Frances E.W. Harper: Poet and Activist

"We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity" (Harper).

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was born in Baltimore, MD, a slave state at the time of her birth. Harper, like her parents, was free. Orphaned at the age of three, she went to live with her mother's sister and her husband, William Watkins, an early civil rights activist. It was alongside her uncle that Harper commenced her devotion to civil rights causes by aiding him as a conductor on the Underground Railroad--thus defying the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Watkins was a minister and ran a school for African American youth. There, young Frances received an "uncommonly thorough education...she showed promise in writing and elocution, a strong interest in radical politics and religion, and a special sense of responsibility and devotion to lofty ideals" (Gates, et al. 491).

By the age of twenty, Harper had published her first volume of poetry. Though she gained popularity and her creative work was widely read, she was mostly known for her civil rights activism and devotion to progressive causes, such as abolition and suffrage. She and her uncle were conductors on the Underground Railroad. Any early 'club' woman, Harper was a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), a forerunner to the NAACP, and was superintendent of the Christian Women's Temperance Union. By the time she moved to Philadelphia, she had become a full-time crusader for the antislavery movement. Much in demand as a speaker, Harper had at one time, thirty speaking engagements across twenty cities (491).

Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, published in 1854, was by far her most outstanding financial success, selling over ten thousand copies (Gates). When her husband passed ten years later, Harper returned to the lecture rounds to pay off debtors. Her lectures attracted "large and receptive audiences," and the company and admiration of her peers: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, and other prominent names in both abolition and suffrage movements. However, the road of activism rarely runs smoothly, and Harper found dissension among many of her activist comrades: "The racism of her feminist colleagues and the sexism of some of her black brothers" caused a rift among progressive thinkers and lecturers of the day. Gates quotes Harper's famous refrain upon encountering such discord among her friends and colleagues: "We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity."

Post-Renaissance Harlem: Ann Petry's The Street

By the 1940s, the once bustling metropolis of African American creative energy that had been Harlem had been harshly impacted by a series of events that followed its cultural heyday. A second wave of the Great Migration brought migrants from other areas of the United States and the Caribbean, which led to overcrowding and racial tension among Harlemites; and the economic depression rendered Harlem largely a ghettoized area that rife with crime and racial injustice. The Harlem Race Riot of 1943 increased the growing tension in Harlem. The event signaled a growing assertiveness among blacks in Harlem to challenge white authority and to interrogate the systems of white power structures.

Described as "graceful and articulate" Ann Petry was born in October 1911 and raised in Old Saybrook, Connecticut (1). She attended Pharmacy school there, perhaps following the example of her father, who owned a drugstore. In the 1930s she traveled to Harlem where she was an apprentice writer for two of the city's major newspapers, The Amsterdam News and The People's Voice. Her role as a young journalist forcibly thrust her into the seedier aspects of Harlem life. Her confrontation with the bleakness of Harlem's poverty and destitution strongly influenced Petry's fiction, giving her work its "compelling edge" (Gates, et al. 1496). Her short narrative, "Like a Winding Street" was published in 1945, gaining Petry considerable critical attention and success, including a Houghton Mifflin Literary Award (2). However it was the novel that eventuated from this first success, The Street, that elevated Petry to national attention and earning her distinction for becoming the first African American woman author to sell over one million copies of her novel (Gates).

Richard Wright, Urban Realism, and Racial-Sexual Politics

Our text points out that Petry's narrative in The Street can be read against Wright's Native Son as a woman's exploration of the individual set against and profoundly changed by the urban environment in which she is situated. Wright's realism in Native Son explores how the white power structures and urban violence against the black male shape his emerging masculinity. Although, Ann Petry's The Street also examines the relationship between the individual and external forces that shape Lutie Johnson, the editors of our text caution that "exaggerating the links between Wright and Petry obscures perhaps the most salient and critical distinction between them: the sexual politics of race and the racial politics of gender" (1497). Petry's narrative casts an interrogative light on the positioning of the black female set against male-dominated spaces in which she is configured as an object of the male gaze. Gates continues, saying that "Petry closely documents the effects of the ghetto on a black woman and shows a critical sensitivity ot woman as spectacle, as a body to be looked at and made the object of male sexual desire and exploitation" (1497). Particularly in regard to her role as mother, and as lone tenant of a predatory male landlord, Petry enlarges the condition of the African American female's vulnerability as sexual object in The Street.

Critics have frequently documented Petry's engagement of urban realism that she extends from Richard Wright's work. However, Petry utilizes the elements of modernism most noticeably in terms of her treatment of space. Keeping in mind Gates's comments concerning Petry's portrayal of the black woman in post-Renaissance Harlem, how does Petry represent space--both physical and metaphorical--to convey Lutie's experience of being on her own?

Poet of Protest: Claude McKay 1889-1948

Commonwealth Magazine

One of the most celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay was not originally from the United States. He was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica. Known for his nostalgic poetic remembrances of his home in Jamaica, McKay's work evolved to include poetry that challenged the racism he encountered in the United States. Such poems as "If We Must Die" came as a direct outcry against the bloodshed from a series of race riots known as the Red Summer of 1919 (McBryde).

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, 

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursed lot. 

If we must die, O let us nobly die, 

So that our precious blood may not be shed 

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor use though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, 

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Claude McKay at Poetryfoundation.org

It is important to note polyvocal character of McKay's work and his ability to merge two cultures in his poetry. As noted, McKay was proud of his Afro-Caribbean heritage; yet, he was first moved by the poetry of the Old Masters--Alexander Pope, Milton, and the "British masters." It was his English friend, Walter Jekyll, who encouraged the poet to recreate Jamaican Creole in his poetry, understanding the dimension that dialect could bring to a poem (2). 

For many years of his young adulthood, McKay supported himself and then his young family by taking menial jobs--though he continued to write poetry. He lived in Brown's Town, Jamaica, where he became a woodworker, and later went to Kingston. It was in Kingston that he encountered the brunt of white racism. Though Jamaica was primarily black, in Kingston, a white majority considered black people "capable of only menial tasks" (2). By 1912, he would publish the collections Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. For Songs of Jamaica, the poet received an award from the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences. His stipend allowed him to travel to the U.S. After a brief time at Tuskegee Institute and then Kansas State College, McKay worked odd jobs before settling in New York City (2). 

In New York, the poet would publish "Invocation" and "The Harlem Dancer," under a pseudonym in 1917. McKay's talent as a lyric poet earned him recognition, particularly from Frank Harris, editor of Pearson's magazine, and Max Eastman, editor of The Liberator, a socialist journal; both became instrumental in McKay's early career. It is in New York where McKay began to nurture a growing interest in Communism. 

While in England, McKay was employed by the British socialist journal, Workers' Drednought, and published a book of verse, Spring in New Hampshire, which was released in an expanded version in the United States in 1922. The same year, Harlem Shadows, perhaps his most significant poetry collection, appeared. McKay then began a twelve-year sojourn through Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa, a period marked by poverty and illness. While in the Soviet Union he compiled his journalistic essays into a book, The Negroes in America, which was not published in the United States until 1979. 

For a time he was bouyed by the success of his first published novel, Home to Harlem (1928), which was critically acclaimed but engendered controversy for its frank portrayal of the underside of Harlem life" (Poets.org) It was Home to Harlem that received the most strident reviews from Dr. W.E.B. Dubois, who admitted "For the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath" According to Gates, McKay's response was to point out the defect in Dr. Dubois's concepts of Art as Propaganda and a "work of art" (qtd. in Gates, 1002). Despite Dubois's reviews, Home to Harlem presents a vision of Harlem that few wanted to report--a seedier, more troubled side that, though less palatable, true nonetheless. One of his celebrated poems, "Harlem Dancer," reveals the effects of female objectification, and the less nostalgic view of Harlem nightlife:

Applauding youths laughed with young

prostitutes

And watched her perfect, half-clothed body 

sway;

Her voice was like the sound of blended 

flutes

Blown by black players upon a picnic day.

She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,

The light gauze hanging loose about her

form; 

To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm

Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.

Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls

Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise,

The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even

the girls,

Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;

But looking at her falsely-smiling face,

I knew her self was not in that strange place. 

From The Book of American Negro Poetry, 1922

Reprinted by poets.org

rachelpakarek.weebly.com