Journey to Diaspora
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints, New York Public Library. “Langston Hughes and Léon-Gontran Damas” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Originally printed in AphroChic magazine Issue 3, Spring 2020.
From it’s beginnings in London at the turn of the 20th century, through the first World War and the start of the New Negro Movement, Pan-Africanism became the primary descriptor under which a host of movements, philosophies and organizations were grouped and understood. By the second decade of the century, New York stood out as a beacon of Black life and a center for the emerging themes of Black culture.
The city became a rallying point for talent and creativity in literature, art, music and more. Harlem in particular became the perfect environment in which to concentrate and explore the new sense of consciousness and self-possession that was growing among Black people and finding expression among the uptown creative community. The expansion of consciousness embodied in the New Negro Movement — later called The Harlem Renaissance — was both representative of and instrumental to a rising tide of internationalist activity from Black people in all corners of the world. The New Negro, the seminal 1925 anthology by Howard University professor Alain Locke, is considered the central defining text of a moment in which it seemed the whole world was coming to New York. But there is more to the story.
The Harlem Renaissance can be seen as a kind of mid-point in the narrative of Pan-Africanism. It’s timing, from roughly 1920 to 1930, stands between Pan-Africanism’s nascence in the discourse of 19th century orators such as Frederick Douglass and Edward Wilmot Blyden, and its eventual end, which came in the late 20th century. The Renaissance itself served as a turning point in the discourse of Black creatives and intellectuals. No longer was the conversation focused on asserting the humanity of Black people or debating the morality of their enslavement. Attention instead turned to exploring the meaning of that humanity and demonstrating the injustice of the circumstances under which it was forced to exist. The New Negro Movement, while contemporary with other group efforts of the time, occurred at a high point of international activity and col- laboration among Black creatives around the world. It was instrumental in the instigation and furtherance of such thought, and with Harlem as its symbolic flagship, sparked the imaginations of those whose work would follow, including the Chicago Renaissance of the 30s and 40s which would see the rise of writer’s such as Alice Walker and Richard Wright along with a host of visual and musical artists and dance ethnographer, Katherine Dunham. As such, the Harlem Reaissance represents a moment in the history of Pan-Africanism that presaged its greatest triumphs while simultaneously charting a course towards its obsolescence and the eventual emergence of diaspora.
Between Harlem and the World
While the importance of New York at this time, and Harlem in particular, should not be undersold, it is important too that it not be overemphasized, at least not to the extent of ignoring the cultural and political strivings taking place elsewhere during this period. Today what is commonly referred to as the Harlem Renaissance is widely understood to have been, as Yale professor Robert Stepto puts it, “merely the North American component of something larger and grander.” The tendency of scholars to bristle at the specification of Harlem as the epicenter of this “larger and grander” event, isn’t new. In fact, Sterling A. Brown, a luminary professor and poet considered part of the New Negro moment, argued that “most of the writers weren’t Harlemites [and] much of the best writing was not about Harlem.” The assertion is, if not entirely inaccurate, perhaps a bit unfair. Harlem was unquestionably a special place that drew attention and talent from around the world at that time specifically because it offered opportunities for collaboration among Black intellectuals not available, or not equally available, in other parts of the United States.
Though the Harlem Renaissance, as it is currently known, is not typically recognized as part of an international event, the New Negro Movement, as it was originally called, made no attempt to attach itself to a single location — particularly as Locke himself was a Philadelphia native and resident of Washington DC at the time he released his anthology. Moreover, it is difficult to believe that those involved in the actual moment believed it to be anything other than international in both composition and scope.
Although primarily connected to the Harlem cultural movement, The New Negro was largely built on the contribution of authors from around the Diaspora, just as the Harlem movement itself was built upon the presence of the Diaspora in America. As scholar and author Robert Philipson points out:
Prominently featured [within The New Negro] were poems by the Jamaican immigrant Claude McKay, and a short story titled The Palm Porch, by the West Indian writer Eric Walrond. Essays were contributed by Puerto Rican bibliophile Arthur Schomburg (The Negro Digs Up His Past), and by the Jamaican-born journalists Joel A. Rogers (Jazz at Home) and Wilfred A. Domingo.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “W. E. B. Dubois in the office of The Crisis.” New York Public Library Digital Collections.
West Indian influence was also deeply felt on the political front as well, most notably through Marcus Garvey’s UNIA movement. Yet the spirit of collaboration that animated this moment was not confined to interactions within the diaspora of the New World, it relied heavily on activities and activists in the Old World as well, with the most important of these located in the very seat of colonial power.
The Two Sides of Paris
If it would be unfair to strip Harlem of the notability of its position during this moment of rebirth, it would be equally so to ignore the position of Paris, New York’s sister city, in the eyes of the Black intellectuals whose movements and work carried them back and forth between these two poles of emerging Black identity. Paris was a unique place where artists, intellectuals, and transients from all corners of the Diaspora could meet and interact, often without many of the strictures that hung over them in other lands.
Despite its historical position as one of the major sites of colonial tyranny and racist exploitation, France had become a place of unusual (though by no means absolute) tolerance through its reliance on Black soldiers and laborers during the early part of the 20th century. Brent Hays Edwards reminds us that:
During World War I, about 370,000 African Americans served in the seg- regated Army Expeditionary Force in France [while] the French conscripted nearly 620,000 soldiers from the colonies, including approximately 250,000 from Senegal and the Sudan and 30,000 from the French Caribbean. France simulta- neously imported a labor force of nearly 300,000, both from elsewhere in Europe and from the colonies.
As a result, France emerged as a type of crossroads for the Diaspora, a theme explored often in the Black literature of the 1920s, in books such as Claude McKay’s famed Banjo: A Story Without a Plot. Paris’ status as a center for world culture contributed to the growing narrative of the city in the minds of Diaspora creatives. Constructed from the endless tales of soldiers, students, and musicians, a narrative emerged describing a place that was both modern and accepting, cosmopolitan and willing to embrace the changing identities of a people only just beginning to realize all that they had to offer. The draw of the city became so absolute that many of those considered to be the literary giants of Harlem’s cultural moment, including Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, and many more spent several formative years in Paris during the 1920s. International movement was so prevalent among intellectuals at this time that, as Edwards notes, “Looking just at the culture makers usually identified with the ‘Harlem Renaissance,’ it is striking that the exceptions are those who remained in the United States.”
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Author Langston Hughes [far left] with [left to right:] Charles S. Johnson; E. Franklin Frazier; Rudolph Fisher and Hubert T. Delaney” New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Yet despite its progressive reputation at the time, it is important to note that France in the 1920s was in no way devoid of racial tensions either between races or among the various Black populations that encountered each other there. The beneficent image of Paris that loomed so large among African Americans came at the precise moment that France was exercising the full extent of its exploitative power over its colonial holdings in Africa and the Caribbean. These contrasting views of the nation led to many schisms between African American writers and those from French-held territories. McKay in particular held his American contemporaries to account for turning what he felt was a blind eye to French oppression of Black people in its colonies. Simultaneously, however, some attention should also be paid to the senseless attitudes of a French population that would cheer the coming of Black American soldiers, offering them greater freedom and acceptance than they received in their home country, while simultaneously maintaining its right to exploit and control Black populations in other places. Still, despite its shortcomings, many Renaissance-period writers, artists, and musicians from across the Diaspora, including McCay, looked to France both as a physical location and abstract symbol of inspiration for the still developing sense of Black internationalism.
L’Monde Noir
Within this context, the intellectual movement of Black Paris in the 1920s was, like that of Harlem, largely contained within the myriad journals produced at the time. These not only expressed a consciousness of the interrelated issues facing Black people around the world, but also demonstrated their commitment to the internationalist approach to meeting these challenges through their affiliation with English-language journals emanating out of Harlem and elsewhere. As much as could be said of the titles of Harlem’s many publications, the names of French journals including, La Paria, L’Action coloniale, La Voix des Negres, La Race negre, La Depeche africaine, Legitime Defense, Le Revue du monde noir, Le Cri des Negres, L’Etudiant Noir, and Africa, serve as clear exposition on the concerns and attitudes of Paris’ Black intelligentsia. Bilingualism was common among publications on both sides of the Atlantic, with several American journals producing French language editions for European circulation, and many French magazines, such as La Depeche africaine, including English language sections among their standard content.
The desire to see Black thought, creativity, and experience translated across linguistic boundaries inspired one of the most important francophone figures, Jane Nardal, to reach out to Alain Locke with the intention of creating a translation of The New Negro for French-speaking audiences. A student at the time, Nardal maintained connections to several French journals, most notably, La Depeche africaine, the first issue of which featured her article L’internationalisme noir. Nardal’s proposal to Locke is in many ways an enactment of the theoretical stance taken by this article, as Nardal states in her own words:
In this postwar period, the barriers that exist between countries are being lowered, or are being pulled down... Negroes of all origins and nationalities, with different customs and religions, vaguely sense that they belong in spite of everything to a single and same race...If the black wants to be himself, to affirm his personality, not to be the copy of some type of another race (as often brings him resentment and mockery)...he must profit from acquired experience, from intellectual riches, through others, but in order to better understand himself[.]
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “La Revue Du Monde Noir” New York Public Library Digital Collections.
The Birth of Negritude
Nardal’s attempts to translate The New Negro were not successful. Nevertheless she continued to espouse a form of internationalism very close in nature to that asserted by Alain Locke. In 1931, as the stresses of the Great Depression were showing on the New Negro Movement in Harlem, Nardal partnered with her sister Paulette Nardal to bring forth their own journal, Le Revue du monde noir, a critical publication in the evolution of Black francophone intellectualism, and a starting point in the foundation of Negritude.
Negritude was the predominant movement among Black francophone intellectuals of the 1930s and 40s. “In practice,” according to Emmanuel Egar, “Negritude had come into being through...Paulette and Jane Nardal, [editors of] Review of the Black World, the journal that recognized the value of Black experiences throughout the world.” Yet it would be Aime Cesaire, a Martinican, Leon Damas, from French Guyana, and Leopold Senghor of Senegal, the foremost authors and patron saints of this movement, who would give shape to this pivotal literary and cultural concept.
For Senghor, Damas, and Cesaire, internationalism lay at the heart of their association. As students in Paris hailing from different ends of the French colonial empire, their association was in itself a form of Pan-African collaboration. Moreover, the movement drew clear inspiration from the work of Pan-African intellectual movements in other parts of the world. In that spirit of collaboration and unity across nations, Damas went so far as to assert that, “Negritude has been the French assertion of the New Negro Movement.”
In Paris, Damas, Senghor, and Cesaire met and together founded L’Etudiant Noir. Despite descriptions as, “a thin, eight- page periodical,” that likely produced only one issue, the publication has nevertheless been afforded great importance in the development of Negritude, if only for bringing together the talents of its three brightest luminaries. Nevertheless, the formally recognized beginning of the movement came with Cesaire’s use of negritude in his epic poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, published in Paris in 1939.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Aimé Césaire” New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Unlike the New Negro Movement, which is widely recognized for its social as well as its artistic impact, there has been some question around the importance of Negritude outside of its initial literary context. Considering the question in his 1966 article, Négritude: A Pan-African Ideal?, Bently Le Baron suggested that, as a movement, “Negritude has always been a literary-cultural movement, a movement more potent in the realm of intellect and idea than in terms of concrete political activity, and it might even be argued that its net effect is more detrimental than helpful to the Pan-African aim of political union on a continental scale.” Predictably, the opinions of the movement’s founders were markedly different. When questioned on the political value of a poetry-driven movement, Damas returned that, “all the revolutions on the world succeed chiefly by the message of the poets. [T]hanks to negritude you had the end of French colonialism and the independence of Africa.” Moreover, the political careers of the founders of the movement belie the suggestion that it and its proponents were apolitical, most notably in the case of Senghor, who became Senegal’s first post-colonial president.
Pan-Africanism and Communism
While the Negritude movement grew in power and influence throughout the francophone diaspora, in other parts of the world, work was being done that, though different in approach, nevertheless shared Negritude’s desire to cast off the chains of colonial oppression and its recognition of the commonalities of racial oppression throughout the world. In 1931, while working in Moscow as the editor of The Negro Worker — a Communist Party publication through the Negro International — George Padmore released The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, a comparatively brief yet comprehensive survey of the working conditions and oppression of Black people in Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean. Not surprisingly, given Padmore’s affiliation with the Communist Party at the time, the book concludes by advocating the positive role of the Red International Labor Unions (R.I.L.U.) as a radically militant opposition to both white chauvinism and the capitalist imperialism that created and sustains that distorted perspective.
Despite the passion of his arguments, by 1934, Padmore had broken with the Communist Party. According to Russian history expert Roger Kanet, the separation came as a result of a realization that, “as Richard Wright has pointed out...the Kremlin was merely using Black men as political pawns to be maneuvered in Russian interests alone.” In 1937, following a move to London, Padmore became a founding member of the International African Services Bureau (IASB), a revision of an older organization — The International African Friends of Abyssinia — led by CLR James to campaign against Italian incursions into Abyssinia. In the same year, the IASB called for the formation of a Pan-African Federation, which would provide an overarching structure for London’s many active Pan-Africanist groups. Over a period of three years, from 1937 to 1939, the organization would produce no less than three distinct publications: Africa and the World (July – September 1937), African Sentinel (October 1937 – April 1938); [and] International African Opinion (July 1938 – March 1939).
The Sixth Conference
In 1945, following the Second World War, the Pan-African Federation called for a Pan-African Conference, to be held in Manchester, England in October of that year. Kanet recounts that, “Because of the problems of travel (the Second World War had just ended), the only African American present was W.E.B. DuBois, who, in recognition of his having called the previous four Congresses, chaired all the sessions except the first, which was chaired by Amy Ashwood Garvey.” Though similar to DuBois’ 1919 conference in that this, the fifth congress (or sixth conference, depending on how one prefers to count) was being held in the aftermath of a massive struggle between colonial powers, the Manchester conference was vastly different in both tenor and outcome. Instead of the mild concessions envisioned by the Versailles congress, the Manchester conference produced dramatic demands including, “‘complete and absolute independence’ for West Africa; equality for all in South Africa; federation and self-government for the British West Indies; and that ‘discrimination on account of race, creed, or colour [in Great Britian]be made a criminal offense by law’.”
The 1945 congress also included the participation of Francis, later Kwame, Nkrumah — the future leader of post-colonial Ghana. Nkrumah had been referred to Padmore by the latter’s childhood friend and professional collaborator CLR James. James had first made Nkrumah’s acquaintance in the United States. Nkrumah’s further involvement with organizations such as the West African Student Union and the West African Secretariat, “sharpened his vision and strengthened his commitment to freedom for the Gold Coast, West Africa, and Africa as a whole,” according to scholar, Nana Arhin Brempont. In 1957, one year after the publication of George Padmore’s seminal Pan-Africanism or Communism?, Nkrumah would fight successfully for Ghana’s independence, and Padmore would take a position as his Advisor on African Affairs. The book, which Padmore called a, “historical account of the struggles of Africans and peoples of African descent for Human Rights and Self-Determination in the modern world,” was largely a refutation of contemporary British propaganda labeling all Pan-Africanist activity as Communist. At the same time that he combated this divisive tactic, Padmore managed to provide a compelling history of Pan-African thought, while offering hope for its future.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Franz Masereel woodcut” New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Pan-Africanism in Decline
By the beginning of the 1960s, the Pan-African Congresses had, for the most part, run their course. A final congress would be held in 1974 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, under the organization of Tanzania’s then president, Julius Nyerere. Much had changed in the world since a London-based, West Indian barrister first conceived of holding a meeting to give Black intellectuals with different histories yet similar heritages the opportunity to discover and reflect on the ways in which, despite distances both physical and intellectual, their futures were inextricably bound. By 1974, many African and Caribbean nations had attained independence, sparking a change in their political agendas and a redirection of focus from Black communities across the world to the needs of their own fledgling states.
And though by this time the Pan-Africanist movement was fraying badly at the seams, a new discourse was forming that would continue the premise of internationalism into a world confused by the changing identities of people who were, for the first time, finding the space to identify with the lands of their birth in greater measure than the continent of their descent, and who were, as a result of this transformation, becoming ever more aware of their difference. Appropriately, the new discourse of diaspora began nearly ten years earlier, in the same place where Pan-Africanism ostensibly came to rest.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “UNIA Parade, organized in Harlem, 1920” New York Public Library Digital Collections.