The Harlem Renaissance (The California Connection)

Arna Bontemps

For scholars and historians of the period, it is well understood that the Harlem Renaissance refers to a quickening of Black art and culture in many of the urban conglomerations of African Americans, not just Harlem. There was plenty going on in Chicago, Washington D.C., and Atlanta. When this quickening became so noticeable as to require a name, "Negro Renaissance" was the first appellation, and it's a pity something analogous didn't stick. But "Harlem Renaissance" became widely accepted even though it led to an overvaluation of Harlem as the unofficial Black capital and a slighting of other seedbeds of Black creativity. Several cosmopolitan "stars" of the Renaissance only passed through Harlem and went on to careers elsewhere (Jean Toomer, Josephine Baker, Claude McKay).

Certainly Harlem itself was a magnet and drew to its bosom the brightest and most ambitious of the race. Countee Cullen, who came of age and spent his life in Harlem, was more the exception than the rule. The biggest names of the Harlem Renaissance came from elsewhere: Langston Hughes, Missouri; Aaron Douglas, Kansas, Zora Neale Hurston, Florida.

What was California's contribution to the Harlem Renaissance? Even though the Los Angeles Black community outgrew all others in the Far West (almost 16,000 in 1920), the Great Migration that gave rise to Chicago's Southside and Harlem itself bypassed western cities. In contrast to the racial homogeneity of these enclaves, L.A.'s "Blackest" district, Central Avenue, housed one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the nation. Even though practically all of L.A.'s Blacks lived in proximity to Central Avenue, they topped out at 20% of the district's population, which included "white" immigrants from Europe, people of Mexican descent -- native-born and immigrants – and the Japanese. Not to mention white Americans from the Northeast and Midwest.

Yet L.A.'s Black community resonated with the cultural trends emanating from Harlem. Marcus Garvey's UNIA took Black L.A. by storm in the early 1920s, but the enthusiasm quickly vanished in the wake of Garvey's fiscal mismanagement and the fiasco of the Black Star Line. The L.A. branch of the NAACP was convened in 1914, two years after the organization's founding. In 1928, it hosted the NAACP's national annual convention to great acclaim.

But the cultural currents only ran from east to west. Two Western writers made the pilgrimage to Harlem to participate in the Renaissance, but only Arna Bontemps was raised in California. His middle-class parents, devoutly embracing Seventh-Day Adventism, raised their children to assimilate into the dominant culture. Bontemps lived in majority-white neighborhoods and was (excellently) educated at majority-white schools. By the time he graduated from Pacific Union College (an Adventist institution), he felt he'd been robbed of his birthright. Rebelling against his upbringing, he moved to Harlem in 1924 and, being a writer of some talent, entered the stabler cohort of younger writers and forged lasting friendships with Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. But not being a writer of first-rate talent, the two Renaissance novels he produced are rarely taught and even less discussed. And, of course, the subject matter is Black AF, but since he didn't grow up in the South, his God Sends Sunday (1931) is rife with the stereotypes that W.E.B. Du Bois ticked off in his ticked-off review: "sordid crime, drinking, gambling, whore-mongering, and murder." Bontemps's second novel, Black Thunder, about the Gabriel Prosser slave rebellion of 1800 (another attempt to kill the white father) was far more artistically successful and broke ground in African American literature as historical fiction, but its 1936 publication came after the Depression had scattered the principal players of the Renaissance to safer harbors than a now-ravaged Harlem.

Wallace Thurman, born and raised in Salt Lake City -- mostly -- was a Westerner, and his peripatetic life before relocating to Harlem in 1925 encompassed three years in Los Angeles, where he dropped out of the University of Southern California and met Arna Bontemps while both worked in the post office. Bontemps and Thurman promoted their own two-man Negro Renaissance to little effect in California, but when Bontemps made the move to Harlem as the literary Renaissance was rising to public notice, Thurman followed hard on his heels.

The friendship between the two Western writers did not last. Thurman was extremely conflicted, maniacally productive, and undoubtedly the leading iconoclast of the Harlem Renaissance until he drank himself to death in 1931 -- also gay, which didn't help matters. He evinces little love for his Western origins in his fictional transgender autobiography, The Blacker the Berry (1929) and briskly skewers the shallow values of the aspiring Blacks at USC. (My father, who had won a fellowship in chemistry at USC in 1942, similarly hated the social climbing student body and dropped out in his turn.)

Slim pickings, all told. I could complicate matters further by examining the astonishing and successful career of Claude Sergeant Johnson, a (voluntarily) Black sculptor who conducted his long professional life out of San Francisco, but this essay has gone on quite long enough. California, especially Los Angeles, made a group contribution to African American culture, but that came well after the Richard Wright generation had buried the Harlem Renaissance.

And Octavia Butler wasn't born until 1947.

--Dr. Robert Philipson

Read more about Dr. Robert Philipson's personal connection to this foray in Black Rebellions I Have Known: The L.A. Episodes

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