James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan and the Kingdom of American Culture.

Surely there shall yet dawn some mighty morning to lift the Veil and set the prisoned free.... When men ask artists, not "Are they black?" but "Do they know?"--W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk 510

"To the general American public," James Weldon Johnson claimed in his 1928 essay "Double Audience Makes Road Hard for Negro Authors," the recent appearance of "the Negro author" on the lists of the best publishers and the best-sellers must seem "a novelty, a strange phenomenon, a miracle straight out of the skies" (408). He used nearly identical phrasing two years later to describe the emergence of modern Harlem at the outset of Black Manhattan (hereafter BM), his chronicle of African Americans in New York: "It strikes the uninformed observer as a phenomenon, a miracle straight out of the skies" (34). The common phrasing suggests the extent to which, for Johnson, "the Negro author"--the highest agent of a racial and national "culture"--owed his or her recognition to the existence of a densely populated, racially homogenous, yet cosmopolitan cultural center contiguous with, and in this case literally inside, a larger, racially heterogenous, cosmopolitan cultural center.

But the two passages suggest a more complicated cultural scenario than that of the mutual interdependency of African American writers and their nurturing, racially-founded, modern--that is, urban--cultural home. Both passages deploy tropes of sudden visibility and divine intervention, qualified by the author's assurance that the strangeness of both phenomena in question is more apparent than real. What marks the miraculousness of the contemporary American scene may be less the emergence of the Negro author than the fact that he or she "has come into the range of vision of the American public eye" (Johnson, "Double Audience" 408). And that he or she has done so owes much to the fact that "a black city, located in the heart of white Manhattan, and containing more Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on earth" (BM 4) makes it virtually impossible for explorers of New York City not to see black people. "If you ride northward the length of Manhattan Island," he informs his reader midway through Black Manhattan, picking up the thread of his introductory paragraphs,

   you cannot escape being struck by the sudden change in the
   character of the people you see. In the middle and lower parts
   of the city you have, perhaps, noted Negro faces here and there;
   but when you emerge from the Park, you see them everywhere, and
   as you go up either of these two great arteries leading out from
   the city to the north, you see more and more Negroes.... [I]t is
   not until you cross the Harlem River that the population whitens
   again, which it does as suddenly as it began to darken at One
   Hundred and Tenth Street. You have been having an outside
   glimpse of Harlem, the Negro
   metropolis. (145)

The "you" whom Johnson addresses here is an ideal citizen-reader: urbane enough to venture from one end of the metropolis to the other, and unafraid to cross a very physically demarcated color line, even as he or she may be more at home in the whiter part of Manhattan. Still, Johnson's disarming tour-guide persona implies that this citizen-reader may be prone to the pattern of mis-recognition that besets "the general American public." His may be "the thoughtless glance" that makes Harlem's presence "within the greatest city of the New World.... the climax of the incongruous"; that reader may be "the uninformed observer" for whom Harlem--like the serious Negro author-artist--is "a miracle straight out of the sky" (BM 3-4).

For our more informed chronicler, of course, the seemingly miraculous and incongruous have historical causes; and his ostensible purpose in Black Manhattan is to demonstrate that modern Harlem is the almost inevitable outcome of forces that trace back to the origins of modernity and the founding of the new nation, when European colonists brought African slaves to New Amsterdam in the 1620s. At the same time, however, Johnson's repeated recourse to the trope of divine intervention betrays his own leap of faith in the utopian promise shadowed forth, if not wholly incarnated, in modern New York City: the promise of a genuinely transracial "kingdom of culture" along the lines famously dreamed of by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. A place where, in Du Bois's rhapsodic description, "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.... I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn and condescension" (438).

Johnson made a significant alteration when his manuscript title, "Harlem: A Backward Glance, became Black Manhattan. (1) For whereas "black Manhattan" might be synonymous with Harlem, it surely connotes something bigger. Of course, both names signify the famous racialized section of a city developed more along lines set by national segregation practices than in response to the cultural nationalist dreams it epitomized. But "Black Manhattan" blurs the distinction between Harlem and Manhattan, shedding Harlem of negative connotations of provincialism and transfiguring the effects of official and unofficial Jim-Crowism that contributed to its making. It names an autonomous "black" counterpart to "the greatest city of the New World"--the "city within a city" (BM 147)--but also a fundamentally biracial metropolis, a world-class city fully cognizant of its hitherto shadowy black presence. And the "blackness" it conjures up is both nativist and cosmopolitan, in keeping with the exceptional character of New York City as a haven for the modern homeless and the beacon of a transnational America. The "blackness" of Johnson's "black" Manhattan is the ambiguous blackness defined by Alain Locke as the sign of "a common consciousness"--one binding not merely American Negroes but potentially all peoples of the African diaspora who would make Harlem their Zion. (2) But it is also a "blackness" that "white" New Yorkers are being invited to recognize as to some extent their own, a sign of cultural Otherness that is at once a most intimate (and tragic) aspect of their cultural identity as Americans and a source of genuinely modernist, cosmopolitan consciousness, should they choose to become true citizens of the world.

No doubt Johnson protests too much in repeatedly asserting that Harlem is "not a 'quarter' or a slum or a fringe" (BM 4), as though disavowing the weight of common knowledge attaching to the contrary claim. That claim found more room in the famous March 1925 issue of the Survey Graphic than it would in The New Negro anthology that grew out of it under Alain Locke's editorship. In his introduction to the journal issue, Locke could still rather tortuously concede that while "in the final analysis, Harlem is neither slum, ghetto, resort or colony ... it is in part all of them" ("Harlem" 629). Kelly Miller described Harlem as manifesting "the most gigantic instance of racial segregation in the United States ..." and "a fair specimen of the harvest of race prejudice throughout the United States." While he thought it "a city within a city," as did Johnson, Miller insisted that it was "a part of, and yet apart from the general life of greater New York" ("Harvest" 683). Even more emphatically, Eunice Roberta Hunton declared Harlem "a modern ghetto," and underlined the lack of genuine traffic between the black and white cities: only an educated few enjoyed "New York in its entirety" or "the opportunity of giving Harlem to New York and New York to Harlem" (684). And Winthrop Lane catalogued "the grim side of Harlem," in particular the "ways in which the Negro is more deliberately exploited in Harlem than in other Northern cities" (692-93). (3) Locke cut his ambiguous sentence from the opening essay he wrote for The New Negro, took from Miller a more uplifting (and promotional) piece on Howard University, and dropped Hunton and Lane from the book project entirely. (4) The keynote of The New Negro as much as Johnson's later Black Manhattan (in anticipation of one of the best received African American cultural achievements ever, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man) was biracial or even transracial cultural possibility.

Johnson's book, like Locke's New Negro anthology, is certainly vulnerable to the charge of downplaying the continuous economic injustice and social discrimination afflicting Harlemites in the 1920s (Levy 318), though it would be far from precise to say that it ignores these, as I shall demonstrate below. By his late retrospective account in Along This Way (hereafter ATW), the Southern-born Johnson's deep fondness for New York City originated in childhood longing, a longing underscored by family legend and whetted by his first boyhood visit:

   It would not have taken a psychologist
   to understand that I was born to be a
   New Yorker. In fact, I was partly a
   New Yorker already. Even then I had a
   dual sense of home. From the time that
   I could distinguish the meaning of
   words I had been hearing about New
   York. My parents talked about the city
   much in the manner that exiles or emigrants
   talk about the homeland; and I
   had long thought of New York, as well
   as Jacksonville, as my home. But being
   born for a New Yorker means being
   born, no matter where, with a love for
   cosmopolitanism; and one either is or
   is not. (47-48)

Johnson's remarkable conception of New York City as a homeland for cosmopolites like himself exiled behind the veil in Jim Crow America suggestively locates it outside that America even as no small part of its legendary allure stems from its stature as the greatest and most "modern" of American cities. (5) Certainly Johnson's New York experience was exceptional enough to justify (or account for) the great faith he had in the power of its many cultural institutions and networks, "high" and "low," to undo the tyranny of the color line. "New York had been a good godmother to me, almost a fairy godmother," he acknowledged in recollecting his remarkably successful career as a lyricist with his brother J. Rosamond and Bob Cole around the turn of the century (ATW 223).

More significant in Johnson's account than the money and modest fame this New York experience brought him are the cross-racial ties he forged: the fact of their studio having become "a center for both Negro and white artists"; the good relations he established with Edward Bok of The Ladies' Home Journal, who laughed with him at the bigoted Southern reader who assumed that Cole and the Johnson brothers were white; the lasting friendship he made with Columbia University's Branders Matthews while taking his course in the history of theater (ATW 195-96, 192-93). Returning to New York in the teens, Johnson continued, through his work with the NAACP and his work as a novelist and poet, to forge close friendships across the color line and to meet as an equal with such prominent white intellectuals as H. L. Mencken, Clarence Darrow, Mary White Ovington, and Carl Van Vechten. And his wife Grace Nail made interracial cultural connections of her own, being the exceptional African American woman member of the Greenwich Village-based feminist group Heterodoxy (Stansell 89). (6)

And yet by his own account in Along This Way, Johnson had to set foot in France before experiencing the kind of "miracle" that New York could only promise; for it was abroad, while touring with his brother and Bob Cole, that "I recaptured for the first time since childhood the sense of being just a human being.... I was suddenly ... free from the conflict within the Man-Negro dualism ... free to be merely a man" (ATW 209). His journey to cosmopolitan France, in effect, accentuates the fact of New York's position within the Jim Crow nation. However exceptional from the standpoint of the southern (American) province, Johnson's backward glance at New York's biracial history reveals a city that has yet to free itself from the racial sins of the nation it would culturally lead. African American slavery, Black Manhattan reminds us, was there from the beginning of "America." This peculiar institution led, of course, to African American struggles for emancipation and pioneering educational enterprises (including the founding of the African Free School, precursor to the New York public school system [BM 20-21]). Fore grounding the black presence in his history of New York, Johnson records historically submerged instances of violent insurrection (such as the slave revolts of 1712 and 1742), and makes the race riots of 1863 and 1900 (the latter occurring at the very moment when New York was playing "fairy godmother" to Johnson) unforgettable signs of the times. Johnson's miraculous black city within the white, furthermore, owes much to the exodus of white tenants and homeowners from Harlem in the face of a perceived black invasion. He reminds us that African Americans were virtually exiled from the stage between 1910 to 1917 (while productions of Thomas Dixon's The Clansmen played to Broadway crowds); he reminds us that segregated seating was common practice in theaters, and that in 1924 racist sentiment was quickly marshaled in the popular press against the impending production of Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings because of its representation of interracial marriage. Perhaps most strikingly, at a key point we find Johnson entertaining the likelihood that Harlem will cease to exist as a black residence once the forces of (white) American business set their sites on developing it for greater profitability--the one consolation for its black residents being that they might reap a profit of their own in the face of forced re-location. (7)

Johnson's most obvious motive for writing Black Manhattan stems from the gulf separating biracial New York from that kingdom of culture it seems to beckon towards. For as the rhetorical relation between the author Johnson and that citizen-reader taking a tour of the city suggests, the transracial, cosmopolitan readership that Johnson's idealized New York City should already have formed is in fact, like Harlem itself, "still in the process of making" (BM 281). As his recent essay on the newly emergent African American author made clear, Johnson was preoccupied at this moment by the problem of the "double audience," claiming that "when a Negro author does write so as to fuse white and black America into one interested and approving audience he has performed no slight feat, and has most likely done a sound piece of literary work" ("Double Audience" 412). Indeed we might speculate that Johnson's deferral of his "literary" projects--specifically a novel he promised to write--in favor of history and autobiography owe something to the dilemma he outlined in the 1928 essay. (8)

In furnishing in Black Manhattan "the story of the Negro in the City and State of New York," which entails both an impressive record of cultural achievements and a larger social and political story of the Negro in America, Johnson worked to awaken his white readership to a fuller knowledge of its actual cultural milieu so that it might become more receptive to the very idea of a black, cosmopolitan city and an African American literature. In effect, while marking the achievements of what we think of as the Harlem Renaissance in the past tense, Black Manhattan advances the Renaissance agenda of securing cultural recognition as a crucial means of securing full citizenship and civil rights for African Americans. Johnson still speaks throughout Black Manhattan across the color line to a readership he imagines as willing to transcend it, while simultaneously re-vitalizing the cultural memory of his own people.

In Along This Way, Johnson described one of his main purposes for writing Black Manhattan as setting down "a continuous record of the Negro's progress on the New York theatrical stage ..." (406); and indeed, as Robert Fleming reminds us, "More chapters are devoted to the various aspects of black show business than to any other topic" (82). The book remains of chief importance as a chronicle of black achievement in the performing arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I would argue finally that its vision of Harlem as the black cultural capital is entangled with the more complex subject of black cultural capital itself, which at once promises to forge the cosmopolitan audience that might make New York a transracial beacon of American civilization and yet suffers an ambiguous, precarious status within a cultural field permeated by hierarchical distinctions, the most obvious being that between popular entertainment and "serious" art. Most of the black cultural achievement recorded in Black Manhattan falls in the domain of the popular, and is predominantly physical, spectacular, and prone to date rapidly, let alone conditioned by what Locke called the "very fixed limitations of popular taste" ("Negro and the American Stage" 80). That "Negro stock" was up in the 1920s, in Rudolph Fisher's memorable phrase (397), no doubt owed something to the high visibility of black urban entertainers who took advantage of the theatrical opportunities afforded by New York's undisputed claim to be, in Johnson's words, "the centre from which all the main forces and activities of the American theatre radiate" (BM 226). And several of these entertainers--Florence Mills, Paul Robeson, Bill Robinson, Josephine Baker, Noble Sissle, and Eubie Blake, like the earlier Williams and Walker--achieved international recognition as bearers of a distinctly racial culture that was also modern (and) American. These artists were emerging at a crucial moment when the American culture industry was being revolutionized by new technologies and new promotional mechanisms, and when it made sense for urban writers and performers "to speculate," as Douglas has compellingly argued, "that entertainment was to be America's biggest business and surest export and the most reliable source material for its history" (20).

Still, the greater significance and value being accorded to popular entertainment may have unsettled, but hardly undid, the prevailing categories for distinguishing levels of cultural achievement, a fact as remarkably evident in Johnson's work as it is in the period's pioneering critical survey of modern American popular culture, Gilbert Seldes's The Seven Lively Arts. "The minor arts," as Seldes calls them, "have their moments of intensity. Our experience of perfection is so limited that even when it occurs in a secondary field we hail its coming. Yet the minor arts are all transient, and these moments have no lasting record, and their creators are unrewarded even by the tribute of a word" (204). Like Seldes before him, Johnson pays loving tribute to those almost or potentially forgotten celebrities whom he has learned about, known, worked with, or simply been delighted by, sensing how much more vulnerable to oblivion their blackness makes them. And in all likelihood Johnson was familiar with Seldes's work, which while boldly recognizing the virtues of American popular art betrayed remarkable blindness to the virtues of its African American creators. Seldes's "Toujours Jazz" is particularly revealing: for while he responded to Clive Bell's diatribe against America's African American inspired popular music by paying homage to that music, Seldes did so while maintaining rigid distinctions between instinct and intelligence, and nature and civilization, that relegated African American musicians and dancers to a lower cultural order whose aesthetic expressive forms are drawn upon and re-worked by the higher order minds of a Eugene O'Neill or Paul Whiteman (Seldes 97-99). And in a footnote added to "The Darktown Strutters on Broadway," first published in Vanity Fair in response to the vogue in "Negro shows" after Shuffle Along, Seldes blithely asserted, "I feel that the negro [sic] show is extraordinarily transient and that a transient criticism of it is adequate." He concedes their exotic and primitivist charm, noting, "It is only in relation to the sophisticated Broadway piece that I find them lacking ..." (150). (9)

Against such "thoughtless glancing," Johnson situates the rise of the black urban entertainer squarely within a history that goes back to the reaction against Reconstruction, when direct political agitation became increasingly futile and dangerous: "In New York the Negro began to function and express himself on a different plane, in a different sphere; and in a different way he effectively impressed himself upon the city and the country." That is, he "gained national notice" in professional sports and "made a beginning and headway on the theatrical stage" (BM 59-60), first in minstrelsy and later in more sophisticated musical comedy. Johnson clearly wants to cast the African American turn to sports and the stage as foreshadowing the strategic turn to literature and art by black civil rights activists in the present. To those who have misrecognized this tendency as the primitive and primarily diverting expression of a putative racial aptitude for feats of strength, mimicry, and singing and dancing, Johnson establishes its significance as a pitch for cultural recognition that is inextricably related to the struggle for social, political, and economic justice.

Nonetheless, despite the space given to individual black show business legends in his work, he too cannot help measuring their accomplishments along a kind of evolutionary scale that makes higher cultural achievement--specifically, literary and serious dramatic achievement--a sounder basis than success in popular entertainment for making claims of cultural equality. The anomalous success of 19th-century Shakespearian actor Ira Aldridge is set in relief against the tragedy of the minstrel described in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. In response to requests that he perform in his after work hours at Ike Hines's, that figure "never essayed anything below a reading from Shakespere [sic]" (BM 76, 87). The would-be Shakespearean actor's lot as minstrel may be a tragedy, but his hidden access to the cultural treasure of the West ensures that minstrelsy and musical comedy would each in turn lay the groundwork for their own supercession. From his historical vantage point, Johnson insists that "the accumulation of theatrical training and stage technique has made possible the higher development of each period of the Negro in the theatre over the period preceding" (BM 178).

A crucial phase of this evolution came about in reaction to African Americans' seven-year "exile" from the downtown theatres in the pre-war years, when African Americans created "a real Negro theater" in Harlem that facilitated a new racial confidence and freed them from the demands and expectations of white audiences. But even this foray into black nationalist theatre ultimately ranks as an imposed parochialism by Johnson's cosmopolitan standards of success, akin to the deep-seated collective resistance on both sides of the color line to black actors performing plays by Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde as well as if not instead of plays "of Negro life." (10) His "record of the Negro's progress on the New York theatrical stage" culminates in "the Negro" actor's triumphant emergence from Harlem to "a definite place on the legitimate stage of New York, the theatrical capital of the world" (BM 224). The Harlem Negro's assumption of cultural equality is finally predicated on access via "Harlem" to "white Manhattan," and to the more stable cultural capital signified by that oft-recurring word "legitimate"--even as he or she gains that access by bearing cultural gifts mischaracterized as instinctive and amusing rather than spiritual and material.

The chronicle of African American urban show business that takes up most of the "cultural" as opposed to "political" story of Black Manhattan finally occupies an ambiguous position in relation to the brief account of the Harlem Renaissance that forms the penultimate chapter of the book, that is, less than one-tenth of it. As though having saved the best stuff for last, Johnson writes: "The most outstanding phase of the development of the Negro in the United States during the past decade has been the recent literary and artistic emergence of the individual creative artist; and New York has been, almost exclusively, the place where that emergence has taken place" (260). This "phase" seems both a culmination continuous with "the Negro's progress on the New York stage" and a cultural manifestation of a higher order altogether, on the higher plane of those arts wherein individual genius is best realized. For Johnson, the highest of these planes is clearly literature (though he alludes to some work in painting and the plastic arts). The chapter draws from the earlier "Double Audience Makes Road Hard for Negro Authors" for part of its material, substituting the phrase "individual creative artist" for "Negro author," and it reflects Johnson's deeply held and oft-stated belief that "the final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced" (Book of American Negro Poetry 9; "When is a Race" 267). This "literary and artistic emergence of the individual creative [African American] artist" is finally predicated not only upon the existence of a genuinely biracial city, but upon what Johnson imagines to be a more widespread cultural consciousness--more specifically, a belated, modernist cultural recognition--of the passing art of the anonymous black folk (that is, the spirituals produced by those black and unknown bards) and of a recent experience of widely shared pleasure taken in black urban entertainment (however precariously remembered might be the individual artistic achievements therein). (11) And yet at the end of Black Manhattan--and at the end of the Harlem Renaissance--we find Johnson re-iterating the Du Boisian claim he had been making for well over a decade, and that to sympathetic minds should long have been a truism: namely, that the Negro "is a contributor to the nation's common cultural store; in fine, he is helping to form American civilization" (BM 284).

The problem Johnson dodges in his work--the very problem tacitly confronted in a retrospective piece Locke published in Opportunity a year earlier--is that acceptance of this fact may be wholly compatible with an inability to see the individual African American artist as anything other than an anomaly. "White people have always more or less sought Negro entertainment as diversion," Rudolph Fisher wrote in 1927, issuing an ironic warning about the inflated value of "Negro stock" (397). The insistence on African American cultural plenitude was rhetorically bound to efforts to overcome a cultural lack (as in Du Bois's Souls). Moreover, cultural reclamation projects (such as the Johnson brothers' Books of American Negro Spirituals) were symbiotically related to cultural promotional projects (such as Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry and Locke's New Negro anthology). So long, finally, as the emergence of the individual African American creative artist appears miraculous and requires an explanation, an asymmetry in cultural power prevails. This effect is one of the more tenacious of what Johnson generally regards as a history of uneven development rooted in slavery and the racist reaction against Reconstruction--a history that found southern born blacks, as Miller phrased it in The New Negro, "at the zero point of culture" (Miller 315).

In "1928: A Retrospective Review," Locke provided an uncannily prophetic metaphor for the reaction that would soon set in against New Negro literature: "as with many another boom, the water will need to be squeezed out of much inflated stock and many bubbles must burst.... The real significance and potential power of the Negro renaissance may not reveal itself until after this reaction, and the entire topsoil of contemporary Negro expression may need to be ploughed completely under for a second hardier and richer crop" (8). Johnson leaves unstated the implications of his project of recording what we might think of as the history of the present: that even African America's "individual creative artists" risk becoming conflated with the foundational material of a higher order of cultural production to come. But just as Locke was parading his capacity for critical judgment in calling for aesthetic discrimination between black artistic products (while leaving a public record of as many products as possible), so Johnson was exhibiting to a white readership his knowledge that stable cultural capital such as "pure literature" mattered as an index of social power (while documenting the precarious cultural capital his people had accumulated under incredibly oppressive conditions). In effect, if Johnson comes across as overly optimistic about the prospect of cultural recognition laying the groundwork for social equality, he is hardly naive. The "colored poet," he well knew, "labors under the handicap of finding culture not entirely colorless in the United States" (Book of American Negro Poetry 39). His work indirectly critiques the way "culture" operates to maintain a racist (and classed) hierarchy rather than to facilitate universal pleasure and understanding, even as it writes his people into the modern American scene and envisions a utopian scenario where a chief motive for writing a book like Black Manhattan would have vanished. "Harlem is still in a process of making," we must recall Johnson's concluding, with his inner eye on a black city that could never be misconstrued as a ghetto, and on a place in the kingdom of culture as legitimate as that boldly claimed by the sophisticated citizens of the new world's most cosmopolitan city.

Works Cited

Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Writings. Ed. Nathan Huggins. New York: Library of America, 1986. 357-548.

Fauset, Jessie. "The Gift of Laughter." Locke, New Negro 161-67.

Fisher, Rudolph. "The Caucasian Storms Harlem." American Mercury 11 (August 1927): 393-98.

Fleming, Robert E. James Weldon Johnson. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

Gregory, Montgomery. "The Drama of Negro Life." Locke, New Negro 153-60.

Hunton, Eunice Roberta. "Breaking Through." Survey Graphic 53 (March 1925): 684.

Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.

Johnson, James Weldon. Along This Way. 1933. New York: Penguin, 1990.

--. Black Manhattan. 1930. New York: Da Capo, 1991.

--. The Book of American Negro Poetry. 1922. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1983.

--. "Double Audience Makes Road Hard for Negro Authors." Vol. 2. Wilson 408-12.

--. "Harlem: The Culture Capital." Locke, New Negro 301-11.

--. "When is a Race Great?" Vol. 1. Wilson 267-69.

Lane, Winthrop D. "Ambushed in the City: The Grim Side of Harlem." Survey Graphic 53 (March 1925): 692-94, 713-15.

Levy, Eugene. James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1973.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. 1981. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Locke, Alain. "1928: A Retrospective Review." Opportunity 7 (January 1929): 8-11.

--. "Harlem." Survey Graphic 53 (March 1925): 629-30.

--. "The Negro and the American Stage." The Critical Temper of Alain Locke. Ed. Jeffrey C. Stewart. New York: Garland, 1983. 79-86.

--. "The New Negro." Locke, New Negro 3-16.

--, ed. The New Negro. 1925. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Miller, Kelly. "The Harvest of Race Prejudice." Survey Graphic 53 (March 1925): 682-83, 711-12.

--. "Howard: The National Negro University." Locke, New Negro 312-22. Morrissette, Noelle. "Critical Fictions: The Prose Writings of James Weldon Johnson." Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2002.

Osofsky, Gilbert. Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Ruotolo, Christine. "James Weldon Johnson and the Autobiography of an Ex-Musician." American Literature 72 (June 2000): 249-74.

Scruggs, Charles. Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

Seldes, Gilbert. The Seven Lively Arts. 1924. Mineola: Dover, 2000.

Stansell, Christine. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Metropolitan, 2000.

Sundquist, Eric J. The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1992.

Wilson, Sondra Kathyrn, ed. The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson. 2 Vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Wintz, Cary D. Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Houston: Rice UP, 1988.

Notes

(1.) Black Manhattan originated in Johnson's contribution to the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, "The Making of Harlem," which appeared as "Harlem: The Culture Capital" in Alain Locke's The New Negro, without the accompanying photographs. Johnson's essay re-appears, with some revisions, as Chapter 13 of Black Manhattan, and is echoed in the opening and final chapters. Especially for his chapter on the New Negro renaissance, Johnson also clearly drew on essays he had published in the late 1920s. I am indebted to Noelle Morrissette for the information about Johnson's original intention of entitling the book "Harlem: A Backward Glance," which she reads as signaling its intimate relation to the autobiography he would publish a few years later. See Morrissette.

(2.) See Locke, "New Negro" 7, 14; and Johnson, BM 3.

(3.) This grimmer, arguably more realistic, view of Harlem--in contrast to the romantic-optimistic view of Johnson and Locke--has been perhaps most influentially established in Osofsky. See especially 127-58.

(4.) Scruggs sums up these changes and others as shifting "the book's main focus from the situation of the common people in Harlem to the elite cultural institutions within black life.... The invisible city of the masses, the invisible city of black women--these were things that Locke wanted to keep invisible, or at least obscured, in The New Negro" (56-57).

(5.) See Douglas for a lively and comprehensive overview of the cultural sensibility, even Zeitgeist, that emerged in relation to New York's cultural ascendancy during the early decades of the twentieth century, especially the 1920s (9-28). Johnson's work--an important source for Douglas's study--obviously contributed to what we might call a discourse of New York exceptionalism, mythologizing even as it historically specified the sources of the city's charm.

(6.) Rightly recognizing Along This Way as "one of the great American autobiographies," Lewis oddly feels compelled to conclude that "it had the serious and ineradicable flaw of its author's unique life and values" (297). By this logic, Johnson's exceptional experience renders him a distinctly unrepresentative man, which in turn, presumably, negates as inconsequential his vision of cultural possibility. Conversely, Hutchinson does much to substantiate Johnson's insistence in both Black Manhattan and Along This Way that New York opened up the field of cultural possibility in ways that no other American place could have done: "without the particular conditions existing in Harlem, and Manhattan generally," he argues, "the "Negro renaissance' would have been vastly different." Hutchinson goes on to list the concentration of the publishing industry, the consequent congregation of "like-minded cultural workers" (more often than not from elsewhere), the obvious presence of cultural diversity, and the relative weakness of cultural elites (white or black) as factors that rendered New York unique. In effect, "New York provided a freer atmosphere for the black artist both because of the concentration, dynamism, and diversity of racial consciousness in Harlem and because of the greater freedom and variety of interracial and interethnic relationships, which only intensified the experimental development of new forms of 'racial' expression" (5-6).

(7.) Johnson's revisions in Black Manhattan to the earlier "Harlem: The Cultural Capital" are noteworthy. In both texts, he raises the question of whether "the Negroes" will hold Harlem, and in both accepts the improbability of their doing so forever. In the essay he insists that "the date of another move northward is very far in the future," and in the book claims that "at the present time such a move is nowhere in sight." But in the earlier essay, he poses another question that seems in some respects at odds with the prospect of ultimately temporary residence: "Will Harlem become merely a famous ghetto, or will it be a center of intellectual, cultural and economic forces exerting an influence throughout the world, especially upon Negro peoples? Will it become a point of friction between the races in New York?" He recognizes, in effect, how stark an alternative Harlem faces, should Harlem fail to realize its potential as a vital cultural center and Manhattan fail to realize its potential as a biracial metropolis. He optimistically concludes, however, that Harlem's "American-ness," its physical connection to the larger city, and its diversified labor force make unlikely the more negative, and more typical, scenario ("Harlem" 308-11 and BM 158-59).

(8.) According to Wintz, Blanche Knopf urged Johnson to write another novel after The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man had been reprinted with his name on it in 1927 (170-71). Johnson hoped to use some of the time granted him by the Rosenwald fellowship to write another novel as well as to finish his work on Black Manhattan (Levy 289-90). A second novel never materialized, however.

(9.) Cf. Locke's account of the Austrian modernist director Max Reinhardt's response to the Negro revues: "It is intriguing, very intriguing ... these Negro shows that I have seen. But remember, not as achievements, not as things in themselves artistic, but in their possibilities, their tremendous artistic possibilities. They are most modern, most American, most expressionistic. They are highly original in spite of obvious triteness, and artistic in spite of superficial crudeness. To me they reveal new possibilities of technique in drama, and if I should ever try to do anything American, I would build it on these things." Locke then describes himself and fellow interviewer Charles Johnson as somewhat nonplussed by Reinhardt's qualified enthusiasm: "Eliza, Shuffle Along, Runnin' Wild! We had come to discuss the possibility of serious Negro drama, of the art-drama, if you please" (qtd. in "Negro and the American Stage" 81).

(10.) Johnson recalls the Ethiopian Art Players' 1923 production of Wilde's Salome, Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, and black playwright Willis Richardson's The Chip Woman's Fortune as "the most ambitious attempt Negroes had yet made in the legitimate theatre in New York." Lamentably though somewhat predictably, in his view, only the latter play met with full critical approval: "The Ethiopian Art Players had run up against one of the curious factors in the problem of race, against the paradox which makes it quite seemly for a white person to represent a Negro on the stage, but a violation of some inner code for a Negro to represent a white person" (BM 190-91). On the one hand, Gregory had recalled the same event in his piece for The New Negro with deference to the standard wisdom: "even great acting could not atone for an unwise selection of plays. This untimely collapse of a most promising enterprise should hold a valuable lesson for other promoters of Negro drama" (158). In the same collection, on the other hand, Fauset held out the same hope as Johnson, deploying the myth of an African American instinctual dramatic gift as the most logical support for her view that black actors might serve higher dramatic culture better than whites: "with chameleon adaptability we are able to offer white colored men and women for Hamlet, The Doll's House [sic], and the Second Mrs. Tanqueray; brown men for Othello; yellow girls for Madam Butterfly; black men for The Emperor Jones" (167).

(11.) For important discussions of Johnson's self-consciously modern perspective on (and ambivalence towards) both the spirituals he sought to preserve in his 1925 and 1926 Books of American Negro Spirituals and his early career as a popular songwriter, see Sundquist and Ruotolo. Granting as they do, however, a primary importance to Johnson's ironic novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (the focus of both essays), both scholars exaggerate Johnson's guilt about his early career in popular entertainment (Sundquist 13, 19, 24-25) and thus his downplaying it (Ruotolo 251-52). Chapters 9-11 of Black Manhattan and chapters 17-20 of Along This Way document Johnson's unabashed commitment to making black commercial entertainment a hallmark of the cultural memories of both collective African America and the nation as a whole.

Michael Nowlin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria in Canada. Besides publishing several articles on 20th-century American literature, he has edited Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence for the Broadview Literary Texts series.