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Show FALL 2013 UHQ pp 304-385_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/16/13 1:25 PM Page 364 UTAh hISTOrICAL QUArTErLy While Locke and McKay announced the death of the “Old Negro” in their writing, in Salt Lake City, Harts confirmed it with his actions. Likewise, Thurman’s participation in the Harlem Renaissance apparently colored his image of Utah. During his years in New York, Thurman returned to Salt Lake City to spend time with Jackson and to recuperate from his “fast life” in Harlem. His grandmother even took care of his finances at various times.101 In the spring of 1929, he returned to Salt Lake City on a protracted visit, during which he seems to have perceived a dramatic change in the treatment of Utah’s black population. In a letter to William Jourdan Rapp he wrote, “Here in Salt Lake just 10 years ago there was no segregation whatsoever and now Negroes are segregated a la Georgia everywhere except on street cars. A taxi man refused to drive me home from the depot!!! Now I ask you?”102 In another letter he told Rapp that he had tried to hire a public stenographer in a downtown Salt Lake City office to type his manuscript, but “the lady took it not. With hostility she regarded me. And icily informed me that she was too busy to take any work.”103 Yet other evidence suggests that the change was not so much in the way white Salt Lakers treated blacks, but rather in Thurman’s perception of his hometown. These include Thurman’s previous experiences in Utah, laws passed in the late 1880s forbidding intermarriage between whites and blacks, and other accounts of racial prejudice, such as Doris Fry’s recollection that “the Mormon Church limited job opportunities for blacks and catholics [sic] regulating them almost exclusively to the menial job market.”104 Thurman himself had noted in his 1926 article “Quoth Brigham Young” that “Negroes are rigorously segregated in theaters, public amusement parks, soda fountains, and eating places” and suggested the segregation was a “result of the post world war migration of southern Negroes to the north which was accompanied by a post world war wave of Kluxism and bigotry”; however, Thurman did not employ the same tone of personal indignation in making these observations as he did in his comments to Rapp.105 Whether this was due to his longer 1929 visit to Utah, which provided more time for observation, or because he had by then spent four years in the company of authors and artists striving to change the way blacks were viewed by others and by themselves, it seems clear that something had caused Thurman to look differently at the situation of blacks in Utah. Thurman’s time in Harlem also affected his views of Mormon culture or at least made him fully aware of the curiosity the religion evoked in others. In “Quoth Brigham Young,” Thurman wrote that the brightest part 101 Van Notten, Wallace Thurman’s, 70. Wallace Thurman to William Jourdan Rapp, in Singh and Scott, Collected Writings, 136; see also Van Notten, Wallace Thurman’s, 80. As noted by Van Notten, internal evidence suggests that this exchange occurred in April 1929. 103 Thurman to Rapp, n.d., copy in possession of authors. 104 Van Notten, Wallace Thurman’s, 80. 105 Wallace Thurman, “Quoth Brigham Young,” 236. 102 364 |
