Mediating "race" and "nation:" the cultural politics of 'The Messenger.' (magazine)

Studies of the Harlem Renaissance have so far paid insufficient attention to American cultural nationalism as an important locus of transracial ideological contestation during the 1920s. Since Nathan Huggins's rather surprising conclusion that "New Negro" authors "failed" in part because of a failure to claim their "American nativity" (308), scholars have focused on the black cultural nationalist, integrationist, and pan-Africanist aspects of the multi-faceted literary movement but have not carefully examined the diverse approaches of black authors to the issue of their "Americanness," despite Robert Hayden's insistence on the importance of this issue in his preface to the 1968 edition of The New Negro (x-xi). Perhaps one reason for this wariness has been the fear that stressing the "Americanness" of the movement would soften the distinction between "black" and "white" cultural traditions that has been an important impetus to much African Americanist scholarship since the 1960s. Perhaps it derives from the continued difficulty of reconciling the "double-consciousness" famously defined by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk: "One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body" (5). Whatever the case may be, the intimate yet multifarious relationship between the writing of the Harlem Renaissance and American cultural nationalism is a rich subject for inquiry at the current moment, when the relative claims of Afrocentricity, American multiculturalism, and cultural "hybridity" demand attention.

One way of approaching this issue is by way of discursive "field" analyses, including examinations of specific institutions that helped structure the literary field in which African American authors worked during the 1920s, institutions offering diverse, sometimes conflicting, and even self-contradictory positions on issues of fundamental import to the re-imagining of the mediation between "American" and "Negro" cultural identity. So far, such examinations have stressed the tensions between The Crisis and Opportunity magazine, yet even these discussions have neglected an important dimension of the cultural debates - the flux of racial and cultural theory at the time, and the variety of views about the likelihood and/or desirability of wholesale "amalgamation" of the "races" in the United States. Views on this crucial issue were remarkably varied; Jean Toomer's, for example, were not so unusual as is often assumed. The Messenger is an especially important journal to examine on this count, as it addressed issues of racial and cultural amalgamation more boldly than did any other publication, and it did so within the context of addressing the "Americanness" of African American culture in provocative and often satirical fashion, with as yet unexamined consequences for understanding the "racial" culture of the United States.

American cultural nationalism took a very different form in the pages of The Messenger than it did in The Crisis and Opportunity. The Crisis's cultural criticism revolved around a political and social indictment of white America on the grounds of "American ideals," served by the propaganda of art; Opportunity emphasized cultural self-revelation as such, the aesthetics of experience, and "cultural racialism" (a "harder" form of cultural pluralism than that of The Crisis). In contrast, The Messenger adopted a stridently iconoclastic approach, more often than not ridiculing the notion that African American culture was distinctly different from European American culture and stressing the "mulatto" character of U.S. culture. One gleans from The Messenger the notion that cultural similarities between black and white Americans are hidden by a shared racial discourse, a culturally specific "American" (that is, U.S.) phenomenon sustaining the widely shared faith in essential racial differences. Moreover, at the heart of the rituals of this faith one finds an ironic deconstruction of it, a flirting with the color line that hides while enacting the "amalgamation" continually going on beneath the cover of racial reasoning.

Theodore Kornweibel has argued that The Messenger was never fully committed to the Harlem Renaissance and lacked a coherent editorial attitude toward the movement. The magazine's editorial columns "never embraced the cultural movement or attempted to spell out a coherent philosophy for it. What philosophy did appear was incidental, the product of columnists and reviewers, chiefly drama critic Theophilus Lewis" (107). However, while Kornweibel is right in saying that the magazine did not present a coherent philosophy, The Messenger presented a more united front on the issue of racial and national identity than Kornweibel suggests. In fact, Lewis's interest in the development of a black aesthetic went counter to the general drift of the magazine's cultural politics, which stressed that the U.S. was or would become a "mulatto" nation. Despite The Messenger's eclecticism, the editors most concerned with "cultural" history and aesthetics other than Lewis shared similar views about the relationship between "white" and "black" cultural identity in the U.S., and these views had definite ramifications for their attitude toward efforts to develop a "black aesthetic" in literature and the "fine arts." Moreover, their views of the shared cultural identity of black and white America fit the magazine's specifically North American socialist ideology.

The main force behind the magazine, A. Philip Randolph, had a long-standing interest in literature; according to Arna Bontemps, Randolph provided the "original literary impulse of the magazine" (see Kornweibel 120). A. Philip Randolph was no black cultural nationalist. He disapproved of blues and jazz, preferring Western classical music, and his favorite author was the Bard of Avon. Indeed, Randolph (a Southerner by birth) picked up his arresting "Oxford-style" English accent learning to recite Shakespeare with the help of a tutor before World War I, when he performed Shakespearean roles in amateur theatre in Harlem. Some of his first acting experience along these lines was with the drama club at the Salem Methodist Church, where Countee Cullen's father was minister, and where he met Theophilus Lewis, later drama critic for The Messenger. Subsequently, Randolph and his wife Lucille organized a Harlem-based amateur troupe known as "Ye Friends of Shakespeare" (Anderson 57-59, 71; Pfeffer 8; Kornweibel 30).

Although he often rightly stressed the importance of autonomy for black groups involved in the movement for justice, Randolph conceived of the racial struggle within the context of "an indigenous movement for social and economic change" (Anderson 344). Both the "indigenous" and the ultimately anti-racialist aspects of Randolph's vision help account for the virulence of The Messenger's attack on Marcus Garvey, and led to W. A. Domingo's withdrawal from the editorial staff (Pfeffer 17-18). Randolph and others at the magazine viewed the programs of such West-Indian-led groups as the UNIA and the communist, black nationalist African Blood Brotherhood (Garvey's bitter opponent) as "foreign" to the realities of black life in the United States.(1) The Messenger attributed racial prejudice to capitalism, insisted on the "Americanness" of African Americans, and continually called for interracial worker solidarity, even when it promoted black control of black groups as a tactical necessity. A. Philip Randolph opposed affiliation of American socialists with the Third International in Moscow, believing that they should resist direction from outside the United States - in part, it would seem, because of the specific conflict between Marxist ideology and American racial reality. His struggle on this point during the 1920s developed into the virulent anti-Communism that typified the rest of his career (Pfeffer 17). But if the U.S. was to be the site of a new form of "indigenous" socialism, it also, The Messenger often suggested, would give birth to a new people and a "mulatto" national culture. Race pride did not conflict with a militant integrationism or even assimilationism; it seems, overall, to have been considered essential to achievement of true integration. Thus J. A. Rogers, one of the most persevering historians of global black achievement, was at the same time an avowed proponent of American "amalgamation."

Like Randolph, Chandler Owen, co-founder of The Messenger, did not consider African American cultural nationalism to have much purchase upon the social situation of black America. Owen clearly advocated integration in every sense. He regarded the cabaret, for example, as a useful social institution because, more effectively than any other, it was breaking down the color line: Black and white common people could be found together there, lured by the two basic instincts of hunger and sex. It was thus "one of the most democratic institutions in America," though some Negro leaders were joining with white "committees of Fourteen" to segregate the clubs or close them down (Owen 461). A similar point was later made by two other Messenger regulars, in George Schuyler's Black No More (20) and in J. A. Rogers' contribution to The New Negro, "Jazz at Home" (223-24).

The involvement of The Messenger with the literary Harlem Renaissance really began after George Schuyler joined the magazine in 1922. Until then, the magazine criticized The Crisis and Du Bois, for example, on the basis of their overemphasis on the arts and "culture," and what creative work it published unambiguously delivered its social and economic message.(2) But by late 1922, Chandler Owen was spending most of his time on the road soliciting advertising from black businesses (which helps account for the dramatic shift of tone in the magazine's socioeconomic criticism), and Randolph needed someone to help him get the magazine out. He turned to the young iconoclast who had been attending his and Owen's Friends of Negro Freedom meetings (Schuyler, Black 133-34). Soon Schuyler was effectively the managing editor, particularly after Owen moved to Chicago in 1923. When Randolph's involvement in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters began taking up more and more of his time, Schuyler became the main force in keeping the magazine going (Kornweibel 57). Thus the very period in which the magazine was controlled by an editor most vociferously opposed to black cultural nationalism, and in which the magazine had become most "middle-class," was the period when its readership was most black.(3)

The period of Schuyler's greatest influence was from 1923 to 1926, when he took a leave of absence to tour the South, and from early 1927 to July 1928, when the magazine folded. The latter period was also that in which Schuyler published such satires as "The Negro Art Hokum" and "Blessed Are the Sons of Ham" for The Nation, "Southern Snapshots" for New Masses, several pieces for American Mercury, and "The Negro's Greatest Gift to America" for Ebony and Topaz, the collection edited by Charles S. Johnson. (The gift: "simply that of being present here, which made white people assume a superiority unknown in Europe" [Schuyler, Black 161].) Schuyler adhered to a particularly provoking and rather paradoxical form of American cultural nationalism, on the one hand insisting on the mutual cultural identity of "so-called" (as he always emphasized) Negro and Caucasian Americans and, on the other hand, stressing the grim significance (and insanity) of that culture's most characteristic - if self-destructive - discourse: the discourse of "race." Unquestioned faith in this discourse was one of the distinctive cultural attributes all Americans seemed to share, despite pervasive evidence of its stupidity. Yet Schuyler's thinking on this issue has logical consequences he repressed: If the "fiction" of racial difference is so imbedded in the way "white" and "black" Americans perceive each other and themselves, is it not productive of cultural difference - cultural difference that is at one and the same time distinctively "American" and, because it is "American," racially marked? This effect, indeed, is nowhere more evident than in Schuyler's own blackly humorous fiction.

In 1923, Schuyler had brought on board his friend J. A. Rogers, who wrote on black history, contemporary events, and international affairs. A favorite topic of both Schuyler and Rogers was the "mixing" of the "races" in America, and this became effectively a recurrent theme for the duration of The Messenger's existence. Rogers, for example, argued that the United States was becoming less "Anglo-Saxon" over time, and that the "Anglo-Saxon-ites" were not true "Americans": "There is another kind of 100 per cent Americanism, whose ideals, it seems, would be to take the composition of this nation (be it good or bad) as an inescapable fact, and after a process of selection of the best qualities in other nations, absorb those qualities[,] evolving in the course of time an individuality of its own" ("Critical" 379). An advocate for a thoroughgoing melting pot, Rogers, author of such books as Nature Knows No Color Line, liked to emphasize the extent of passing and "miscegenation" in the United States. In a piece entitled "Is Black Ever White?" Rogers completely rejects the racial discourse initiated by white racists for their own profit and now shared by both white and black Americans. A supposedly "black" man like Walter White should be called white, according to his physical appearance: "One of the first things towards 'solving' this so-called race problem is to learn to call things by their right name." Refusing to accept the racial discourse foisted upon all Americans by white racists, he argues that "right here is the fountainhead of the so-called color line." Instead of an artificial "racial" dualism of "whites" and "blacks," writes Rogers, "I see but one American people, speaking a common language, and at bottom having a common ideal, shading in color by imperceptible degrees from white to black, or black to white, as you will" - the difference is "of little moment" (274).

Schuyler, too, vehemently rejected the notion that there were major cultural or racial differences between so-called "white" and "black" Americans as such. His early work for The Messenger included most importantly a series of articles on "Hobohemia" and the transracial urban underclass. Among the homeless one found little racial discrimination - even among the well-read and well-educated. Racial differences seemed minimal among the "hobos," who had their own distinctive, non-racial culture and vocabulary that were indigenously "American" - free of much of the hypocrisy that characterized the bourgeoisie and working classes of both black and white Americans. Schuyler constantly notes that two-thirds of "so-called Negroes" are partly white, and that white men pursue black women while black men prefer "yellow" women and "Nordic" blondes: It is a fact of nature, in Schuyler's view, that "unlike people attract each other" (rev. of Dowd 95). Schuyler deliberately stressed such mutual attraction, along with the cultural similarities of "black" and "white" Americans, to sharpen hiw satirical attack on American racism. This was an essential weapon in his rhetorical repertoire, which he first developed in his monthly column "Shafts and Darts" - in Langston Hughes's view, the most valuable feature of the magazine (233).

Like Schuyler and Rogers, Thomas Kirksey argued in a 1926 article that "amalgamation" is inevitable; the "races" are bound to merge - have, in fact, already merged to a great extent - so whites should stop being contemptuous of their brothers and sisters. The New World, in any case, is not a "Nordic" environment, and there are few differences between black and white Americans. Finally, history shows that amalgamation is "natural" (363-64, 381). Looking back over world history at the emergence of great peoples and nations of the past, many contributors to and readers of The Messenger apparently concluded that the U.S. was at an early stage of development toward a new racial identity such as had never been seen before.

In late 1926 and 1927, about the same time that W. E. B. Du Bois was publishing the results of his survey "The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?", The Messenger ran a poll (no doubt drafted by Schuyler) on "Group Tactics and Ideals" that questioned whether race consciousness helped or hindered the black struggle for equality. The questionnaire reads like a series of leading questions (in this respect much like Du Bois's in The Crisis, though with a very different intent):

1) Is the development of Negro social consciousness (a definite group psychology, stressing and laudation of things Negro) compatible with the ideal of Americanism (Nationalism) as expressed in the struggle of the Aframericans for social and industrial equality with all other citizens?

2) Will this ideal of equal rights and privileges be realized within the next century?

3) If and when this ideal is realized, will it or will it not result in the disappearance of the Negro population through amalgamation?

4) If the struggle for the attainment of full citizenship rights and privileges, including industrial equality, is to result in the disappearance of the Negro through amalgamation, do you consider the present efforts to inculcate and develop a race consciousness to be futile and confusing?

5) Do you consider complete amalgamation of the whites and blacks necessary to a solution of our problem?

6) Do you desire to see the Aframerican group maintain its identity and the trend toward amalgamation to cease?

7) Can a minority group like the Aframericans maintain separate identity and group consciousness, obtain industrial and social equality with the citizens of the majority group, and mingle freely with them?

8) Do you or do you not believe in segregation, and if so, in what form? ("Group Tactics" 361)

The range of responses to this questionnaire is fascinating even today. A surprising number questioned the premises of Negro "race consciousness," noting that many "Negroes" were mostly white - certainly much more so than African, and that to accept the "Negro" designation was to accept the racist discourse of whites (a position that would fit the socialist line that racialism was a capitalist invention to foster the exploitation of workers). However, most respondents believed that "group" consciousness and effort were necessary as long as whites oppressed blacks on the basis of "race" (see, e.g., "Group Tactics" 308).

Eugene Gordon, a Boston Post staff member who had been recruited by Schuyler to do monthly commentary for The Messenger on "the best editorials appearing in the Negro press," replied that he believed "the doctrine of race consciousness to be harmful to the American Negro." "Amalgamation" is both inevitable and desirable. He completely rejected "race consciousness," arguing that complete "Americanization" - realization of the democratic ideals of liberty and justice for all - can come only with the merging of the races. The Negro masses should be taught national rather than racial consciousness: "They are no longer more to Africa, and will never again be more to Africa, than are their white compatriots to Caucasia" ("Group Tactics" 361). A different position was taken by Floyd J. Calvin, the Eastern District Manager of the Pittsburgh Courier (for which Schuyler was already writing). He was neither for nor against amalgamation, but he did not see it as likely to happen on a large scale or as realistically necessary for the achievement of equality. Moreover, he did not believe race consciousness to be at odds with "Americanism" ("Group Tactics" 361).

Most respondents believed amalgamation would occur sooner or later, at the very least as a result of growing equality - even if they stressed that race consciousness was a present necessity. Robert Bagnall of the NAACP even argued that "the more pride he has in his race, the greater the probability of amalgamation," a position with which J. A. Rogers would probably have agreed. "As no minority group in history," he continued, "has ever attained a position of equality and remained separate from the majority group, I do not believe that this is possible for the Aframerican." Nonetheless, for the time being race consciousness was important for mass action ("Group Tactics" 12). J.A. Rogers felt that if "Americanism" ever became the "dignified homogeneous thing" it ought to be, rather than synonymous with "white Americanism," then stress on racial consciousness would not be compatible with it; but at present "America" was a white man's country. Ultimately, Rogers noted, amalgamation is inevitable and not to be regretted ("Group Tactics" 12).

Similarly, N. B. Young, responding for the faculty of Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, wrote that they had come to a consensus that, while amalgamation was inevitable and necessary to full equality, racial solidarity and self-segregation were currently needed. Amalgamation should be a blending of both races, culturally and biologically, so race consciousness would help ensure that some Negro traits enter into the formation of the new group. Harold Simmelkjaer, a clerk in the New York Supreme Court, considered amalgamation inevitable and desirable, but did not see any contradiction between race consciousness and Americanism. And C. H. Douglas of Macon, Georgia, a bank president, felt that racial consciousness was needed to defend the rights of African Americans but should not be overstressed, because "we are all Americans"; amalgamation, moreover, was eventually bound to occur and was the quickest way to achieve equality. Only William M. McDonald, president of a Fort Worth bank, came out strongly against amalgamation, holding forth for segregation but equality ("Group Tactics" 11-14, 29). However unrepresentative of bourgeois black thinking during the Harlem Renaissance the responses to The Messenger's survey may be, they suggest an important ideological undercurrent during the period that has been largely ignored in subsequent criticism, even in commentary on The Messenger itself.

This undercurrent was, however, notably countered by one of The Messenger's own most astute contributors, Theophilus Lewis, in his theatre column. After commenting on a production of Willis Richardson's play Compromise, Lewis indulges in a brief essay about the advisability of legalizing interracial marriage so that white men could be forced to marry the black women who become pregnant by the - a line the NAACP happened to be pushing at the time. Lewis emphatically does not want interracial sexual relations, and particularly interracial marriage, to become as acceptable as intraracial sex and marriage. Free interracial marriage would be disastrous for the Negro people, for "if able Negro women had a fair chance to become the wives of substantial white men instead of only their paramours[,] considerable numbers of them would seek unions across the line, impelled by the cosmic urge . . . to secure well placed fathers for their children." Black men would thus be robbed of the "counsel and inspiration" intelligent black women provide in a marriage. But Lewis goes further, anchoring his position in an explicitly eugenicist and racialist rationale that goes against the anti-racialist reasoning (reliant in part upon Boasian anthropology) that generally informed The Messenger:

Furthermore, the loss of able mothers would cause a falling off in the average quality of pure bred Negro children. Nor would the race gain anything from the infusion of Caucasian blood in the colored children intelligent Negro women bore their white husbands; for the white race the world over is losing vitality and petering out while the African peoples, having lain fallow a thousand years, are showing signs of resurgent energy. It follows that the way of wisdom lies in not only preserving the present order which offers straight women no inducement to mate outside the race but to begin now to build up protective sentiment against the day when white people will want to let down the bars. . . . I shall drive a stake in the ground here and watch how many years it takes Dean Pickens, J. A. Rogers and the cohorts of the N.A.A.C.P. to reach this point. ("The Theatre" 182-83)

Lewis's black cultural nationalism in this case is linked with a more overtly patriarchal racial nationalism that stresses biological "purity" and racial "ownership" of women, and assumes the existence of cycles of racial destiny. It may be significant that this column was published while George Schuyler was on leave. In any case, it patently opposes the usual position of The Messenger on the issue of racial separatism. While at odds with the ultimate hopes of writers such as Schuyler and Rogers, Lewis's reasoning assumes the truth of their belief that amalgamation in the U.S. would be inevitable but for segregationist laws and mores. The very intensity of his fear on this subject indicates how intimate the vision of amalgamation is to racial nationalism, and helps highlight the psychic structure of attraction/repulsion in American racial reasoning.

The Messenger also debated what self-terminology Americans of (at least partially) African descent should adopt, given the reality of the caste system. George S. Grant, in "What Are We?", recommended the term Black Americans as filling "a long felt want":

The argument for it begins with the fundamental assertion that we are not Negroes (niggers) or colored people (culled fellahs) but Americans; if it is necessary to distinguish us from the white Americans, then we are BLACK AMERICANS; not all of us are black, not all of white people are white, but "black" and "white" are used here to classify rather than to describe.

Grant developed his position on strictly strategic grounds, with regard to the rhetoric of national idealism: "As the whole machinery of education and publicity in the United States is designed and operated to build up respect and romantic idealism around the word 'American,' by merely including that term in our group name, we inevitably appropriate the effect of that propaganda." On the other hand, by adopting the term black as a "logical mark" distinguishing the group from "white" Americans, "we endow both it and ourselves with a dignity" that would combat notions of white superiority (300). Effectively, Grant's logic comports with the idea that race pride is a necessary tool in the battle against American racism, even though it must coexist with an ironic understanding that "race" is a social fiction foisted on the world by white capitalist civilization. This, indeed, is a position shared by Schuyler and Rogers.

For example, in his review of Du Bois's The Gift of Black Folk - at the very time he was ridiculing the notion of major cultural differences between black and white Americans - Schuyler hailed the book as a useful weapon against the Negro "inferiority complex": "I have always felt that a knowledge of the history and achievements of the Negro in America and elsewhere would do much to dispel [the] illusion of inferiority" (384-85). As Du Bois's book demonstrated, the Negro had been the most important factor in the making of the United States. Every American Negro should know this and take pride in it. But such knowledge would not, in Schuyler's view, lead to any belief in the distinctiveness of black culture; the notion of the "peculiarity" of African American culture seems always to have connoted "racial" inferiority for Schuyler, despite the fact that his own fiction suggests a preference for the "warmth" and "spontaneity" of black folks. As salutary as his satire was, Schuyler's chief fault lay in his tendency to attack any suggestion of cultural difference between black and white Americans, and particularly any identification of African with African American cultural identity, as racist exoticism.

Clearly this point of view distinguished Schuyler from most of the canonical Harlem Renaissance writers, whose efforts to develop a black aesthetic he regarded as submission to the racialist absurdities of white supremacy. It is therefore not surprising that, unlike some of the other authors of his generation, Schuyler was particularly fond of Jessie Fauset's fiction. In an admiring 1924 review of There Is Confusion he praised the portrayal of the "best" Negroes, people of whom whites know nothing and who are "the inspiration of the rising generation." In tune with Fauset's own thematic focus (and that of The Crisis) he stresses the "Americanism" of the black middle classes and the female point of view: "I believe this is the first novel, not obviously propaganda, by an American Negro woman about American Negroes (who are more truly American than the loud[-]mouthed 'Nordics' and Kluxers who must try the patience of the gods with their ignorant gibberish)" (146). Unfortunately, as Schuyler and J. A. Rogers saw it, too few people were writing realistic fiction about the "best" Negroes, for publishers were responding to a white demand for the sensational and exotic (Schuyler, "At the Coffee House" 236-37; Rogers, "The Critic" 365, 380). In a review of Nigger Heaven, Rogers did not blame Van Vechten or his publishers for coming out with the novel, for they were merely responding to public demand: "If so-called Negroes" want "the more respectable" side of life presented, they must do it themselves or support those who do - "Until this is done, I say, it serves us right." After all, both Gertrude Sanborn's Veiled Aristocrats and Fauset's There Is Confusion had suffered mediocre sales ("The Critic" 365, 380).

In his January 1926 "Shafts and Darts" column (coinciding with Du Bois's attack on Van Vechten and his essay "Criteria of Negro Art"), Schuyler offers facetious counsel to aspiring New Negro writers. Come to New York and join a Young Writers' Guild, he advises, to meet Negro intellectuals who belong to the Civic Club or the Community Church, and associate with white writers. "Success depends, however, on the ability of the striving writer to do the Charleston, sing the spirituals, and chatter amiably with the abandon supposed to be characteristic of members of a race with a primitive background." Soon white writers or editors will ask for a manuscript, which must display "true Negro psychology":

Such matter should always without exception be bizarre, fantastical and outlandish, with a suggestion of the jungle, the plantation or the slum. Otherwise it will not be Negro literature, and hence not acceptable. The predominant characteristic of the writing offered should be naivete, as befits simple children just a century or two removed from the so-called uncivilized expanses of the Dark Continent. (9)

Yet, contrary to the assertions of his satire, Schuyler was having little trouble, apparently, placing his own work in the chief "white" journals connected to the Negro literary movement, and he was pressed by the white editor, anthologist, and publisher V. F. Calverton (who strongly supported the idea of a "Negro aesthetic") to write the novel that became Black No More (Schuyler, Black No More 14; Black and Conservative 170). Regardless of the actual contradictions to his point, Schuyler's sarcasm calls into question not only the alleged insistence on the primitive and exotic, but also the ahistorical notions of Africa that ignore its ancient civilizations. Schuyler, however, also rejects the supposed "Africanism" of the New Negro: "If the mistake is made of presenting the American Negro as a product of machine civilization, just like other people in the same environment, an immediate rejection slip can be expected" ("Shafts" 9). Along the same lines, Schuyler's "Ballad of the Negro Artists" in the August 1926 issue satirized the foisting of "New Negro Art" upon a gullible public, cashing in on so-called "racial differences"; and "The Curse of My Aching Heart," a limerick by "Carl Von Vickton," lampooned Van Vechten for boosting New Negro trash ("Shafts" 239).

At least on this subject, Theophilus Lewis apparently agreed with Schuyler and Rogers. Emphasis upon black primitivism was a white capitalist trick that must be countered by black capital development and the founding of new publishing concerns. In a review of Eric Walrond's Tropic Death that panned the book for its exploitation of "paganism" and the exotic, Lewis suggested a strategy for building up an independent publishing industry. Monied blacks should start a publishing house to sell cheap "trash" books - mysteries, "sex books," crime novels, and so on, which sold best in the "American" mass market - to create a large Negro audience for fiction, then branch off into "better literature" so that black authors would not be so dependent upon white publishers, who in turn depended on white audiences (27-28). The fact that white editors and publishers remained interested in the work of authors such as George Schuyler and Jessie Fauset (whose novels, like Walrond's and Toomer's, were published by Boni & Liveright!) apparently did not register with Lewis. And only a few weeks later he would be praising Langston Hughes's much maligned Fine Clothes to the Jew (published by Knopf), which many black critics considered a prime example of Van Vechten's baneful influence: "Instead of the passion, sensuousness and wild music which throbbed from his first poems the later blues exhale the ascetic delicacy one finds in the lyrics of Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman" ("Refined Blues" 109). These blues, the review's title argued, were admirably "refined."

On the complicated issue of the "low" versus the "high" and "white" versus "black" interpretations of African American culture, James Ivy - later an editor of The Crisis - tried for a more balanced approach than did Lewis or Schuyler. "All able sympathetic novels about the lower[-]class Negro," he suggests in a fawning review of Julia Peterkin's Black April, "are written by whites, while those of the middle and upper classes are written by Negroes with a greater talent for sociology than literature" ("Book Bits" 168). This division of labor would continue for some time, he felt, because whites either do not know anything about "intelligent Negroes" or have ingrained in them the idea that there is no such thing. Black authors, on the other hand, suffer from an inferiority complex and fear of whites' stereotypes which causes them to write only of the elite. What Ivy wished to see, it seems, was a rapprochement between the two groups, paralleled by a maturation of the interracial audience for fiction about black life. Again, the recognition of racial constraints in contemporary American culture here coincides with an assimilationist and even "amalgamationist" vision of the future. In his review of E. C. L. Adams's Congaree Sketches, Ivy calls Paul Green's introduction for the volume "the best preface to any book by or about Negroes" because it argues that whites and blacks have assimilated a mutual tradition and practice, and nearly the same social conceptions in daily life: "'Black and white are inextricably mingled in blood and bone and intention'" (287). The destiny of the Negro, Ivy agrees with Green, is the destiny of the United States. Yet he finds Green overly optimistic in believing that whites are waking up to this fact, the counter-evidence being their taste for portrayals of only "lower-class" black characters.

Ivy points out a disturbing aspect of the context of reception in which whites and blacks encounter representations of African Americans. However culturally similar they may be (class and region being more significant cultural influences than race, in The Messenger's general view), one aspect of their common culture is their deep-seated racialist ideology, the chasm across which they fail to see each other for what they truly are - "Americans." On the one hand, Ivy argues, black readers can find only the stereotypical in white representations of blackness because of their assumptions about white subjectivity and perception. This suspiciousness - however well-founded - hampers both self-recognition and interracial dialogue, not to mention the development of black art. On the other hand, a question remains about just what the white audience is seeing in even the most "realistic" representations of lower-class black life if these are the only representations they can recognize. They seem to be taking comfort in the distance these portrayals reinforce between themselves and African Americans as a whole. Messenger critics such as Ivy and Schuyler would challenge this distance by forcing recognition, for example, of the class-based and regionally based differences that cut across race. Fiction of middle-class black life is particularly significant, because it gets middle-class white readers "where they live" and undermines their assumptions of racial difference/superiority.

Even when conventional differences between the races were affirmed in The Messenger - black "warmth" versus white "coldness," for example - their "American" mutuality and tendency to merge were emphasized, although this very tendency might precipitate the brutal rituals of racial exorcism as whites sought to repress their own desire for the merging, a desire psychologically interwoven with fear of racial "dispossession" and extinction. Thus Robert W. Bagnall's rave review of Waldo Frank's Holiday:

It paints with stark colors the bitter, barren brutality of the white world in a Southern small town, its barren monotony, its sordid hidden fear that the colorful, warm life of the Negro may dominate it. Here is shown for the first time in a white novel the contempt as well as the hatred felt by the Negro for the white, and here you have a white virgin with arid passion drawn irresistibly to throw herself into the arms of a Negro, and the Negro turning his back upon her and walking away, in spite of the fact that he is drawn toward her. Then you have the inevitable self-rebuke, hurt pride, sadistic desire for revenge, the determination that he shall not live to tell or to look at her whom he has repulsed - and so she has him lynched. (360)

Bagnall finds the novel "daring" and more - "understanding in a remarkable way" (360). This reading of Holiday (which Jean Toomer considered a sort of companion text to Cane) comports well with the idea that the "races" are naturally drawn to each other but that "artificial" social constraints and racial oppression cause repression of interracial desire. The blocking of this desire leads to violence in place of sexual fusion, a fusion that would be inevitable if those constraints could be dismantled.

In the pages of The Messenger, emphasis on the ways in which the racialization of identity pervasively shapes both "black" and "white" "American" selves unwittingly puts in question the magazine's overt resistance to ideas of racially identified cultural differences. (After all, if the social construction of "race" is so important in the U.S., does it not condition cultural development differentially?). But it also works against the recognition of continuities between "African" and "African American" cultural phenomena. This point is particularly evident in the magazine's drama criticism, which, despite differences between particular writers, consistently rejected notions of the Negro's "natural" dramatic ability and of African survivals in the black American traditions of performance. According to Wallace V. Jackson's 1923 discussion of the subject, slave life left the Negro with "certain leanings in emotional expression, a litheness of movement in the dance, and facility in songs and music and a peculiar aptness at mimicry - slavery will leave any people with such tendencies, witness the Russian serf." Hence the "materials" with which Negroes began their artistic career in North America were not African, but the products of slavery. Songs and dances were the principal forms of entertainment, because "all peoples pass through a stage in which the song and dance form the principal forms of entertainment" (746, 747). Jackson, an associate of the publisher William Stanley Braithwaite at B. J. Brimmer (Braithwaite's press), hoped for the development of "serious" drama, which would come after further experience in European drama and the further spread of amateur black dramatic clubs.

Jackson rejects not only the notion of a connection between African and African American cultural performance (which he regards as a racist notion), but also the idea that white Americans are somehow better suited than black Americans to perform European drama. After all, when the American Negro "entered man's estate he was an occidental and American." He is just as much a Moor, Spaniard, Roman, or Jew as the white American - "he knows and feels as much of Ibsen's Norwegian characters as the next American" (747). Hence the objection that a "Negro Stage" should not perform the plays of Wilde, O'Neill, or Shakespeare smacks of Jim Crow - a point Abram L. Harris would reiterate in a defense of the Ethiopian Art Players' performance of Salome; furthermore, the performance of these plays would contribute ultimately to the development of the drama by black playwrights about black American life (Jackson 748; Harris 774-75, 777).

The greatest hindrance to the development of that drama, according to The Messenger, was the dearth of good black playwrights and of an appreciative black audience.(4) Combatting this problem was virtually an obsession for Theophilus Lewis, The Messenger's regular drama critic after 1924. Lewis provided the most biting and consistently interesting commentary on the situation of black theatre in the Harlem Renaissance - much of the time, ironically, by ridiculing the notion that African Americans had any particular aptitude or interest in "good" theatre. This point ran directly contrary to the optimistic pronouncements frequently made in The Crisis, Opportunity, The Nation, and other magazines heralding the New Negro. Lewis's satirical iconoclasm in this regard, at least, fit in well with The Messenger's general tone on "cultural" matters, despite the fact that he presents more of a black cultural nationalist position than do the other editors.

Much of Lewis's criticism seems intended as overt provocation of racial pride:

Where considerable racial or national theatrical talent exists you quite naturally expect to find an indigenous theatre striving to interpret the group life and character. The alleged excessive fertility of the Aframerican has not produced any such theatre making any such effort.

Even the Lafayette Players, "the premier theatrical organization of the race," had failed to reveal any dramatic achievement of note:

In a decade of almost continuous activity it has neither found an embryo Pinero in its own ranks nor inspired a would-be Yeats to write a single sensible play; it has made no appreciable effort to bring the lush and colorful life of the black belts on the stage; it has not attempted to achieve distinction by presenting anything novel or provocative of thought; it has not even kept pace with the white theatre it set out to imitate.

And, more surprisingly still, Negro theatregoers are not seriously upset about this state of affairs. Twisting the knife, Lewis charges: "If you know of a single energetic attempt to make the Negro Theatre mature and virile, or, rather, to put it more accurately, if you know of a single serious effort to create a Negro Theatre that was not fostered by white folks you are a wiser bird than I am" ("Theatre" 291). Like W. E. B. Du Bois, Lewis wanted a theatre of, by, for, and near black folks, but he saw no evidence that many other black folks shared his interest.

Lewis, moreover, differed from Du Bois both in blaming African Americans themselves for failure to develop their own theatre and in his approach to the development of a black national drama. Lewis was never very specific about what the "aesthetics" of black theatre would be, for he believed its qualities could only emerge over time. The first step toward such emergence, however, must be the establishment of actual theatrical troupes and institutions supported from within the black community itself. Any community that could support myriad churches and musical revues should certainly be capable of sustaining its own theatre, regardless of the preferences of "outside" audiences. If African Americans were really adapted to the theatre and enjoyed it, most urban "black belts" would have at least a company or two. Yet, according to the Negro Year Book, there was not a single theatre in the United States in 1921-22 "devoted to the production of serious drama by or for Aframericans" (Lewis, "Same" 14). The three black theatres - the Lafayette (Harlem), the Dunbar (Philadelphia), and the Attucks (Norfolk) - mostly did vaudeville and motion pictures, just like most "white" theatres.

Furthermore, African American actors on the whole - despite the pronouncements of white liberals and black optimists - had displayed little actual dramatic ability, for the simple reason that they had not trained for the theatre. The virulence of Lewis's critique of black actors and the (almost non-existent, in his view) black drama may partly be attributable to his belief that other critics were not being honest, perhaps having been blinded by what they wanted to find in black theatre, the theatre of the "other," so to speak. In this respect, despite the black cultural nationalist thrust of Lewis's overall project, his criticism fit well with the tone of Messenger's other cultural criticism, both in its flamboyant iconoclasm (like Schuyler, Lewis greatly admired H. L. Mencken) and in its satire of the romanticization of black difference. Talented black actors were almost nonexistent, according to Lewis, and even "mediocre" ones were rare: "The best informed colored theatrical observer in America once declared to the writer that if a producer wanted to cast a single play requiring ten characters he would find it impossible to fill the parts with competent players from the ranks of colored professionals." Moreover, "there is nothing which can be said in extenuation of this condition. It is simply an evidence of the marked lack of virility of the Negro actor and a rebuttal of his vaunted 'natural' ability to excel on the stage" ("Survey" 301). The statement implicitly notices a connection between contemporary beliefs in the Negro's superior acting ability (to which a number of white directors had attested) and the stereotype of the sensual and "virile" black male. If there were to be a black dramatic tradition, it would not, for Lewis's part, depend on any racialist notions of "organic" black difference. Such notions could too easily become excuses for lack of effort.

A major hindrance to the black drama, Lewis charged, was sheer lack of commitment on the part of black actors. While recognizing the obstacles of public apathy and the opposition of profit-seeking managers (many of them white), he charges that "a handful of actors of courage and stamina, like Holcroft, the sturdy Englishman, or the robust American, Joseph Jefferson, would certainly have swept aside opposition tenfold as formidable in the course of the generation during which the Negro has been firmly established in the theatre" (301). Clearly, black Americans had demonstrated neither much interest nor much inherent ability in the "serious" drama, as Lewis defined it.

In contrast, they had shown a remarkable passion and aptitude for dancing and "low comedy," and by late 1926 Lewis began to think this fact might indicate the way out of the impasse he still lamented. In January 1925 he had traced the popular black drama to the blackface minstrel show in which white actors "imitated" the supposed imbecilities of blacks; black actors had unfortunately tried to "fit" into the same tradition: "It was to this vogue that the builders of colored musical comedies and revues went to school" ("Same" 15). The popularity of the form among black audiences as well as white had restricted the development of "serious" black theatre. In particular, "serious" black actors, playwrights, and critics (including Du Bois!), in reacting against this popular tradition, equated the "legitimate" stage with the "white" stage, "a presumption the white theatre has never claimed for itself" (14-.

Black theatre, it seemed, suffered from something like the "high-brow" / "low-brow" split Van Wyck Brooks had noted in white American culture, and the split was having similar effects in stunting the development of an "indigenous" black drama. On the one hand was a lower-class audience with vulgar tastes, "which means [the theatre] must devote itself to exaggerated buffoonery, obscene farce and sex-exciting dancing, supplemented with such curiosities as giants, midgets, acrobats, musical seals and mathematical jackasses." On the other hand were the "better[-]class Negroes" who stayed away and criticized. Instead, Lewis felt by July of 1926, they should attend the shows to function as a "leavening factor," causing theatres to adjust to tastes of both the "higher" and the "lower" elements, and come up with an "Aristotelian" mean.

Like the "high-brow" white American, the "high-brow" black American sought a theatre that bore little relation to his or her actual life. Rather than seeking entertainment adjusted to "indigenous ideas of propriety," the "higher Negro" commonly ignored even "his" own tastes and adhered to "alien standards" of judgment: "He insists on the Negro copying the suave manners and conventions of the contemporary white American theatre [a theatre aping European drama], unaware that the white stage reflects the racial experience of a people whose cultural background has never resembled ours since the beginning of history" (Lewis, "Theatre" 214). Appealing to the genuine, if crude, tastes of the lower class was at least better than trying to please this upper-crust audience.

By the fall of 1926, Lewis had decided that the way to develop an indigenous black drama was precisely to build upon the traditions roughly developed in the "vulgar" comic revues that had emerged from the black appropriation of the "white" blackface minstrel show - the most "indigenous" white American drama, and itself a caricature of black cultural performance. Lewis was the only black critic I know of to take this approach to the possible future of black theatre, although it comports well with suggestions the German director Max Rheinhardt had expressed to Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke in a 1924 interview, and bears some resemblance to the position outlined by Jessie Fauset's "The Gift of Laughter" in The New Negro.(5) Lewis's reasons for suggesting this approach, however, differed slightly from both Fauset's and Rheinhardt's - as well as from Johnson's and Locke's reasons for coming to embrace Rheinhardt's ideas. Rather than emphasizing the unique dramatic qualities of black popular performance in relation to modern Western theatre as a whole, Lewis stressed the strategic importance of developing a theatre based on what black communities would actually enjoy and support. His position, therefore, had a stronger economic as well as cultural black nationalist content. Equally significant, however, is the thinness of the line dividing this ostensibly racial nationalism from the sort of amalgamationism propounded by the likes of Schuyler and Rogers. For if the black comic revue, appealing to male sexual interest (usually in "mulatto" women, as Lewis noted) and subversive "masked" humor exploiting racialist stereotypes, is the vulgar origin of indigenous black theatre, it is nonetheless a form in complex relationship to a popular "white" theatre that, while consciously racist, flirted with racial "cross-dressing" and unconscious transracial identification, as Eric Lott has recently argued.(6)

Like Fauset, Locke, and Johnson, however, Lewis regarded popular black entertainment as the basis for the development of "serious" drama. Its dancing and ribald comedy could turn out to be augurs of the future if such resources could be brought to serve the "dramatist" and the "real" needs of the African American community. For Lewis, the main motif of both the dancing and the humor of the popular black stage was "sex," shading frequently into "indecency" but nonetheless representing the "natural and sane attitude toward the subject characteristic of the Negro race" ("Survey" 301). This emphasis, however, served the needs of white audiences more than those of blacks themselves; according to Lewis (and so many other critics of the time), whites needed "paganism" to revitalize their "spiritual life," whereas blacks did not: "Our way of living is naturally fecund and exuberant and we have a frank way of facing life" (301-02). Each race, in fact, had what the other needed. Hence, while the popular black theatre performed a valuable function for American culture as a whole and white culture in particular (a function of which Lewis approved), it was not providing what the black community specifically most needed to achieve cultural "maturity." It resembled the Attic revels that preceded "the advent of Aeschylus" (302). Moreover, while it was not "necessarily fatal to hardy talent," it was "inimical to the development of good acting" - which explains why the really great black actors, in Lewis's view, had to rely on productions by white dramatists to both develop and showcase their abilities. The ironies of the development of "racial" cultures through national drama are inescapable; all are interdependent in their very striving for self-development and even self-determination.

However, while Lewis occasionally praised "white" plays on "black" subjects, he was generally more circumspect in this regard than the critics of both The Crisis and Opportunity, particularly concerning "folk plays." His chief objection was to romanticization of black folk life in the South and other forms of idealization. Hence, while Eugene O'Neill's plays had performed the important function of combatting discrimination against black actors, they had also "idealized" blacks. O'Neill, David Belasco, DuBose Heyward, Paul Green, and others had unfortunately established, by 1926, "the celestial origin of black folks." Here again, what Lewis objects to is rather different from what other black critics tended to single out at the time. For example, the play Black Boy by Jim Tulley suffered from the typical faults of the morality play (a seemingly irresistible form for "sympathetic" drama about black life in America) - the black characters were all paragons of virtue and the whites were all devils ("Theatre" 333-34). Similarly, Em Jo Basshe's Earth offered "an elaborately camouflaged Greenwich Village conception of an Uncle Tom's Cabin version of the Book of Job" ("Theatre" 157). For the same reasons, unlike the critics for The Crisis and Opportunity, Lewis had little enthusiasm for Paul Green's plays: "He writes about sordidness in a sentimental way and winds up his stories with a sad ending," then calls the result a "Negro play" ("My Red Rag" 18). (In fairness, however, the critic acknowledged that Green did the same thing with his "poor white" plays, and with only slightly better results.) Lewis feared for the future when he noticed that a "Paul Green cult" was forming among black intellectuals and actors.

The main point of Lewis's criticism was that black drama needed to focus upon the present needs of the African American community, and that this entailed a skeptical attitude toward the nostalgia for lost origins, a strategic and historically contingent conception of "blackness," and discomfort with the inevitable shortcomings of a "Negro" drama that was not economically as well as creatively controlled by Negroes themselves. Lewis did not usually attack the white culture industry for the state of affairs of black drama; he put the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of black actors, playwrights, and audiences. If it hadn't been for the white theatre, Lewis argued, the talents of the few great black actors (Charles Gilpin, Ira Aldrich, Opal Cooper, Paul Robeson) could never have come to light: "Their dramatic vehicles, the opportunity for expression and the appreciation of their ability have been donated by the buckra folks" ("Theatre" 291). More than any other critic of the period, however, Lewis recognized the ways in which the white playwrights' attempts to advance black drama were caught up in the problems of the representation of "otherness," tending even in the best cases toward romantic idealization. White playwrights, obviously, could not be inventors of a modernist black drama, even if they played significant roles in its development (a point with which, it should be mentioned, Paul Green, Eugene O'Neill, and Ridgely Torrence thoroughly agreed). Given this fact, Lewis presented specific ideas about how an "indigenous" black drama might be developed entirely from within the black community itself.

In his most radical moments, Lewis put this hoped-for development in the larger context of the modernist predicament and what we might today call a "postcolonial" project:

Now the Negro Problem is this: It is the question whether a youthful people living in the midst of an old and moribund civilization shall die with it or find themselves able to shake loose from its complexities and build their own culture on its ruins. . . . This condition of doubt will find its esthetic expression in dissonances of sound and color, and such explosive comedy and tragedy as result from the struggles of a passionate people to escape the restraints of the Calvinist version of the Ten Commandments.

The task for the Negro artist, then, is to observe the confusion of rusting flivvers, vanishing forests, migratory populations and expiring faiths which confronts him and reveal its meaning in a felicitous manner. He will show us, perhaps, the convulsions of a world breaking down in chaos. Perhaps the nuclei of a new world forming in incandescence. ("The Theatre" 230)

Ironically, this is a very Toomer-esque scenario, but in Toomer's case the vision would be of a new "mixed" race emerging from the chaos, whereas for Lewis this role was to be filled by a "new" Negro. Here Lewis completely repudiates the idea that the new black culture would be an organic growth out of the folk or African past. American Negroes are a "new" people - in fact, the newest people - faced with the challenge of inventing themselves out of the fragments of collapsing civilizations, migratory populations (not "rooted" ones), and dying religions. Surprisingly, this argument ends up buttressing and extending in certain respects the more typical "amalgamationist" tendencies of The Messenger's cultural politics, though redefining the amalgamated identity as Negro while characterizing white culture as "organic" and therefore prone to extinction, "old and moribund." Furthermore, if the drama Lewis imagines here is that growing out of the popular black musical revue, then a main source of its very vitality is the extent of its conscious hybridity, of its double-reversal upon American racial differentiation and its subversion of the color line.

While Lewis occasionally spoke in essentialist terms of a racial "spirit," his main thrust was in the direction of a more historically contingent and pragmatic understanding of African American culture (including its relation to the global situation) and the potential role of drama in its re-invention. The ultimate form of that drama remained open, but it was to begin with the popular, the "low," the "vulgar." This meant not some pure racial origin, or some Herderian folk past such as Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory stressed, but rather the modern, urban, erotic, both morally and culturally "impure" comic revue - "illegitimate" offspring of an illegitimate, patently racist (though subconsciously miscegenationist), and pronouncedly "indigenous" "white" American theatre that owed its own existence to African American culture as much as to the peculiar fantasy life of the white American mind. Thus the "amalgamationist" strain in The Messenger's cultural criticism was not so very far removed from the black American cultural nationalism of Theophilus Lewis's criticism as it at first appears.

The view of the American Negro as a "new" and specifically "American" racial type (a view put forth from a "scientific" standpoint in Melville Herskovits's The American Negro in 1928) related in shifting ways to the vision of the future of "Americans" in general - potentially all to become a new amalgamated type, different from any of the Old World. In this way African American cultural nationalism and "amalgamationist" expectations stood in uncertain, inherently ironic, and productively experimental relation to each other, together providing a crucial issue for African American modernist authors - such as Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Nella Larsen - to address in varying ways. That both tendencies were featured within the same magazine illustrates the importance of the tension between them to the Harlem Renaissance - indeed, to U.S. racial ideology generally - and makes The Messenger all the more significant for readers today as we confront an even more complicated pattern of racialized and hybridized "American" identities.

Notes

1. See Anderson 127-37; and Schuyler, Black and Conservative 120-23, 145. Kornweibel discusses the anti-West-Indian prejudices expressed in The Messenger (143-54) and Garvey's general lack of interest in domestic American conditions (152-61).

2. See Johnson and Johnson 57-58. The Johnsons provide a useful overview of the cultural politics of The Messenger in many respects, but they completely ignore the anti-black-cultural-nationalist thrust of the magazine.

3. In 1921 the editors estimated that the magazine's readership was one-third white (Kornweibel 54). In fact, from 1917 to 1921, the magazine's audience was chiefly made up of white and black radical intellectuals. Subsequently the stance and tone shifted as the magazine became more sympathetic to black business and the American Federation of Labor, featuring society pages, sports, business and industry, and the achievements of black entrepreneurs. In 1925 it became chiefly an organ of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (see Kornweibel 50-51).

4. See, for example, Fort-Whiteman; "The Play" (editorial); "Do Negroes Want High Class Anything?" (editorial); and Schuyler, "Interviews."

5. See Locke 145-46; and Fauset 161-68. Fauset (167) cites a Carl Van Vechten essay, "Prescription for the Negro Theatre," as making a similar argument.

6. This is not a point that Lewis mentions, but it inhabits his criticism even when he is most insistent about racial identity.

Works Cited

Anderson, Jervis. A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait. New York: Harcourt, 1972.

Bagnall, Robert W. Review of Holiday. Messenger 6 (1924): 360-61.

"Do Negroes Want High Class Anything?" Editorial. Messenger 7 (1925): 20.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Fauset, Jessie. "The Gift of Laughter." The New Negro. Ed. Alain Locke. 1925. New York: Atheneum, 1968. 161-68.

Fort-Whiteman, Lovett. "Drama." Messenger 5 (1923): 671.

Grant, George S. "What Are We?" Messenger 8 (1926): 300.

"Group Tactics and Ideals." Messenger 8 (1926): 361, 383.

"Group Tactics and Ideals." Messenger 9 (1927): 11-14, 29.

"Group Tactics and Ideals." Messenger 9 (1927): 308.

Harris, Abram L. "The Ethiopian Art Players and the Nordic Complex." Messenger 5 (1923): 774-75, 777.

Hayden, Robert. "Preface to the Atheneum Edition." The New Negro. Ed. Alain Locke. 1925. New York: Atheneum, 1968. ix-xiv.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. 1940. New York: Hill and Wang, 1963.

Ivy, James W. "Book Bits." Messenger 9 (1927): 167-68.

-----. Review of Congaree Sketches, by E. C. L. Adams. Messenger 9 (1927): 287.

Jackson, Wallace V. "The Theatre-Drama." Messenger 5 (1923): 746-48.

Johnson, Abby Arthur, and Ronald Mayberry Johnson. Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1979.

Kirksey, Thomas. "Reflections on Race." Messenger 8 (1926): 363-64, 381.

Kornweibel, Theodore, Jr. No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917-1928. Westport: Greenwood, 1975.

Lewis, Theophilus. "My Red Rag." Messenger 10 (1928): 18

-----. "Refined Blues." Messenger 9 (1927): 109.

-----. Review of Tropic Death, by Eric Walrond. Messenger 9 (1927): 27-28.

-----. "Same Old Blues." Messenger 7 (1925): 14-15, 62.

-----. "Survey of the Negro Theatre - Ill." Messenger 8 (1926): 301-02.

-----. "The Theatre." Messenger 7 (1925): 230.

-----. "The Theatre." Messenger 8 (1926): 182-83.

-----. "Theatre." Messenger 6 (1924): 291.

-----. "Theatre." Messenger 8 (1926): 214.

-----. "Theatre." Messenger 8 (1926): 333-34.

-----. "Theatre." Messenger 9 (1927): 157, 169.

Locke, Alain. "Max Rheinhardt Reads the Negro's Dramatic Horoscope." Opportunity 2 (1924): 145-46.

Lott, Eric. "'The Seeming Counterfeit': Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy." American Quarterly 43 (1991): 223-54.

Owen, Chandler. "The Cabaret - A Useful Social Institution." Messenger 4 (1922): 461.

Pfeffer, Paula F. A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1990.

"The Play." Editorial. Messenger 8 (1926): 111.

Rogers, J. A. "The Critic." Messenger 8 (1926): 365, 380.

-----. "Critical Excursions and Reflections." Messenger 6 (1924): 379, 388.

-----. "Is Black Ever White?" Messenger 8 (1926): 274.

-----. "Jazz at Home." The New Negro. Ed. Alain Locke, 1925. New York: Atheneum, 1968. 216-24.

Schuyler, George S. "At the Coffee House," Messenger 7 (1925): 238-37.

-----. Black and Conservative: The Autobiography of George S. Schuyler. New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1966.

-----. Black No More. 1931. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1989.

-----. "Interviews with Actors." Messenger 7 (1925): 21-23.

-----. Review of The Gift of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois. Messenger 6 (1924): 384-85.

-----. Review of The Negro in American Life, by Jerome Dowd. Messenger 9 (1927): 95.

-----. Review of There Is Confusion, by Jessie Fauset. Messenger 6 (1924): 145-46.

-----. "Shafts and Darts." Messenger 8 (1926): 9.

-----. "Shafts and Darts." Messenger 8 (1926): 239.

George Hutchinson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. This essay is part of a book entitled The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, forthcoming from Harvard University Press. The research was supported in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers in 1989-90.