Black-White Literary Relations in the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

URING THE I920'S there was a resurgence of American literature L)-written by both whites and blacks, the latter now regularly known as the Harlem Renaissance. With a white renaissance and a black renaissance both underway at the same time, then, it is natural to ask: what did ;the black and the white writers have to do with each other? Did they know each other at all? If there were contacts between them, were they continuing and fruitful, or casual and negligible? I want to pursue these questions from the black side in this article: what white writers did notable black writers of the Harlem Renaissance know, and so far as it can be determined, what effect did their relations have -on the blacks? Without rehearsing the history of the Harlem Renaissance, I suppose the story of its black-white literary relations could be said to begin back with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in I9IO and the emergence of a great new Negro leader in the person of W. E. Burghardt DuBois. The NAACP was middle class and integrationist and through much of its early life white-dominated, but DuBois quickly became its most powerful spokesman, especially as editor of the organization's journal, Crisis.! His closest friend in this enterprise was the white writer and literary scholar Joel E. Spingarn, a founder and board member of the NAACP, author of A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (i899), The New Criticism (igii), and other works. DuBois, himself a scholar and man of letters, whose works included sociology such as The Souls of Black Folk (I903) and novels such as The Quest of the Silver Fleece (I9II), probably did his most important work for the Harlem Renaissance in bringing the large white philanthropic piower of the NAACP to