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Jon Michael Spencer. The New Negroes and Their Music: The success of the Harlem Renaissance. The University of Tennessee Press, 1997. 171 + xxii pages. In this study, Jon Spencer sets to explain the Harlem Renaissance as not just a literary movement, but also a musical movement. He interprets the Harlem Renaissance by focusing on the music that it produced. He sets out to show the Renaissance in a different light then most of the previous authors on this subject.
During the early 1900 s many African-Americans from the south moved towards the north to start their lives over and find jobs. Many came to Harlem a place where mainly Blacks lived. This is where the beginning of a new culture emerged. African-American literature, art, music, dance and social commentary began to show in Harlem. This African American cultural movement became known as The New Negro movement and later as the Harlem Renaissance.
In these books we find that music is treated as being of relative importance and that the unifying vision of each book is that the Harlem Renaissance was a failure (pg. xix). By challenging the writings of authors Nathan Huggins and his book Harlem Renaissance, and David Levering Lewis When Harlem was En Vogue. , Spencer wants to disprove there theory that the Harlem Renaissance was unsuccessful in what they were trying to attempt. In the book Harlem Renascence written by Nathan Huggins, he talks of the Renaissance as being an inadequate strategy and an answer to the old problem of racism (pg. 1). Spencer argues that the music of the Renaissance actually brought people together on many accounts and dispelled the racism at certain times. Besides setting out to prove the success of the Renaissance, he shows how the Renaissance was not only the Literature but also the music.
In particular once again he looks at the texts of Huggins and Lewis. They do not altogether leave out the music of Harlem but they do fail to give black music a more important place in their discussions of the Negro Renaissance (pg. xxi). He talks of how they do not take into account all the earlier texts that have been written on the subject.
The musicians are part of the whole that helped to obtain the vindication of the Negro which was the goal of the Renaissance not the rid of racism. Spencer also shows the Renaissance era was a much larger span of time than thought and written about by other scholars. It spanned more than the 1920 s, it was well at the beginning of the turn of the century and for three decades beyond the 1920 s. He ascertains that the end of the Harlem Renaissance was the beginning of the Great Depression when there was no longer enough money to support the artistic aspirations. Spencer defines the Harlem Renaissance as not a fight to end racism but rather a way to attain vindication of the Negro. Renaissance intellectuals such as Alain Locke, Charles S.
Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson felt that they must in order to attain vindication was to debut the New Negro, whose image would displace the image of the old Negro that the white thought of. The stereotypical beliefs that whites created and perpetuated about the Negro being immoral, criminal, and mentally inferior. The point was that all the old myths needed to be dissolved in order for the new image of the Negro to emerge. Spencer relates that the white patrons and the critics of the Negro Renaissance wanted the old Negro, they wanted them to use the old dialects, and the spiritual songs, but the new white intellectuals did not want that. Huggins felt the Renaissance Negro had a self hatred for the Old Negro, but as Spencer points out it is not a self hatred it is a displeasure with the myths of the Old Negro and the stereotypes that defined and enslaved black people (pg. 5) In the case of the Renaissance being a failure because it did not end the racism towards blacks, you must look and understand that there were those who felt that the Renaissance was to separate blacks, form their own culture, and recognize black superiority within the black community. Essentially the black community, I feel was not looking towards away to reach out and have the whites embrace them make them part of their community, but rather to bring the black community closer together and somehow form a culture of their own that had somewhat been lost through years of slavery.
In any case when a group of people is freed, or anything of that nature they must somehow form a community of their own, a culture of their own. Culture is formed around that central theme of music, art and literature. David Levering Lewis dates the Harlem Renaissance from around 1919 to 1932, and draws that same conclusion that Huggins did, that the Renaissance as caused by the devastation of the countries economic crisis. In the final chapter of his book When Harlem was En Vogue, Lewis says that Depression accelerated the inevitable failure of the Renaissance as a positive social force (Lewis, 305). But the Spencer argues that how could the Renaissance die when you have the musicians like those of Date, Still, Hayes and Major, whose music influenced others after them well into the Fifty's. The training and experience for these artists were just beginning.
Many articles have been written about Harlem being the pathway to the music of the Forty's and Fifty's. How do intellectual movements end when they can live on in the minds of men and women. If we were to say that an era was still continuing because artists, and the influence of artists was still going on then we would never quite evolve into another time, and nothing could ever end... I think that one reason that also attributes to the end of the...
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