Sondra Kathryn Wilson, editor
The Crisis Reader.
Modern Library, 422 pages, $14.95

Sondra Kathryn Wilson, editor
The Opportunity Reader.
Modern Library, 538 pages, $14.95

Sondra Kathryn Wilson, editor
The Messenger Reader.
Modern Library, 418 pages, $14.95

For nearly ten years, our Negro [artists] have been “confessing” the distinctive sordidness and triviality of Negro life, and making an exhibition of their own unhealthy imagination, in the name of frankness and sincerity. Frankness is no virtue in itself, however, as any father will tell his son, nor is sincerity. A dog or savage is “sincere” about his bestialities, but he is not therefore raised above them… . If sincerity is to justify one in exploiting the lowest traits of human nature; and in ignoring that sense in man which Cicero says differentiates him from other animals—his sense of what is decent—then sincerity is to pander to a torpid animalism.

William Bennett explaining rap music? Not exactly. The above passage was put to paper by a black scholar and psychologist named Allison Davis, and it appeared in August 1928 in The Crisis: a Record of the Darker Races. This magazine was published during the Harlem Renaissance by the NAACP (although still around, the magazine is no longer relevant), and Davis’s piece is one of the offerings in The Crisis Reader: Stories, Poetry and Essays from the NAACP’s Crisis Magazine . The volume was published last year and has been followed by two more volumes: The Opportunity Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the Urban League’s Opportunity Magazine and just recently The Messenger Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the Messenger Magazine. They are part of the Modern Library’s continuing Harlem Renaissance series.

The main thing that one brings away from these volumes is not so much the splendor of the fiction or poetry—although it’s obvious that Langston Hughes was one of America’s most original poets, most of the fiction can’t hold a light to the masters of the period. No, the revelations here are the essays, which show that there was once a time, before Jesse Jackson and Cornel West, when the black community—even the parts of it that were steeped in the often febrile impulses of 1920s modernism adhered to standards of decency and conduct. Even the Communists knew their manners. The Messenger was officially dedicated to spreading world socialism, but upon opening the compilation of its writings one finds not the bloodthirsty mumbo jumbo made famous by West and Al Sharpton, but, well, family values. To be sure, one J. A. Rogers condemns the obsequious, pre-revolutionary black as “a tyrant of tyrants” and “dog-like creature,” but the overall impression was that even the revolutionaries closely adhered to high literary standards and bourgeois values. In “The Black and Tan Cabaret America’s Most Democratic Institution,” the putative revolutionary Chandler Owen spends as much time defending the “moral caliber” of the cabaret patrons as he does attacking the snobbery of those who look down on the clubs.

It’s been argued that the upheavals of the 1960s were seeded in the 1920s, when a country spiritually sick over a mindless war began to question received assumptions, and that were it not for the Depression and World War II, the Sixties would have happened a lot sooner. In this sense, the upper-class blacks who turned up their noses to jazz, blues, and the Harlem Renaissance may have been anticipating the cultural collapse of the rock and roll era. The problem is that these critics didn’t appreciate the art of many people now considered masters. Allison Davis claimed that Harlem Renaissance writers depicted blacks as “having no self-respect,” but he also insisted that Langston Hughes, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence were smut-peddlers sullied with excessive “naturalism.” And, as Langston Hughes noted about the Black Washingtonian Jean Toomer’s novel Cane (1925), no one in “the cultured colored society of Washington … seemed to know anything about the book and cared less.”

Indeed, according to the late historian Constance Green, many upper-class blacks thought such books as Toomer’s Cane and Rudolph Fisher’s City of Refuge were too “black,” depicting characters without refinement or education. The black writer Dixon Wecter blasted such attitudes from the Black upper crust, attacking them for their “pseudo culture, their slavish devotion to Nordic standards, their snobbishness, their detachment from the Negro masses, and their vast sense of importance to themselves.” Perhaps the most splenetic condemnations of the Harlem Renaissance came in 1927 from Kelly Miller, the chairman of the sociology department at Washington’s famous black college, Howard University. In 1926 Carl Van Vechten, who was white, wrote a novel called Nigger Heaven that claimed Harlem as the home of black culture. Miller fired back in Opportunity, in a piece reprinted in the compilation: “The New Negro of whom we have heard so much is nothing but the old [southern] Negro exposed to the Harlem environment.” Nigger Heaven was

merely an artistic portrayal of the Harlem Negro, in his gayer mood for joy and jazz … the Negro life in Harlem is mainly effervescence and froth without seriousness or solid supporting basis. The riot of frolic and frivolity is characteristic of Babylon on the verge of destruction rather than of Heaven, the blissful abode of tradition.

Would that Miller were alive today to take on gangsta rap.