1 New Negro: Paul Robeson’s Formation in Harlem

C. L. R. JamesClose, the charismatic Trinidadian polymath, described Paul Robeson as “the most marvellous human being I have ever known or seen.” But, he added, his Marxism kicking in, Robeson was also “a man whose history is not to be understood unless seen in the context of the most profound historical movements of our century.” James met Robeson in the early 1930s, when they were both living in London. Although Robeson had already achieved a “legendary” reputation among English audiences by that time, his status in his adopted home was paradoxical. Forty years on, in the 1970s, James reflected that Robeson had been “one of the best-known and best loved black men who ever was looked upon by British people as one of the blacks who had made it”; and yet, however much the English may have embraced him or even claimed him, in the end he remained incorrigibly American. In his last years, after he “went back home to the United States,” Paul Robeson “could not have been thought of as anything else but an American citizen.”

That insight into Robeson’s Americanness remains true, however fractious his relationship to the United States became, and even though James appears to have forgotten that, after his return to the States, Robeson based himself in Europe for a second time, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A more significant oversight is James’s failure to mention Robeson’s formation as a very particular type of American citizen in the years before his migration to Europe. Although British people would have recognized Robeson as being both black and American, few would have fully grasped the intellectual and psychological baggage he brought with him, as the result of his formation in the “Harlem RenaissanceClose,” or the “Negro Renaissance,” as it was more commonly called at the time, in the period between the end of the First World War and the start of the Depression and the repeal of Prohibition. It may not have been what James had in mind, but this remarkable example of a black cultural politics, in an era of American national-cultural self-creation, should count as one of the “historical movements” that provides the context for understanding Robeson’s career.

From this perspective, Robeson’s time in Europe can be seen as a transformative interlude in an American life. Already an iconic figure in Harlem before he moved to London, Robeson embodied the modernizing values, conflicts, and anxieties of the Negro Renaissance. These were adapted and transformed as he worked through his European experience, and then dramatically put to the test on his return to the United States. This chapter tells the first part of that story. It examines the Harlem milieu of the 1920s, and it shows how Robeson experimented with a number of personae—“race man,” intellectual, actor, and singer—in the process of his formation as an artist and as a public figure. In doing so, it reveals something of the American legacy that determined the trajectory of his long European detour.

Having graduated from Rutgers, Robeson arrived in Harlem in the summer of 1919, only months after the end of the Great War, along with thousands of other migrants. Most were escaping from the harsh feudalism of the agricultural South to seek work in the industrial northeast, but many came from the Caribbean and some from Africa. Demobilized soldiers, newly returned from Europe, rubbed shoulders with ambitious young men and women seeking an education or a profession, or chasing a dream of literary fame. Just two years after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, this was America’s own explosive “Red Summer.” Competition for jobs was exacerbating interracial tensions, as the demand for labor created by the war economy fell away. The Ku Klux Klan was starting to revive across the nation, still energized by continuous screenings of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation four years after its release in 1915. Lynching was on the rise, while Congress dragged its heels on antilynching legislation being promoted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). More than two dozen race riots in major cities left scores dead and hundreds injured. At the same time, black Americans were becoming increasingly self-assertive, especially in Harlem. The demagogic oratory of Marcus Garvey was galvanizing an international movement, based on a populist hotchpotch of black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, socialism, and Booker T. Washington’s ideology of self-help and self-improvement. A. Phillip Randolph and Chandler Owen were spreading the socialist word through their newspaper, the Messenger. In February 1919, while W. E. B. Du Bois was chairing a Pan-African Congress in Versailles, half a million people turned out to watch James Reese Europe and his band lead the returning Harlem Hellfighters, as they marched up Fifth Avenue from Lower Manhattan. When Europe turned off 110th Street onto Lenox Avenue, and the band began to play “Here Comes My Daddy Now,” the crowds cheered and danced.

James Weldon Johnson—diplomat, poet, composer, author, and executive secretary of the NAACP—described Harlem in the 1920s as a “great MeccaClose” for “the enterprising, the ambitious and the talented of the whole Negro world.” More than that, within “this city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world,” a new collective self-consciousness and a new type of society were in the making. “Harlem is more than a Negro community,” claimed Johnson; “it is a large scale laboratory experiment in the race problem.”

The Harlem experiment posed the question of what it meant “to be a Negro,” and, more specifically, what it meant to be a metropolitan Negro in the postwar United States. The growing proportion of black AmericansClose living in urban areas—up from less than 20 percent in 1890, to 34 percent by 1920 and nearly 44 percent by 1930—added urgency to the challenge of how they might be able to enjoy full citizenship rights, and, if they could, on what terms. In the half-century since Emancipation, conventional political and legal paths had not won them those rights. Many continued to be disenfranchised. At the same time, the broader American society was reinventing itself as a unified nation, characterized by genuinely national markets and a nationwide public sphere, and by the emergence of a self-questioning national culture that reflected widespread exasperation, fuelled by the Great War, about the viability or value of European civilization. This modernizing process created the circumstances in which the intellectuals, writers, and artists associated with the “Negro Renaissance” were able to experiment with new ways of thinking.

A key figure was the philosopher Alain LockeClose, whose 1925 anthology The New Negro became a defining document for the movement. Locke graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and then, between 1907 and 1911, studied at Oxford as the first black American Rhodes scholar. (He was rejected by five Oxford colleges because of his color, before being accepted by Hertford.) After Oxford, with the encouragement of Hugo Münsterberg, one of his Harvard professors, he moved on to the University of Berlin. He completed his doctorate at Harvard in 1918, while holding an appointment at the historically black Howard University. Dismissed from Howard in 1925, for demanding equal pay with white professors, he spent the next few years concentrating on his role as public intellectual and, in his own words, as the “philosophical mid-wifeClose to a generation of younger Negro poets, writers, artists.” (He was brought back to Howard in 1928 by its first black president.) Locke’s international experience was an important determinant of the political and cultural strategy of the renaissance. He described himself as “a cultural cosmopolitanClose, but perforce an advocate of cultural racialism as a defensive counter-move for the American Negro.” Taking its cue from nationalist movements in Ireland, India, and Czechoslovakia, the renaissance called America to account on its promises of political universality and cultural democracy, by asserting a black identity, a black history, and a black culture—the Negro, the Race—as vital components of a modern American nation. Its intellectuals took existing political categories—participation, representation, rights—and reworked them in more cultural terms. The renaissance was thus not only an aesthetic movement, although artistic innovation did both inspire and respond to new thinking, political activism, and institution building. Addressing the question of how it might be possible to be both “Negro” and “American” in his introductory essay to The New Negro, Locke insisted that the two terms need not be incompatible: “The Negro mind reaches out as yet to nothing but American wants, American ideas.” For him, this meant a pragmatic experiment in creating a new “Americanism,” based on “race values” and yet sharing fully in “American culture and institutions.” In this context, the “racialism of the Negro” should be understood as “a constructive effort to build the obstructions in the stream of his progress into an efficient dam of social energy and power.”

In the restless, transitional Harlem of 1919, Paul Robeson—a successful young man, confident in his talents, and frank about his ambition—cut a romantic figure. “Paul Robeson was a heroClose,” wrote Eslanda Robeson, in her 1930 biography, “he fulfilled the ideal of nearly every class of Negro.” Apart from his impressive intellectual and athletic achievements, his “simplicity and charm were captivating; everyone was glad that he was so typically Negroid in appearance, colour, and features.” As “part and parcel of Harlem,” Paul Robeson seemed to embody and enact the virtues of the New Negro.

When Paul Robeson walks down Seventh Avenue he reminds one of his father walking down the main street of Somerville: it takes him hours to negotiate the ten blocks from One Hundred and Forty-Third Street to One Hundred and Thirty-Third Street; at every step of the way he is stopped by some acquaintance or friend who wants a few words with him. And always Paul has time for those few words. In 1919 Paul strolled the “Avenue,” and soon became one of its landmarks; he was often to be seen on the corner of One Hundred and Thirty-Fifth or One Hundred and Thirty-Seventh Street, the centre of a group. He could talk to anyone about anything.

Even though Essie was hardly a disinterested observer, and despite his decision to become an actor and a singer rather than a lawyer, the trope of Paul Robeson as charismatic New Negro had become well established by the mid-1920s. The New Republic published a pen-portrait in 1926, in which Elizabeth Shepley SergeantClose managed to capture the allegorical dimension of Robeson’s emerging persona. “Paul Robeson is not merely an actor and a singer of Negro Spirituals but a symbol,” she wrote. “A sort of sublimation of what the Negro may be in the Golden Age hangs about him, and imparts to his appearances an atmosphere of affection and delight that is seldom felt in an American audience.” Robeson is presented as a star, as a glamorously desirable body that generates meanings and, in doing so, takes on a quasi-mythical aspect. “Six feet two and one half inches tall, twenty-seven years old, black as the Ace of Spades, he is a man of outstanding gifts and of noble physical strength and beauty. His figure on the slave block, in The Emperor Jones, is remembered like a bronze of ancient mold.” Robeson was “unlike most moderns” to the extent that he “is not half a dozen men in one torn and striving body.” He had a “sureness of essential being” that marked him out for an historic destiny: “Paul Robeson knows where he is bound.”

This image of Robeson as both modern and yet inwardly grounded suggests why he was a romantic hero. In addition to being talented, beautiful, and charismatic, he appeared to embody a narrative of oppression, struggle, achievement, and a full emancipation to come, which was at the heart of a strategy of collective self-reimagining and self-assertion. This narrative was a “romanceClose,” in the sense that the genre entails a drama that plays out “the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the Fall,” and often tells a story of the founding of a people, or collective self-identification, symbolized and inaugurated “by the hero’s transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his final liberation from it.” In the first half of the 1920s, Robeson, as a public figure, was, in effect, being handed a script that required him not only to exemplify the ideal characteristics of the New Negro, but also to act as a catalyst, moving the narrative forward and helping to bring into being a world in which vindicated New Negro virtues might flourish.

Part of the fascination of Paul Robeson in Harlem, at this time, lies in the way that, although he willingly took on these communal expectations, he also bridled against them. Through both that acceptance and that resentment, he acted out deep-seated differences and ambiguities within the Negro Renaissance. Robeson belonged to a generation of artistsClose impatient with their elders’ “cautious moralism and guarded idealizations,” but he still felt constrained by claims on him framed in those terms. For the older generation, as Alain Locke saw it, the function of art was to “fight social battles and compensate social wrongs,” and so the role of artists and intellectuals was to “be representative” and to “put the better foot forward.” This is what it meant to be a “race man.” Even in the 1920s, Paul Robeson didn’t always want to be exemplary, and he wasn’t, at least not all the time—or so some of Harlem thought. Harlem’s ambivalence toward Robeson was not only about who he was, as a person. Just as much, it was about the political disputes and the intellectual doubts that informed and drove the renaissance.

Among the courses Alain Locke took at the University of Berlin, in 1910 and 1911, were two given by Georg Simmel: one on nineteenth-century philosophy, the other on “The problem of modern culture.” By then, Locke had already articulated positions on society, culture, and value that predisposed him toward Simmel’s interpretive sociology. He was certainly sympathetic to Simmel’s characterization of modernity as a social formation determined by the relationship between an external world of things, or crystallized social forces, and the possibility of subjective life and individual creative development. In the same way that Simmel interpreted the significance of Germany’s population shift from countryside and small towns to Berlin, Locke understood the Great MigrationClose from the South as a qualitative, as well as a quantitative phenomenon: “a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.” At the same time as black Americans in the first decades of the twentieth century were being recruited to the modernity of Fordist industrial production, they were also demonstrating a desire for, or at least openness to, a subjective modernity, in which intellectuals like Locke saw the potential for progressive social change.

One thing that Locke helped to generate in the renaissance was a new conceptual understanding of culture, and its political significance for the creation of imagined communities. This produced two ways of thinking about black American culture. The first entailed the rediscovery or, more accurately, the creation through reimagining, of a black history, which would help to authorize a modern, American nationhood with an African thread woven inextricably through it. As Arthur SchomburgClose, Harlem’s great archivist, put it: “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” The outcome of this remakingClose was not only a much more positive evaluation of cultural continuities with Africa than had previously existed, but also a community-defining myth of origin that would eventually lead to a collective self-identification as “African American.” Starting from this newly imagined Africa, its narrative memorialized the trauma of the Middle Passage, and established itself as American through stories and songs created in the South during the violence of slavery. This was a “diasporic” conception of culture, distilled into a story that could articulate a sense of shared racial ancestry and destiny, and so nurture “race consciousness” and “race pride.” The alternative, more “ethnographic” way of thinking looked less to the past than to a new culture in the making, here and now, and shared Alain Locke’s positive evaluation of black urbanization. This ethnographic perspective saw a specifically African American culture (or possibly subculture) being generated through the interaction, even when negative or conflictual, between Harlem’s “cultural racialism” and the “vogue” in white Manhattan for Harlem art, Harlem culture, and Harlem nightlife. The “mongrelization” of Manhattan paralleled the negrophilia flourishing in postwar Paris, Berlin, and London. Although white interest in black music, art, and literature might seem a positive development, it was often, with some justice, denounced as transient, prurient, and patronizing. Harlem’s cabaret cultureClose, it was feared, threatened to dilute the uniquely Negro quality of the renaissance. The anxiety was that the vogue might pollute the political integrity of the movement, through the commercialization and vulgarization of black culture for white audiences, and also that it might undermine its moral authority through its overt and (though this was less openly spoken) heterodox sexuality. Scorning this angst, the poet Langston Hughes took a polemically ethnographic view of the emerging culture. It was, he insisted, the commercial success of Shuffle Along on Broadway that “gave a scintillating send-off to that Negro vogue in Manhattan” and created the space for the intellectual and political manifestations of “Manhattan’s black Renaissance.” Shuffle Along “gave just the proper push—a pre-Charleston kick—to that Negro vogue of the 20’s, that spread to books, African sculpture, music and dancing.”

Both the diasporic and the ethnographic narratives of an emergent African American culture shared their pragmatism, their pluralism, and their modernismClose. The pragmatism of the renaissance, deriving from the philosophies of William James and John Dewey, was encapsulated in the principle that America’s modern “identity” would be created through experience and experiment, rather than discovered or recovered, even if the newly minted identity would routinely be portrayed as the retrieval of a folk history and ethnic traditions. Its pluralism, heavily influenced by the relativizing anthropology of Franz Boas, was inherent in its redefinition of “race” in terms of cultural difference and reciprocity, rather than natural hierarchies, and in its attempts to articulate African inheritance as one defining component of an emerging modern America, interacting with others. The modernism of the Negro Renaissance lay, above all, in the emphasis on the constitutive role of art and culture in this broader movement of American national self-invention, or self-reinvention. In 1928, Locke reflectedClose that it had been “a fortunate thing” that the radicalism of “Negro art” had coincided with trends in “American art at large in search of its national soul.” The Renaissance emphasis on “folk music and poetry as an artistic heritage” found its equivalent in the avant-garde struggle against “conventionality” and “Puritanism.” Both movements believed in “re-rooting art in the soil of everyday and emotion,” and this convergence gave “the Negro artist” every reason “to be more of a modernist than, on the average, he yet is, but with each younger artistic generation the alignment with modernism becomes closer.”

On the ground, in Harlem’s “experiment in the race problem,” the dissemination of new ideas was mediated through two competing journalsClose, The Crisis and Opportunity. The Crisis had been launched in 1910 as a mouthpiece for the NAACP, although with Du Bois as editor it was always clear that the journal would be just as much as a vehicle for his own beliefs and priorities. Its implicit readership was his putative “talented tenth,” a black social and intellectual elite that the journal was designed to nurture into being. The Crisis accepted the NAACP’s axiomatic equation between the “emancipation of the Negro race in America and the emancipation of America itself,” but with Du Bois’s additional gloss that whatever was most essentially American in American culture would have had an African American origin. Opportunity started publication only in 1923. Sponsored by the National Urban League, which focused on social-welfare and reform activities more than civil rights, it was edited by the sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, who, at thirty, was twenty-five years younger than Du Bois. The novelist Zora Neale Hurston called Johnson “the root of the so-called Negro Renaissance.”

Although literary writing had not been part of the original vision for The Crisis, Du Bois soon began to publish contributions that, in his somewhat Victorian view, attempted a truthful, but respectful, portrayal of black American life and history. With the appointment of the novelist Jessie Fauset as literary editor in 1919, The Crisis gave greater prominence to the rising stars of the Harlem Renaissance: the Caribbean Marxist Claude McKay first appeared in 1919, Langston Hughes’s first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in 1921, and Jean Toomer’s “Song of the Sun,” in 1922. Even so, Du Bois was never wholly at easeClose with the prominence given to art in the renaissance, if it threatened to detract from the politics. In 1921, defending Eugene O’Neill’s controversial play The Emperor Jones against charges that it reproduced offensive stereotypes, he had urged black Americans not to “shrink at the portrayal of the truthClose about ourselves,” and insisted that equating art with propaganda “is wrong and in the end it is harmful.” By 1926, however, with his cultural authority under challenge by Alain Locke and Charles Johnson, Du Bois was testily reasserting the primacy of politics over art. “All art is propagandaClose and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I do not give a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”

Although Du Bois liked to rail against its supposed advocacy of “art for art’s sake,” Opportunity’s cultural policy in fact reflected less aestheticism than Charles Johnson’s sociological trainingClose at the University of Chicago, under the mentorship of Robert Park. Park had always insisted on the detailed, empirical, and unsentimental observation of people and groups, in their social and cultural settings, and Johnson applied the same principle to literature. “The beginning of the twentieth century has been marked in America by a conscious movement ‘back to the concrete’,” he explained. This modernist realism delivered “the new fascination of watching the strangeness and beauty of familiar things,” and represented “America in revolt against the stiff conventionalism of borrowed patterns.” Its fresh way of seeing compelled a new generation of Negro writers and artists to reject the sanitized ideals of their elders and to discover “a new beauty in their own lives, ideals, and feelings.” To the newness of American culture, they contributed the “liberated energy” of their poetry, with its “new and beautiful life conceptions.” “Investing negro life with a new charm and dignity, and power,” modern black writing promised to reveal the full range of black American experiences in, and on, their own terms. “No life for them is without beauty, no beginning too low.”

The differences between The Crisis and Opportunity came to a head, explosively, with the publication of Carl Van Vechten’s novelClose  Nigger Heaven, in 1926. A wealthy critic, collector, photographer, and man-about-town, Van Vechten liked to act as gatekeeper between the renaissance and Manhattan and as tour guide to Harlem for his white friends. (“Like Van Vechten, start inspectin’,” exhorted Fats Waller’s collaborator Andy Razaf in his 1930 song “Go Harlem.”) Zora Neale Hurston considered him Manhattan’s number one “NegrotarianClose”—a white humanitarian, with a genuine interest in the New Negro movement. The Herald Tribune picked up on Essie Robeson calling him “godfather,” and profiled him as “the beneficent godfather of all sophisticated Harlem.” The Marxist Mike Gold, in contrast, denounced Van Vechten as “the worst friend the Negro has ever had”: “a white literary bum,” pruriently obsessed by “gin, jazz and sex,” who had “created a brood of Negro literary bums.” Undeniably a dilettante, Van Vechten was also—for good or ill—a friend and patron to many figures in the Harlem Renaissance, including Paul and Essie Robeson.

Van Vechten’s novel depicted Harlem as a social microcosm, uniquely black yet unequivocally American, and attempted to avoid what Van Vechten saw as the twin dangers of racial stereotyping and “uplift” sermonizing. Whatever the novel’s literary merits and shortcomings, the title alone was guaranteed to start a row, and the aura of sex and drugs and wailing Harlem jazz helped to make the book sell in the tens of thousands. “Negroes did not read it to get mad,” recalled Langston Hughes, another Van Vechten protégé. “They got mad as soon as they heard of it.” Robeson, however, was enthusiastic. “Nigger Heaven amazing in its absolute understanding and deep sympathy,” he telegraphed Van Vechten. “Thanks for such a book. Anxious to talk to you about it.” In his review for Opportunity, James Weldon Johnson took a sanguine view of his friend’s portrayal of Harlem in all its aspects, from its self-regarding bourgeois salons to its underbelly of jazz clubs, sensuality, cruelty, and crime: “It is all life. It is all reality.” Alain Locke regarded it as “a studied but brilliant novel of manners” in the modernist style.

Du Bois loathed the book—“a blow in the faceClose,” he called it in his review in the December 1926 issue of The Crisis. The date is significant, as by this time Jessie Fauset had resigned as literary editor. Without her moderating influence, Du Bois was starting to turn on younger writers whom he had once championed, and his attacks on the Harlem Renaissance were becoming more strident. The appearance of the novel seemed to confirm his worst fears about “white ‘decadence’ in art concerning the Negro.” Here was proof that white publishers really were putting out books highlighting the “sordid” aspects of negro life, pandering to white readers all too happy to read “about filth and crime and misfortune” among black Americans. Unable to convey any intellectual or psychological depth in its Harlem characters, thundered Du Bois, Van Vechten just slops about in “the surface mud.” Van Vechten saw life as “just one damned orgy after another, with hate, hurt, gin and sadism.” His novel was “an affront to the hospitality of black folk and to the intelligence of the white.”

The Van Vechten scandal and the broader debate about the political function of art and culture in the Negro Renaissance bring into focus some of Paul Robeson’s ethical dilemmas, at this stage of his career. Although part of Van Vechten’s bohemian social set, and a contributor to Opportunity, he still felt accountable to an often socially conservative Harlem community, which, as Langston Hughes despaired, wanted white audiences to see “only good NegroesClose, clean and cultured and not-funny Negroes, beautiful and nice and upper class.” Robeson could not afford Hughes’s disdain for “the smug Negro middle class,” nor his indifference to the claims of “uplift.” Robeson had to manage the demand that he embody black authenticity and exemplify New Negro aspirations, and yet he could establish a sustainable career only by attracting white audiences. Playing to both sets of expectations at the same time inevitably exacerbated the experience of that “double consciousnessClose,” which Du Bois had diagnosed twenty years before: that is, the black American’s “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” and the sense of “twoness,” of being, at the same time, “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” Hence Robeson’s public performance as “Paul Robeson.” “As soon as another personClose came into the room,” observed Gertrude Stein, with piercing sarcasm, “he became definitely a negro.”

Nowhere were the competing claims of a responsibility to Harlem and the creative opportunities opened up by his engagement with Manhattan modernism more clearly evident than in Robeson’s decisions about the parts he should accept as an actor. In Here I Stand, the autobiography-cum-apologia he published in the 1950s, he acknowledged that, early in his career, most “Negro performersClose” had taken the view that “the content and form of a play or film scenario was of little or no importance.” It was the opportunity to perform at all that mattered, and “for a Negro actor to be offered a starring role—well, that was a rare stroke of fortune indeed!” He conceded, however, that he later “came to understand that the Negro artist could not view the matter simply in terms of his individual interests, and that he had a responsibility to his people who rightfully resented the traditional stereotyped portrayals of Negroes on stage and screen.” Two controversial roles, both in 1924, illustrate the conundrum: one in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, the other his long-ignored appearance in Oscar Micheaux’s film Body and Soul.

The Provincetown Players first staged The Emperor Jones on November 3, 1920, at their Greenwich Village theatre. The part of Brutus Jones, the Pullman car porter who becomes the dictator of “an island in the West Indies as yet not self-determined by white marines,” was played not by Robeson, but by Charles Gilpin, a seasoned actor who, although hired while running an elevator at Macy’s department store, had twenty years experience in fairground song-and-dance acts and minstrel shows, as well as in “straight” roles with companies like the Harlem-based Lafayette Players. The Provincetown Players were trying to create a radical modern American drama that combined, really for the first time, progressive social and political attitudes with formal innovation in dramaturgy. The Emperor Jones met both criteria, not only as the first serious American drama to feature a black protagonist, but also as an experiment in expressionist effects. The production placed unprecedented demands on its leading actor. Gilpin had to sustain a single, increasingly delirious monologue over six scenes, lasting something over an hour, as Jones flees through a jungle from his rebellious subjects and unravels, mentally and spiritually, in the face of the demons representing America’s history of racial oppression as well as his own moral corruption. At the same time as he confronts his “formless fears,” Jones is stripped bare physically, tearing off his clothes to reveal a male body, whose blackness was highlighted by setting it against a blank white cyclorama, as throbbing tom-toms underscored his regression.

Gilpin’s performance was widely acclaimed, but his relationship with O’Neill was never easy. Although the playwright admired Gilpin’s talent, they fell out over the play’s language. Whereas O’Neill felt that he was capturing the music and the integrity of black American vernacular speech, Gilpin took exceptionClose to the script’s relentless repetition of the word “nigger.” When he began to slip in alternatives like “Negro” and “colored man,” an enraged O’Neill threatened to “beat the hell” out of him. In 1923, O’Neill complainedClose to his friend Mike Gold that he had “stood for more from him than from all the white actors I’ve ever known—simply because he was colored!” Gilpin “lived under the assumption that no one could be found to play his part and took advantage accordingly.” That, along with his alleged drunkenness, is why O’Neill decided not to risk starring Gilpin in the 1925 London production. Instead, he “corralled another Negro,” who was prepared to stick to the letter of the script—Paul Robeson, “a young fellow with considerable experience, wonderful presence & voice, full of ambition and a damn fine man personally with real brains—not a ‘ham.’” In the event, unexpectedly, Robeson got to play Brutus Jones in New York before London, when the Provincetown Players revived the play for a week’s run in May 1924, as a stopgap, while they sat out attempts to ban O’Neill’s new play about an interracial marriage, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, in which Robeson was supposed to debut.

Despite their critical success, Robeson’s appearances in The Emperor Jones and, even more, in All God’s Chillun Got Wings, in which he kissed the hand of the white actress Mary Blair, provoked a mixed, and often hostile, reaction in Harlem. The plays’ language apart, the main objection was that O’Neill perpetuated the “doubtful formula of hereditary cultural reversionClose”; that is, the canard that even the modern black man wears rationality, sophistication, and civilization merely as a mask, which will slip, given the slightest provocation, to reveal his innate irrationality and primitivism. “I am still being damnedClose all over the place for playing in All God’s Chillun,” Robeson complained in Opportunity, and countered by rebuking his critics for their “petty prejudices” and by objecting that they “know little of the theater and have no right to judge a playwright of O’Neill’s talents.” Robeson’s positive case for The Emperor Jones was that Brutus is a kind of Everyman, whose “exultant tragedy” is “the disintegration of a human soul.” Warped by racial suffering, Jones in the forest “re-lives all the sins of his past—experiencing all the woes and wrongs of his people—throwing off one by one the layers of civilization until he returns to the primitive soil from which he (racially) came.” Despite the character’s moral corruption, Robeson sees Jones as heroic to the extent that he confronts his demons: “here was a man who in the midst of all his trouble fought to the end.”

As with other primitivist fantasies in 1920s modernism, The Emperor Jones can be read as a projection of the social anxieties and tensions of modernityClose onto the black body. While acknowledging that such displacement can occlude the history of sustained violence and brutality against actual black male bodies, looking at the process of projection suggests what those anxieties and tensions might have been. Doubtless O’Neill was externalizing his own inner demons, although less onto the character of Brutus Jones than onto his narrative. The play’s trope of a “real” self beneath the façade of civilized modern man—a self that is primordial, obscene, and monstrously without form, a self that demands too much and gives too little—is narrativized as the horror of being inescapably haunted by both biographical traumas and historical forces. O’Neill’s own “formless fears,” it has been argued, may have included his emotional entrapment by a dysfunctional and self-destructive family, as well as a sense of social marginality as a result of his own ethnically ambiguous status as Irish-American. (“I created the role of the Emperor,” taunted Charles Gilpin. “That IrishmanClose, he just wrote the play.”) The flight, regression, and destruction of Jones in the jungle thus render the melancholic and corrosive senseClose of never-quite-belonging that characterizes modern subjectivity. In this context, Brutus Jones’s blackness is semiotically arbitrary but culturally overdetermined. It activates a relay of misreading, mimicry, and projection that freights the narrative with inordinate imaginary significance, but that is rendered uncanny in performance as the physical reality of the black actor playing “Brutus Jones” interrupts the purely imaginary nature of the fantasy. To put that another way, the nature of the projection onto “Brutus Jones” would have been different from the projection onto either Charles Gilpin or Paul Robeson playing Brutus Jones. It matters which black male body acts as the point of cathexis for the projection. When he played Brutus Jones in 1920, Charles Gilpin was already over forty, and his body showed it. Robeson was twenty years younger, and his athletic physique must have, at least, confused the play’s evocation of an oppressed underclass with its “noble physical strength and beauty” and its connotations of classical statuary. Robeson may not have changed the lines, but his physical presence would unavoidably have added an epic dimension to the tragedy invested in the traumatized body of Brutus Jones.

The dissonance between the tragic role of Brutus Jones, or Jim Harris in All God’s Chillun, and the romantic destiny projected onto him by his Harlem contemporaries, may help to explain a recurrent ambivalence in Robeson’s reception. Intuiting this, critics would often draw a distinction between the offensive role and the exemplary actor. Robeson appears to have been allowed no such indulgence, however, in his first starring role on screen, in Oscar Micheaux’s Body and SoulClose, shot in 1924 and released in 1925. Micheaux was no Harlem intellectual, but a low-budget filmmaker, who had cut his teeth during the flurry of independent black production in reaction against Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, and who continued to treat cinema as a kind of demotic public sphere. Essie Robeson brokered the deal immediately after Paul’s critically successful, but financially unprofitable, run with the Provincetown Players. In hiring him for Body and Soul, Micheaux may have hoped to cash in on Robeson’s popularity in the black community. Apart from that, he also found in Robseon his latest controversial topic.

The narrative of Body and Soul is incoherent, not just because of Micheaux’s characteristic use of multiple dream constructions and flashbacks, but also because of its implausible central premise. Two identical brothers, both played by Robeson, are living in the same Georgia town. One is an ambitious and hardworking young inventor, a Washingtonian New Negro, while the other embodies the consolidation of two African American folk characters, the trickster and the preacher. The Reverend Isiaah T. Jenkins is a charismatic ex-convict and hustler, masquerading as a pastor, who ruthlessly dominates and exploits his congregation. What holds Body and Soul together, it has been argued in a controversial readingClose by the cinema historian Charles Musser, is the way that Micheaux deploys these various manifestations of black masculinity to challenge the racial ideology he perceived in three contemporary white-authored plays about “Negro life”—all of which happened to star Paul Robeson. The most significant was Roseanne, a melodrama by Nan Begby Stephens, which supplied the outlines, and many of the details, of Body and Soul’s narrative about a venal pastor, a devout washerwoman, and her abused daughter. The other two were The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings. From The Emperor Jones, Micheaux borrowed the trope of an escaped convict, who manipulates a naïve black community by claiming supernatural powers, until they rise up and turn on him. All God’s Chillun appears to have prompted him to portray the “good brother,” Sylvester, as a black man ambitious to succeed in a white world, in pointed contrast to O’Neill’s depiction of the neurotic, psychologically paralyzed Jim Harris, whose hopes of passing his bar exams are systematically undermined by his hysterical, and increasingly deranged, white wife.

Apart from his bewildering play with splitting, doubling, masquerade, and parody, the new narrative element Micheaux brought to this synthesis was its conclusion. Roseanne ends with the redemption of the pastor, as the washerwoman forgives him, and Emperor Jones with the hero’s death. In Body and Soul, Rev. Jenkins repays the washerwoman for allowing him to escape by killing her son, who is one of his pursuers. At this point, she finally wakes up, to reveal that the whole baffling, de-formed narrative has been a dream: a nightmare about betrayal by her pastor. The scandalous insinuationClose of this denouement, in the revisionist reading, was that, not unlike the trickster-minister, Paul Robeson, Harlem’s much admired New Negro, may also have provided false leadership for his community. That indictment, rather than the fantastic complexities and non sequiturs of the plot, delivers the real coherence and thrust of Body and Soul.

If that is right, the puzzle is what Robeson might have done to antagonize Micheaux. His most likely offence was his willingness to take on ideologically repellent roles, in plays like those by O’Neill and Begby, and so, by the way, his contribution to the decline of the less compliant, and more racially conscious, Charles Gilpin. (Apart from Emperor Jones, Gilpin had quit the lead role in Roseanne, again to be replaced by Robeson, only three months before shooting started on Body and Soul.) Micheaux may also have reacted against the sanctimonious rhetoric Robeson sometimes used to justify himself. Overall, then, the director perhaps felt that his star needed cutting down to size because he was naïve, egotistical, and sometimes less than frank, and because, in the attempt to rationalize his roles, Robeson appeared to obfuscate the racial ideologies they perpetuated.

Whether or not this was how Body and Soul was intended, and whether or not its charges were justified, the film had little impact. Few in its audience would have seen the O’Neill and Begby plays, and Micheaux’s coding of his critique was so arcane and allusive that none of Body and Soul’s reviewers even mentioned its source white plays. Harlem’s intellectuals would probably have given the film a miss. (Cinema does not rate a mention in The New Negro.) Robeson himself, however, may have got the point. Although he kept quiet about the film, even later in life, it could be that Micheaux and, especially, Gilpin were among those he had in mind when he acknowledged that “the Negro artist” had “a responsibility to his people who rightfully resented the traditional stereotyped portrayals of Negroes on stage and screen.”

Even more than his performance in The Emperor Jones, the event that foreshadowed Paul Robeson’s future career was his first public recital of spiritualsClose, with Lawrence Brown as his accompanist. The two men had first met in 1922, in London, while Brown was living there and Robeson was rehearsing for Voodoo. Brown was an accomplished pianist and musicologist, who had established himself as accompanist to the classical tenor Roland Hayes. Robeson’s musical abilities were already known. Du Bois had spotted the Rutgers undergraduate as a talented “baritone soloist” in 1918, and, the following year, Robeson sang at a memorial service for the bandleader James Reese Europe, who had been killed by a deranged musician. At their first meeting, Robeson and Brown talked about the spirituals and, when Brown published arrangements of five “Negro spirituals” for solo singer with piano and cello accompaniment in 1923, he remembered their conversation, and sent a copy to Robeson.

Returning to New York for his father’s funeral two years later, Brown bumped into RobesonClose, who took him along to an evening in Greenwich Village with James Light, Robeson’s director in the two O’Neill plays. During a conversation about the variety of emotion to be found in spirituals, Robeson suggested that they perform “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Every Time I Feel the Spirit.” When Brown joined in as second voice, Light told them that they should give a concert together. A semipublic performance followed, at one of Van Vechten’s parties. “Carl was amazedClose and just begged for more and more songs,” enthused Essie in her diary. He and his wife, the actress Fania Marinoff, “just raved about Paul’s voice and Larry’s rhythm. Larry is really fine. Carl is so interested he is almost jumping up and down.” Van Vechten put some money into the public concert, to be given three weeks later on April 19, 1925. The Provincetown Players offered the use of their MacDougal Street theater in Greenwich Village and also helped out with administration and staging. Van Vechten and the NAACP’s Walter White used their address books to drum up an audience, and the New York World’s drama critic, Heywood Broun, promoted the show in his column.

The concert Paul Robeson and Larry Brown were planning built on what Brown had achieved with Roland Hayes. Although his reputation was based on performances of the European song repertoire, in recent years Hayes had begun to include Negro spirituals in his recitals. “It pleased me to believeClose that I was restoring the music of my race to the serious atmosphere of its origins,” Hayes recalled, “and helping to redeem it for the national culture.” This sense of recovering the racial specificity of “Negro” music in the service of an inclusive American culture chimed with Alain Locke’s views about the need to fuse black cultural particularity with cosmopolitan aesthetic universals. In celebrating Hayes’s return to the United States after his long stay in Europe, in the December 1923 Opportunity, Locke praised the way that he had presented spirituals to European audiences, along with classical songs. Even if it had not yet have evinced “an admission of equal valueClose—that could not be expected,” the juxtaposition of the two genres at least raised the prestige of the spirituals.

What was new, and courageous, about Robeson’s recital was that no solo artist had previously devoted a program exclusively to Negro songs. For Hayes, it remained a principle not to do so: “I will never sing spiritualsClose without classics, or classics without spirituals, for properly interpreted they are classics.” The risk in Robeson and Brown’s experiment was that their approach might not be accepted as a “proper interpretation.” The timing, however, was propitious. The Harlem vogue had produced a thirst for “the real thing,” for “authentic” black culture. As a result, the small theater was packed out. Some disappointed customers snuck into the wings to listen. Scores more were turned away. The predominantly white crowd was, noted Essie, “very high classClose.”

Hiding their nerves, Robeson and Brown enteredClose, dressed discreetly in tuxedos. Brown sat at the keyboard. Robeson stood facing him, resting one hand on the piano, and signaled he was ready. “I have never seen a more civilized, a more finished artistic gesture than his nod to his accompanist, the signal to begin his song,” wrote Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant in her New Republic profile. “The gesture is the final seal of Paul Robeson’s personal ease in the world.” The recital lasted for about three-quarters of an hour. An opening set of four spirituals, arranged by Harry T. Burleigh, was followed by four secular songs: Burleigh’s humorous “Scandalize My Name,” Avery Robinson’s arrangement of “Water Boy,” and two love lyrics by Paul Laurence Dunbar in settings by J. Rosamond Johnson (James Weldon Johnson’s brother) and Will Marion Cook. The second half consisted of eight spirituals, all arranged by Brown. The enthusiastic audience demanded five encores, three additional songs, and repeated curtain calls. The next day’s press reviews were flattering. One critic described the concert as “the first appearance of this folk wealth to be made without defence or apology.”

In the following months, a “vogue” for spirituals prompted a debate about the function of concepts like authenticity, modernity, folk, and art in shaping the narratives of the Negro Renaissance. In November 1925, an Opportunity editorialClose identified two schools of thought. One believed that “the songs should be preserved in all their native simplicity”; the other that “the original tunes should be used as the basis for the limitless development of a new music which would, of course, preserve the distinguishing characteristics of the original.” Thus authenticity was posed against artistry, and people lined up to support either the supposedly “natural” baritone of Paul Robeson or the trained, Europeanized tenor of Roland Hayes.

In The Book of American Negro SpiritualsClose, published by J. Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson, the latter was carefully even-handed. Through his “supreme artistry,” Hayes was taking the spirituals “high above the earth”; he “sheds over them shimmering silver of moonlight and flashes of the sun’s gold.” In contrast, it is through “sheer simplicity, without any conscious attempt at artistic effort,” that Robeson “achieves substantially the same effect.” For Johnson, it was less important whether Hayes or Robeson was more authentic, than that they were both manifestly sincere: “they both feel the Spirituals deeply.” The poet Carl SandburgClose, an occasional contributor to the Crisis, was less diplomatic. Hayes “imitates white culture and uses methods from the white man’s conservatories of music” and, as a result, his delivery of spirituals attracts praise for its educated musical technique. Robeson singing spirituals, on the other hand, is “the real thing” and Sandburg’s reaction is that he “kept of the best of himself” and had “not allowed the schools to take it away from him.”

Van Vechten, of course, championed his protégé Robeson. In a program noteClose for a later concert, he contrasted the authenticity of Robeson and Brown’s “evangelical, true Negro rendering” against the “sanctimonious, lugubrious” delivery of spirituals and “the pseudo-refinement of the typical concert singer.” Their aim was “to restore, as far as they are able, the spirit of the original primitive interpretation to these Spirituals.” Once again, the “authentic” was being conflated with the “primitive,” and then contrasted against a white Western culture that had become overrefined and inauthentic. James Weldon Johnson also believedClose that the spirituals “cannot be properly appreciated or understood unless they are clothed in their primitive dignity” and praised Robeson’s “devoted adherence to the primitive traditions.” At the same time, again like the Johnson brothers, Van Vechten was well awareClose that, in performance, the primitivism of “these simple, spontaneous outpourings from the heart of an oppressed race” had to be, if not manufactured, then, at least, artfully recreated. “Under primitive conditions,” he noted, the spirituals had always been “sung in harmony by a chorus, one voice leading with a verse to which the chorus responds.” Robeson and Brown modernized this traditionClose, for their concert performances, by having Robeson undertake the solo parts, “while Lawrence Brown sang the choral responses, the piano filling in the harmonies.” A major part of Brown’s contribution to the partnership lay in his ability to rework the songs, not only to fit Robeson’s voice, but also to give their performances “natural” and “authentic.”

“I’m afraid we shall never agreeClose on the subject of the Spirituals,” Van Vechten wrote to Alain Locke in October 1925. In his New Negro article on “The Negro Spirituals,” Locke had acceptedClose Van Vechten’s criticism that some “Negro composers,” like Burleigh, may have been “too much influenced by formal European idioms and mannerisms in setting these songs,” but he resisted any forced choice between Robeson’s “robust and dramatic style” and Hayes’s “subdued, ecstatic and spiritually refined versions,” on the grounds that the folk tradition embraces both. His preference for Hayes was clear, however. The spirituals were “caught in the transitional stage between a folk form and an art form.” Preserving their folk authenticity was essential, but Locke did not accept that this should mean confining them to “‘simple versions’ and musically primitive molds.” Looking to the future, Locke foresaw that “an inevitable art development awaits” the spirituals, just as “in the past it has awaited all other great folk music.” In Hayes’s delivery, Locke heard the creative tension between folk authenticity and modern artistry. Hayes had a “voice of artistic paradoxes,” a voice “refined but unaffected, cultivated but still simple.” He had retained the “primitive race gift,” but transformed it through a formal musical development that was both “critical and sophisticated.”

For Robeson, the partnership with Brown offered an opportunity for rehabilitationClose after the wounding criticism of his appearances in O’Neill’s plays. The “deep racial quality” in his delivery of the spirituals was widely acknowledged, and Paul Robeson was once again being hailed as “the embodiment of the aspirations of the New Negro.” Achieving the status of Hayes, but with broader popular appeal, not only made obvious career sense, it also suggested how Robeson might be recognized as an engaged and responsible artist. When Robeson sang spirituals, he presented “the distinctive gift the Negro has made to America,” yet he did so in a style that was “in keeping with the aspirations of the modern Negro.” He had found a voice that combined the folkloric legacy of the Negro diaspora, with the ethnographic modernity of the renaissance.

There was a third, dissenting viewClose on all this, pointedly expressed by two women writers. In her contribution to Nancy Cunard’s Negro, Zora Neale Hurston, an anthropologist as well as a novelist, deplored the appearance of “neo-spirituals.” Without naming names, she seems to have had both Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson in her sights—Essie certainly, and resentfully, thought so—when she complained that concert singers might “put on their tuxedos, bow prettily to their audience, get the pitch and burst into magnificent song,” but what they sang was “not Negro song.” However much Robeson may have aspired to an authentic delivery, the spirituals as recreated by Brown and others lacked ethnographic authenticity: “All good work and beautiful—but not the spirituals.” Gertrude Stein was even more succinct. As Robeson fashioned a persona for the times, she warned her friend not to overinvest in the spirituals. “Gertrude Stein did not like hearing him sing spirituals,” records The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. “They do not belong to you any more than anything else, so why claim them, she said. He did not answer.”

When Alain Locke predicted that a future “art development” of the spirituals was “inevitable,” he was wrong. The reworking of the spirituals by the renaissance composers, and the performances of Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson, turned out to be their high point and, pretty much, their end point. Locke’s overoptimism reveals a blind spot in renaissance thinking: the way that an emphasis on folk roots, as the basis for a future art, tended to entail a disdain for modern black vernacular culture. This alternative culture found its most eloquent advocate in Langston Hughes, whose ecumenical vision embraced the vernacular alongside the avant-garde. In his famous 1926 polemicClose “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes proclaimed that his generation of writers, artists, and performers was creating an aesthetic that was “truly racial” (“like the singing of Robeson”), and yet also distinctively American and modern. Indifferent to anxieties about the purity or authenticity of its cultural lineage, their bricolage mixed invented traditions of an African origin with imagined narratives of black experience in the South and, not least, with contemporary commercial culture.

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand. Let Paul Robeson singing “Water Boy,” and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers and catch a glimmer of their own beauty. We younger artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs.

Jazz was at the heart of Hughes’s modernism. As “one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America,” it expressed both the primordial—“the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul”—and the new: “the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter and pain swallowed in a smile.” Given this creative potential, Hughes teased, why worry if one audience’s myth of origins is read by another audience as exotica? “We know we are beautiful.”

For Paul Robeson, however, jazz was a worryClose. Although Hughes saw Robeson as a fellow member of the jazz generation, and although Essie’s diary in the mid-1920s records happy visits to Harlem nightspots, Robeson’s public utterances about jazz were hostile. Unlike the spirituals, the folk origins of jazz had been warped by its commercial exploitation. Jazz “reflects Broadway, not the Negro. It exploits a Negro technique, but it isn’t Negro.” The music may retain “something of the Negro sense of rhythm, but only some.” Because jazz “is no longer the honest and sincere folk-song in character,” it can claim “no spiritual significance.” It will have no “serious effect on real music.”

In The New Negro, J. A. Rogers tried to redeem jazzClose by adopting a typical renaissance critical strategy. On the one hand, Rogers extrapolated whatever elements in jazz, ragtime, and blues could be attributed to a folk heritage and folk values, and welcomed the way even a commercial form like jazz (as then understood) was perpetuating them. On the other hand, he looked forward to the potential future development of the music, both artistically and socially. To balance jazz’s acknowledged links to a shady nightlife culture, its appropriation by a white-dominated entertainment industry, and the need to expunge its artistic “vulgarities and crudities,” Rogers invoked a familiar rhetoric of cultural eugenics—this time, the conductor, Leopold Stokowski, enthusing that jazz would “have the same revivifying effect as the injection of new, and in the larger sense, vulgar blood into dying aristocracy.” Rogers then made a link to an analogous social function for jazz in “the daily lives of people.” As a “leveller,” jazz “makes for democracy.” Its “popular mission” would be to put “more reality in life” by “taking some of the needless artificiality out.” Jazz could encourage spontaneity and communal participation, and so it made the expression of “joy” possible. Given this capacity, Rogers concluded that the wise response was not to protest against jazz, but instead to “try to lift and divert it into nobler channels.”

This “nobler” jazz would, in Rogers’s view, build on the disciplined, “symphonic” music of orchestras “like those of Will Marion Cook, Paul Whiteman, Sissle and Blake, Sam Stewart, Fletcher HendersonClose, Vincent Lopez, and the Clef Club Units.” They did not yet display the soon-to-emerge jazz ideals of spontaneity, individual brilliance, and improvisation, but rather the New Negro virtues of musical sophistication, polished self-presentation, and exemplary competence. The interesting transitional figure among the various black and white bandleaders cited by Rogers, and also a revealing point of comparison with Paul Robeson, is Fletcher Henderson, who was recognized as the leading figure among the middle-class black musicians bringing a new professionalism to the business of popular music in Harlem.

Henderson and Robeson were born within four months of each other, they were both college graduates, and they arrived in Harlem within a year of each other, both planning further study at Columbia—a Masters in chemistry, in Henderson’s case—before deciding to switch careers. The two men’s paths crossed from time to time. Early in 1923, for example, “F. Henderson, Paramount Recording Wizard” featured as pianist in a new Clef Club Orchestra formed by Will Marion Cook, with which Robeson appeared as a guest singer at least once. Growing up in Georgia, Henderson had been immersed in European concert music, with the result that, when he arrived in Harlem, he was no jazz musician. Instead, he started as an apprentice in a changing industry. For the first time, “mechanical royalties,” based on the sale of records, were becoming more important as a source of revenue than sheet music sales, and the success of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920 had led to a boom in “race records.” Henderson soon graduated from being a song plugger and arranger to accompanying some of the leading women blues singers of the time, including Bessie Smith. He was also appointed musical director of the new Black Swan label, which was originally intended to specialize in “uplifting” music, but which actually succeeded by releasing the blues of Alberta Hunter, Trixie Smith, and Ethel WatersClose. Ethel Waters saw that her music “isn’t his kind at all,” when Henderson spent seven months on the road with her, but it was through this range of experience that Henderson was transforming himself into a certain kind of jazz musician. By 1923, as well as being the most widely recorded accompanist in New York, Henderson was gathering the nucleus of a regular band around him. His musicians had to meet two criteria: they should be able to play jazz, but, above all, they had to be able to read music. His was the first black band to make its name through recording. Although it only began to play “live” at Club Alabam in January 1924, between spring 1923 and October 1924, when Louis Armstrong joined, the band released nearly one hundred sides. Henderson was also quick to seize the opportunities opened up by radio: his orchestra began regular broadcasts from the Roseland Ballroom in 1924.

By 1925, when Paul Robeson and Larry Brown developed a concert style that, they believed, could reanimate the “authentic” folk tradition of the spirituals in a modern presentation, Fletcher Henderson had learned an assortment of musical idioms and he was contributing to the creation of a new musicClose. In his music, jazz or not, Henderson absorbed and reworked elements of the classical tradition, blues and ragtime, as well as contemporary urban popular music. Following in the footsteps of Will Marion Cook and James Reese Europe, he had recalibrated his respectable, but restricted, musical formation to fit Harlem’s cosmopolitan and liberated ethos. This journey involved less a search for folk roots or racial authenticity, than Henderson’s self-reinvention as a modern American musician. His emerging style epitomized the principle of jazzClose celebrated by Opportunity in 1925. “The Negroes,” claimed the journal, not only expressed the spirit of “modern American life” through jazz, but they had also discovered, in jazz, “the key to the interpretation of the American spirit.”

In later years, after the jazz wars of the 1940s, a normative history of the music set in place a teleology of black expressivity that saw nothing but inauthenticity and compromise in Henderson’s achievements during the 1920s. Even his foresight in hiring Louis Armstrong was turned against him, as Armstrong, and the great improvisers who followed him, were claimed in retrospect to have foreshadowed real jazz (improvisatory and often noncommercial) as opposed to false jazz (formal and unashamedly commercial). It is true that Armstrong, rather than Henderson, embodied the most compelling future forms of jazz, although it was only in 1927 and 1928 that he began to record the “hot jazz” subsequently used by critics to redefine the criteria for both authenticity and value. Despite his influence on Duke Ellington’s style and the swing bands of the 1930s more broadly, Henderson’s was not the main road followed by jazz. In the mid-1920s, however, in the Harlem of the renaissance, his music was acceptedClose as original, American, black, and modern.

If Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra is sometimes heard, with the condescension of historical judgment, as being not “authentic” enough, then it is reasonable to ask what Paul Robeson did next in pursuing his own negotiation of the demands for authenticity and the need for a career, after Emperor Jones and the spirituals. The answer, of course, is that he took on his third defining role of the 1920s, as the shiftless stevedore Joe, singing “Ol’ Man River” in Show Boat, first on Drury Lane, then on Broadway, and finally in Hollywood. Robeson complained that jazz “reflects Broadway, not the Negro.” However often it was (and is) called a spiritual, “Ol’ Man River” is Broadway through and through, authentic pastiche if it is authentic anything. J. A. Rogers, by now European correspondent for the Amsterdam News, reported black reactions to the opening of Show Boat in London in 1928. He heard “many harsh thingsClose” being said about Robeson “for lending his talent and popularity toward making it a success.” “If anyone were to call him a ‘nigger’, he’d be the first to get offended,” protested one interviewee, “and there he is singing ‘nigger, nigger’ before all those white people.”

Both Paul Robeson and Fletcher Henderson had tried to achieve the difficult balance between commercial success and professional integrity, while creating a musical style that was uniquely black, and yet also modern and American. And just as Henderson was overtaken by the more radical innovations of Louis Armstrong, so Robeson’s reclamation of the spirituals was eventually displaced by a rejuvenated style of popular religious music apparently untouched by the aspirations and anxieties of the renaissance. This new gospel musicClose represented a move away from the allegory of the spirituals, or the formality of the hymnal, toward a more sensual Christian blues, which seemed to capture the intensely personal nature of black American spirituality. The difference can be heard in a song like “Precious Lord,” written in 1932 by Thomas A. Dorsey, who, as the hokum blues singer and pianist Georgia Tom, had made successful records in the 1920s with the guitarist Tampa Red. (The bawdy “Tight Like That” sold over a million copies.) Dorsey had also built a reputation to rival Henderson’s as an accompanist to blues singers like Ma Rainey. Drawing on that background, he introduced a feeling of “gut-bucket heartache” (Langston Hughes again) into religious music, using jazz-inflected rhythms, direct language, and a more intimate address that gave his songs an urgent, and almost erotic, charge. Decades later, in the 1960s and 1970s, Dorsey’s music was part of the soundtrack to the Civil Rights movement, and it also spawned the Gospel tradition of Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, and Aretha Franklin, which eventually crossed over and was resecularized in the 1950s and 1960s as an assertively African American soul music. Like bop and its successors, Dorsey’s legacy thus helped to displace the myths of diaspora, in favor of an ethnographic, or “ethnic,” understanding of race and African American self-expression.

After the event, Langston Hughes reflected wrylyClose that most Harlemites “hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.” Not so for Paul Robeson, even leaving his future earning power to one side. (His success in Show Boat gave him long-term financial security.) By the time he moved to Europe, Robeson had been formed within a certain American modernism. Or, it might be more accurate to say, he had internalized, without yet resolving, the fluid relationship between three variants of modernism in 1920s New York: first, Alain Locke’s strategic blending of cosmopolitanism with “cultural racialism”; second, the free-thinking, anti-Victorian bohemianism of Carl Van Vechten and Eugene O’Neill in Greenwich Village; and, third, the vernacular modernism that emerged as Langston Hughes’s “younger generation” of black artists remixed avant-garde with popular culture. As a result, Robeson arrived in London as an accomplished performer with a developed sense of racial pride and a not wholly formed commitment to progressive and libertarian ideas, used to being lionized socially, sensitive to insult or condescension, and tractable when it came to balancing artistic and ethical principles against the needs of his career. The story of Paul Robeson’s later life would largely be determined by the interaction between this formation and the contending rhythms of European modernity that he encountered in the 1930s.