Download Enter the new negro

A Relationship to Things Throughout the Great Migration
Lucinda Kalin
11/29/10
Published in 1941, Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices describes the
African American transition from the early 1900s to the 1930s, not only from south to
north but from rural to urban—farm to factory. In this, he wrote,“We, who were landless
upon the land; we, who had barely managed to live in family groups; we, who needed the
ritual and guidance of institutions to hold our atomized lives together in lines of purpose;
we, who had known only relationships to people and not relationships to
things;…(Wright, 1941, 2).” Again, as I noted in your first version of the essay, your
historical question should go at the end of the essay- which you pasted in below. What
you need here is your arugment. Was Wright correct in asserting that African Americans
of this time had only relationships to people rather than “things?” Or, were those very
relationships a result of the “things” surrounding them? It seems like you are arguing that
as African Americans moved North their relationships to “things” changed. Then you
would be specific about what you mean here.
THIS SEEMS TO BE THE HEART OF YOUR ARUGMENT (I COPIED IT
FROM THE MIDDLE PART OF THE ESSAY. IF I AM RIGHT, THEN YOU
SHOULD INSERT IT HERE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE ESSAY
While residing in the North as a result of the great migration, African Americans’
connection to “things” had become complex. Although they had been denied the very
“things” they had migrated north to find, better wages and living conditions, they became
able to produce “things,” . For example,……(i.e., publications, poetry, art, the Harlem
Renaissance) they would never have been able to produce in the South. In Harlem during
the 1920s, black society thrived in the throws of the Harlem Renaissance.
When considering the circumstances under which blacks at this time began
migrating north, their connection to physical things (such as – you need to define what
you mean by “things” here----cannot be overlooked. Isabel Wilkerson makes this clear in
The Warmth of Other Suns when writing, You should paraphrase this quote“Immigration
plunged by more than ninety percent, from 1,218,480 in 1914 to 110,618 in 1918, when
the country needed all the labor it could get for war production. So the North turned its
gaze to the poorest-paid labor in the emerging market of the American South. Steel mills,
railroads, packinghouses sent labor scouts disguised as insurance men and salesmen to
recruit black north, if only temporarily (Wilkerson, 2010, 2).” But despite the shortage of
white laborers, the arrival of a black workforce was seen by whites as a threat rather than
a solution to their problems of overwork and low pay.
During WWI, there were not enough white workers to fill the rapidly expanding
factories and when their labor unions struck due to extended hours without adequate
compensation, labor agents began recruiting southern blacks but at much lower wages.
As a result, white workers immediately resented their new co-workers because their
arrival allowed the strikes to be broken while pay rates remained low. Nevertheless, black
workers were not admitted to white labor unions. And because this condition greatly
reduced the chances of future strikes, as black workers were not unionized and could not
afford to stop work due to their sub-union wages, factory owners did their best to
maintain the racial divide (Wright, 1941).
Despite their unconscionable wages however, African American workers could
have afforded some of the apartments, offered only to white workers at around 50 dollars
per month. But because only certain building owners and landlords would rent to black
families, prices for a kitchenette could be as high as 42 dollars per week (Wright, 1941).
So despite that fact that black workers were making more money then they had in the
south, due to low wages and limited housing options, the “things” that black workers
could obtain for themselves were poor quality.
With no other choice, entire families were forced to live in one room and share a
toilet with as many as 30 tenants. Because of these conditions, infant mortality was twice
that of whites (Wright, 1941). And of the children who did grow up, living in relation to
such “things,” many developed emotional problems and illness. In addition, scarlet fever,
dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, and pneumonia ran rampant.
Clearly, kitchenettes were “things” that were of such poor quality that families became
sick and their relationships became strained. However, some were able to move where?
Out of the kitchenettes into better housing? but not without a fight.
When black families managed to buy a home, their white neighbors viewed it as
an invasion and believed that their presence drove home values down within the area.
White residents then threatened black residents with violence and if they were
unsuccessful at getting blacks to move, whites moved away. Real estate brokers quickly
bought the abandoned white homes and resold them at higher prices to black families in
desperate need of better homes. Eventually many formerly white neighborhoods followed
suit and in order to stop further movement of black families into white neighborhoods,
whites began signing “restrictive covenants,” promising never to sell their homes, their
“things” to black families (Wright, 1941). In some cities, 80 percent of real estate was
under restrictive covenant (Wright, 1941). This meant that the kitchenette was
safeguarded and continued to generate immense profits while city officials were bribed to
ignore their health and safety violations (Wright, 2010).
You need to support these descriptions of urban conditions in the North with one
of the secondary sources. Wright’s work is considered a primary source. You can use
Kelley and Lewis ( on the website) to support these claims. You should need a sentence
or two.
While residing in the North as a result of the great migration, African Americans’
connection to “things” had become complex. Although they had been denied the very
“things” they had migrated north to find, better wages and living conditions, they became
able to produce “things,” (i.e., publications, poetry, art, the Harlem Renaissance) they
would never have been able to produce in the South. In Harlem during the 1920s, black
society thrived in the throws of the Harlem Renaissance. I copied and inserted this
paragraph into the beginning of the essay. If you keep it there you need a new paragraph
here that restates this argument but using different words and makes a transition to the
second part of the essay. You should elaborate here on the Things of the Harlem
Renaissance.
Zora Neale Hurston, at New York Times Book Fair,
November 1937.
And because of this, debates about how the “new negro” should be physically
represented (by things), and how these representations should be circulated, were
prevalent. Central to these debates were questions regarding what type of media should
be used (i.e., novels, magazines, paintings, and/or mass-produced illustrations), whether
publishers should direct these expressions, and whether these productions should be all
black or include the work of white writers, artists, and editors (Nadell 2004).
By 1926, debates of this type had gained great momentum because of how
horribly the image of African Americans had been portrayed throughout the latter 19th
century in publications like Currier and Ives’ Darktown Comics. With this in mind, the
question of what constituted African American art was tackled in the publicionat, The
Nation. Langston Hughes wrote if this is an article in the Nation , it needs to be in
quotation marks. And you need a citation with the year it was published. The Negro
Artist and the Racial Mountain while George Schuyler published The Negro-Art Hokum.
What was the nature of the debate between Hughes and Schuyler? It is not clear. You
need to elaborate.
Following these debates, also in 1926, W.E.B. Du Bois sponsored The Negro in
Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?
Author Langston Hughes [far left] with [left to right:] Charles S. Johnson; E. Franklin Frazier;
Rudolph Fisher and Hubert T. Delaney, on the roof of 580 St. Nicholas Avenue, Harlem, on the
occasion of a party in Hughes' honor, 1924.
This what served as a symposium? DuBois’ article? You need to say what his main
argument was. served as a symposium in the Crisis, a magazine affiliated with the
National Association of the Advancement of Colored People, for the exchange of ideas
regarding how African Americans should represent themselves through the arts and
media (Nadell, 2004).
Charles S. Johnson, a sociologist and editor of the journal, Opportunity, was also
deeply involved with this dialogue what dialogue? and stated that, “The tone and the
self-assurance of these magazines were the important thing. They gave a sense of
importance to blacks who read them. They gave answers that always had failed the
porter, the barber, the maid, the teacher, the handyman. They were the Negro’s voice
against the insult that America gave him” (Pearson, 1977, 126). Johnson was more
concerned with how art or “things”could change how blacks perceived themselves rather
than how they were perceived by whites (Pearson, 1977). And as part of this effort,
Johnson began sponsoring the Opportunity Contests for black writers in 1924. In 1928,
Johnson wrote that publishing the Opportunity and its contests was a way, “to effect an
emancipation from their sensitiveness about meaningless symbols, and to inculcate a
disposition to see enough of interest and beauty in their own lives to rid themselves of the
inferior feeling of being a Negro (Pearson, 1977, 125).”
African American artists and writers went on to do just that, embracing rather than
hiding their folk culture and history while in effect, claiming an identity within America
through the “things” they produced. From horrid living situations and meager wages to
historical art movements and African American publications, the black community knew
the intricacies of its relationship to things through the great migration and used it to
transcend. Transcend what? Perhaps come back to Wright here.
Was Wright correct in claiming that African Americans had only relationships to
people and no relationship to things? Or did the African American relationship to things
directly effect its community and progress throughout the great migration?
Bibliography
Nadell, M. (2004). Enter the New Negroes. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London,
England: Harvard University Press.
Pearson, R. (1977). Combating Racism with Art: Charles S. Johnson and the Harlem
Renaissance. Lawrence, Kansas: The Center for Digital Scholarship, University of
Kansas.
Wilkerson, I. (2010). The Warmth of Other Suns. New York: Random House.
Wright, R. (1941). 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Basic Books.
Lucinda:
This still needs work. The first part and second part of the essay don’t entirely hang
together. What you need is an argument at the beginning which addresses both parts.
Then you need to make a more effective transition between the Wright section and the
Harlem Renaissance section. The second section is still rough—you need more detail—as
noted. Then you need to come back to Wright’s quote about things at the end.