Johnson, Georgia Douglas (1877?–1966)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Stephens-Lorenz
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Normal School ◽  
New Negro ◽  
School Class ◽  
Georgia Douglas Johnson ◽  
Oberlin College

Georgia Douglas Johnson was a multitalented artist of the New Negro/Harlem Renaissance era who wrote poetry, plays, short stories, music, and newspaper columns from her home in Washington, D.C. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia and was a member of Atlanta University’s Normal School class of 1893. She studied music at Oberlin College and wrote songs from 1908 until 1959.

Saturday Night at the S Street Salon

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Treva B. Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
Georgia Douglas Johnson ◽  
Supportive Community ◽  
African American Women Writers

This chapter introduces one of the most understudied communities of New Negro writers. Commencing in the 1920s, African American writer Georgia Douglas Johnson invited writers to her home on Saturday evenings to encourage the development of a cohesive and supportive community of black writers. With a particular emphasis on the writing of African American women, the S Street Salon evolved into a viable space for African American women writers to workshop their poems, plays, short stories, and novels. Many of the New Negro era literary works produced by African American women participants of the S Street Salon tackled politically significant and contentious issues such as racial and sexual violence and women’s reproductive rights. Most of the well-known New Negro writers participated in a Saturday session at the S Street Salon. The S Street Salon was arguably one of the most significant intellectual, political, and cultural communities of the New Negro era. This community pivoted around African American women’s expressivity. The women of the S Street Salon inserted their stories and their voices into black public culture through creating an African American women-centered counterpublic.

Gwendolyn Bennett's “The Ebony Flute”

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 744-755
Author(s):  
Belinda Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Assistant Editor ◽  
Cover Art ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

IntroductionGwendolyn Bennett (1902-81) is often mentioned in books that discuss the harlem renaissance, and some of her poems Occasionally appear in poetry anthologies; but much of her career has been overlooked. Along with many of her friends, including Jessie Redmond Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, Bennett was featured at the National Urban League's Civic Club Dinner in March 1924, an event that would later be “widely hailed as a ‘coming out party’ for young black artists, writers, and intellectuals whose work would come to define the Harlem Renaissance” (McHenry 383n100). In the next five years Bennett published over forty poems, short stories, and reviews in leading African American magazines and anthologies, such as Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1927) and William Stanley Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927; she created magazine cover art that adorned two leading African American periodicals, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races and the National Urban League's Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life; she worked as an editor or assistant editor of several magazines, including Opportunity, Black Opals, and Fire!; and she wrote a renowned literary column, “The Ebony Flute.” Many scholars, such as Cary Wintz, Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, and Elizabeth McHenry, recognized the importance of Bennett's column to the Harlem Renaissance in their respective studies, but their emphasis on a larger Harlem Renaissance discussion did not afford a detailed examination of her column.

Sketching Out America’s Jazz Age in British Vogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Kalich
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
New Negro ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter investigates the contributions to modernism of Dorothy Todd’s British Vogue (1922-1926) as the magazine traced the evolution of Bloomsbury in England and the Jazz Age in America. While scholarship on this periodical has traditionally focused on the publication of Bloomsbury artists in the magazine, this chapter examines Todd’s displacement of the high/popular cultural binary through her unflagging support of jazz music and avant-garde literature. Furthermore, in examining Anne Harriet Fish’s and Miguel Covarrubias’s cartoons and illustrations, the chapter reveals the era’s use of visual humour as a means of coping with deeper anxieties regarding women’s increasing independence and the emergence of African-American culture as a fixture in mainstream, American culture. Analysing the construction of the Modern Woman and the New Negro in a commercial magazine demonstrates readers’ initial introduction to Bloomsbury and the Harlem Renaissance, broadening our understanding of modernism’s function in commercial settings.

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.

Modern Sentimentalism and the New Negro

2019 ◽  
pp. 121-148
Author(s):  
Lisa Mendelman
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Recent Scholarship

Chapter 4 focuses on Jessie Redmon Fauset’s acerbic use of sentimentalism to diagnose the tensions inherent in New Negro femininity and artistic production, as exemplified by her novel Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral (1929). Fauset’s anti-didactic Künstlerroman highlights the conflicted demands of Harlem Renaissance/New Negro ideology and the particularly fraught position of the black female writer. The chapter extends recent scholarship on racial feeling and the gendering of double consciousness to theorize Fauset’s sentimentalism as an ironic and melancholic mode that registers the New Negro woman’s unique form of self-estrangement. Plum Bun ultimately proposes racial laughter as an apt response to the position of a black female artist in late 1920s America: a mode that is at once an adaptive gift of internal distance and a creative prison of the same.

Burleigh Spirituals and the Harlem Renaissance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean E. Snyder
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Professional Singers ◽  
Carl Van Vechten ◽  
New Negro Renaissance ◽  
Art Style ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter examines the controversy between Harry T. Burleigh and his colleagues and critics over the issue of spirituals during the Harlem Renaissance. Although Burleigh was still regarded as the pioneer and by most as the master arranger of spirituals during the mid-1920s, there were dissenting voices. Henry Krehbiel, for example, warned against oversophistication of African American folk music “by standardizing its form, making it conform to the standard of music of European conception.” Carl Van Vechten also criticized Burleigh and his colleagues for relying on the Hampton and Fisk collections for most of their arrangements. This chapter considers how Burleigh came to be the target of criticism from some of the most outspoken of the younger Harlem or New Negro Renaissance voices, as well as his counterargument that the movement was chauvinist and separatist, or sacrificed what he felt were basic artistic standards. It also discusses Burleigh's belief that the vast repertoire of spirituals must be preserved in simpler versions accessible to untrained singers, as well as in art-style transformations for professional singers.

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