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Show FALL 2013 UHQ pp 304-385_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/16/13 1:25 PM Page 352 UTAh hISTOrICAL QUArTErLy Ambitiously, he launched a monthly magazine, the Outlet, in September 1924, labeling it “the first western Negro literary magazine.”35 This magazine provided an outlet for Thurman’s own writing and the work of some of his friends, including Arna Bontemps, who became a well-known gay American poet and Harlem Renaissance figure, and Fay Jackson, a journalist and movie publicist.36 However, Thurman could not sustain the financial burden, and the Outlet closed down after six issues. He also tried unsuccessfully to organize a literary group on the West Coast comparable to those developing in the East.37 The juncture in American and African American history and culture that took place at the dawning of the twentieth century—identified by W. E. B. DuBois as a time characterized by the problematic “color line”— witnessed, according to Alain Locke, the emergence of the “New Negro.” According to Locke, then the Dean of Humanities at Howard University, “the younger generation is vibrant with its new psychology, the new spirit is awake in the masses, and under the very eyes of the professional observers is transforming what has been a perennial problem into the progressive phase of contemporary Negro life.”38 Locke’s declaration, in many ways, confirmed DuBois’s pronouncement in The Souls of Black Folk (1902) that the new “American Negro” “would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism.”39 During the 1920s, a diverse assortment of writers, artists, musicians, dilettantes, and even revolutionaries congregated in New York and declared war on the values of middle-class America. As F. Scott Fitzgerald explored to some degree in his now-classic novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), these independent thinkers had the romantic appeal of the exotic, the fervor of insurgents, and the promise of liberation from outmoded forms. Although artists have frequently been on the fringes of “respectable” society, the culture gap that yawned during the Jazz Age was painfully deep.40 This gap existed, in part, because of the racial aspect of 1920s culture and its ability to generate stereotypes, tension, idealism, and aspiration. DuBois, Locke, and the major writers of the budding Harlem Renaissance—including Thurman—readily knew this. The Dutch first settled the neighborhood known as “Haarlem”; German, Irish, and Jewish residents lived there in subsequent eras. The first 35 Freda Scott Giles, “Glitter, Glitz, and Race: The Production of Harlem,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre (Fall 1995): 2. 36 Arna Wendell Bontemps (1902–1973) became a librarian at Fisk University, where he established an important collection of African American literature and culture. Fay Jackson (1902–1979) founded the first West Coast black magazine, Flash. In the 1930s, Jackson became the first black Hollywood correspondent with the Associated Negro Press. 37 Dorothy West, “Elephant’s Dance: A Memoir of Wallace Thurman,” Black World 20 (November 1970): 78. 38 Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 3–16. 39 W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 215. 40 Wukovits, The 1920s, 9–19. 352 |
