The Daily Worker Newspaper, April 23, 1927, Page 7

cd ‘The New Negro 9 this day when Holiday Nigger, and Porgy have been succeeded by Nigger Heaven and Black April, and new books by and about Negroes seem to multiply almost with every dawn, it is wise to take inventory of the situation. While the Negro problem is funda- mentally economic, its recent stir has been largely within the sphere of the books. Few problems have absorbed so profoundly the attention of the reading public. Between 1923 and 1924, for instance; thirty books, cov- ering a diversity of themes: fiction, poetry, essays, history, sociology- religion, were written by Negroes, and over eighty books concerned with the Negro and the Negro problem, covering the same diversity of topics, were written by whites. The Negro press itself is an important contribu- tory factor in the cultivation of the Negro writer. In 1863 there were only two newspapers in the United States published by Negroes. Today there are 412 periodicals published by or for colored people; 70 religious, 85 pertaining to education, 7 magazines of general literature, 30 fraternal or- gans and 220 newspapers. Today there are prize contests that are run every year by two leading Negro magazines, the Crisis and Opportu- nity, which are an additional insptr- ation to the young Negro writer. Al- though the work of the older Negro writers from Dunbar to Chestnutt developed without the incentive of prize contests, it can be said without exaggeration that the development of the Negro press, and in, particular the encouragement of prize contests, have helped to promote if not stimu- late the work of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. . * ¢ «© The new Negro is thought of as Synonymous with these new achieve- ments in the novel, drama, and poetry. Alain Locke’s recent volume The New Negro is devoted primarily to things artistic. While There is Confusion has passed into a welcome limbo, the young Negro intellectual still follows the expressions of the Negro in fiction and poetry with an avid curiosity that too often excludes interest in matters economie and po- litical, In Walter White’s Fire in the Flint and Flight, or Eric Waldron’s Tropic Death. Langston Hughes’ Weary Blues or Fine Clothes to the Jew, or Countee Cullen’s Color or Jean Toomer’s Cane, is seen the evolution of the New Negro. This new Negro thus becomes an art product. In a way he becomes an isolated phenom- enon, separate from the economic struggle of his people. . 8 Se The cause of this phenomenon Is peculiar. Out of the Negro masses has emerged a Negro intellectual. Edu- cation has created a new type of Ne- gro. The strides in educational ad- vance have been extensive. An ex- amination of recent statistics will re- veal the sweep of this change. First, let us look at the data in reference to illiteracy in the United States. In 1920 there were 4,431,905 persons 10 years of age and over who were il- literate. Of this number 3,087,744 or 62.6% were white and 1,842,161 or 87.4% were Negroes. In 1880 there had been 3,320,878 illiterates among the Negroes, tantamount to a per- centage of 70. To pass from illiteracy to literacy, we discover that in 1924 alone, 675 Negroes received the 3achelor of Arts degree and that the total number of Negro college gradu- ates is now about 10,000. Twenty- nine Negroes have won the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from standard American Universities, and sixty Ne- groes have been elected to the Phi Beta Kappa. In the professions, like- wise, the Negro has achieved singular success. In 1900 there were 1,734 Ne- gro doctors; in 1920 there were 3,495. In 1920 there were 1,950 Negro law- yers, two of them women, 1,109 den- tists and 3,341 trained nurses. Negro physicians such as Daniel H. Wil- liams, who was the first surgeon to perform successfully an operation on the human heart, and Algernon E. Jackson, who discovered a cure for articular rheumatism, have attained international reputations. oe « The force of these facts is all the more striking when we turn to state- ments that were part of accepted sociology less than a generation ago. At the time when Booker T. Wash- ington was propagating his phil- osophy of adaptation based upon sub- mission, and inculeating his ideal of segregated endeavor that was to achieve economic unity, A. H. Keane, the well-known anthropologist, wrote in the Encyclopedia Britanica (9th edition): “No full blooded Negro has ever been distinguished as a man of science, a poet or an artist; and the fundamental equality claimed for him by ignorant philanthropists 1s belied by the whole history of the race throughout the historic per- ied.” A few decades earlier Theodore Parker in a letter to Miss Hunt (Let- ter Nov. 10, 1857) had written: “In Massachusetts,” there are no laws to keep the black man from any pursuit, any office that he will; but thefe has never been a rich Ne- gro in New England. . none eminent in anything except the call- ing of a waiter.” These statements are so grotesque- ly absurd today. The facts adduced in the preceding paragraphs of this article are sufficient to expose their fallacy. In historical perspective al§o they reveal a pathetic ignorance of the Negro’s past. Since the times of their respective utterances, the Ne- gro in America has advanced in al- most every branch of human activity. His educational advance we have noted. In economic life also he has progressed. Immediately following the Civil war the Negro was engaged in approximately forty different busi- ness occupations; today he is engaged in over two hundred kinds of trades and business projects. There are about one hundred Negro banks with resources equivalent to $20,000,000, a dozen state wide business leagues and a score of local leagues in a number of states. 2 - - One of the important economic forces behind the development of this new Negro is the vast migration of black people from southern to north- ern latitudes. In this sweeping hegira, economic law has been predominant. The entire migration has been one of economic circumstances. The old belief that it was persecution which hastened the Negroes from their Southern hovels to Northern ghettoes was decisively exploded by a recent correlation made between Southern counties in which lynching had oc- curred during the thirty-year period 1888-1918, and the migration to and from these counties. (See Charles Johnson’s article on The Negro Mi- grations in The Modern Quarter Vol. TI, No. 4, page 314, which presents the most valuable study of this mi- gration problem that has-been made.) For instance, in Jasper county, Ga., where nine lynchings were effected, the greatest number for any county of the state in thirty years, the Ne- gro population increased between 1890-1920, while the white popula- tion during 1900-10 actually decreas- ed. In Harrison county, Texas, which has the largest number of lynchings (16) of any county in the state, the Negro population increased from 15,- 544 to 15,639. In other words lynch- ing, the most severe and flgrant form of persecution, does not depopulate communities of their Negro inhab- itants, * * * In view of all these changes, we sce that the Negro as a social and eco- nomic group is passing through a stage of rapid evolution. The pos- sibilities of this change being stem-. med, or diverted into futile channels, are enormous. Already the economic philosophy of the Negro is conserva- tive. Already it has accepted a score of American myths. That it has ac- cepted these things as a result of its having been an enslaved group, and is continuing many of them because it is still a submerged class, is obvious to a radical sociologist. Now that the Negro is beginning to grow as a so- cial and economic group, it is impor- tant that his philosophy does not be- come entangled with the webs- of American liberalism, and thus be led into a political cul de sac. It is im- By V, F. CALVERTON portant too that it dees not become infected with the racialisms that tvo often handicap persecuted peoples in their struggle in an economie world. oe One The mass of Negroes are proletar- ian. Their cause is linked up with the cause of the proletariat. What has this to do with the prob- lem of the new Negro? What has this to do with the poetry of Cullen and Hughes, the stories of Toomer, Ches- mitt, Mathews, the dramas of Gregory, Fauset and Richardson? The connection is simple and sig- nificant. These poets, story-tellers and dramatists have been described as the New Negro. Their work has been interpreted as the work of the New Negro. Their achievements rep- resent a Negro Renaissance. It is the argument of this article that the New Negro represents some- thing deeper, more stirring and more signal than that. These Negro ar- tists represent certain artistic fumb- lings for form. Jean Toomer, for in- stance, can write of simple things with subtlety, of little things with skill. His genre is the delicate, the precious prettiness of life, the soft, poetic regrets, the purple nuances of fleeting, futile passions. He is the Lafeadio Hearn of Negro literature. He has beautified the trivial, ensnared the elusive. Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes and many others have made of words a thing of beauty, but none of them has as yet caught the song of the masses. Their work, in most cases, seems to live in a separate world. It appears in the regular maga- zines, is featured as an attraction, and the word Negro comes to haven enchantment somewhat like the lure of strange drama or the fascination of antique furniture. The new Negro, we venture to pro- phesy, is and will be something differ- ent. The New Negro will really be new in that he will understand the economic situation of his people. His literature will be of a proletarian peo- ple, struggling for revolution and freedom. His songs will be the songs of the worker. The new Negro will labor for a new economic world. He will challenge not race-prejudice only, but class-prejudice, class-rule, and class-oppression. He will link himself with the labor movement. Like Dronke, Freiligrath, Wirth and Pfau in Germany of the last century his poetry will be defiant and revolution- ary. Contemporary Negro poets rep- resent achievement, but not’ newness. Their spirit is different from that of Dunbar, but it is a difference more in degree than in substance. Perhaps they represent a transition. The work of Claude MeKay is a hint in the new direction. The work of the new Ne- gro in poetry as in life, however, will abandon hint, evasion, and pure prettiness, and seek reality in radical reconstruction and revolutionary as- piration. AT THE PITMOUTH By HENRY GEORGE WEISS. And the crowd is surging around the pitmouth, And a pall of black smoke is hanging over the pitmouth, And there is weeping of women and wailing of. children around the pitmouth, And grim-faced men are striving to reach the dead and dying far down below the rim of the pitmouth; And a fat boss stabs at the pitmouth, Stabs with a two-bit cigar at the pitmouth, And tired miners come and seal up the pitmouth, With concrete and brick, wall up the pitmouth, So the air may not rush down the pitmouth, May not feed the flame that burns the coal far below the pitmouth; And frenzied hands beat in vain on the barrier erected at the pitmouth, Beat in vain at the concrete and brick that prevent them from winning to safety beyond the pitmouth., O dead, twisted bodies lying with bruised hands behind the Implacable Greed that seals the pitmouth!