heschel

2021 ◽  
pp. 198-216
Author(s):  
Susannah Heschel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
West Side ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
The Public ◽  
Prophetic Voice ◽  
The Public Sphere

The friendship between Abraham Joshua Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr was both personal and intellectual. Neighbours on the Upper West Side of New York City, they walked together in Riverside park and shared personal concerns in private letters; Niebuhr asked Heschel to deliver the eulogy at his funeral. They were bound by shared religious sensibilities as well, including their love of the Hebrew Bible, the irony they saw in American history and in the writings of the Hebrew prophets, and in their commitment to social justice as a duty to God. Heschel arrived in the public sphere later, as a public intellectual with a prophetic voice, much as Niebuhr had been for many decades prior. Niebuhr’s affirmation of the affinities between his and Heschel’s theological scholarship pays tribute to an extraordinary friendship of Protestant and Jew.

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