Lewis Nkosi, the South-African born critic and novelist, is teaching at the University of Wyoming. His novel, Mating Birds, is published by Ravan Press.
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Biography and memoirs, Literature and literary criticism, 1900-1999, 1900-1945, Race, Americas, North America, USA
Vol. 22 No. 16 · 24 August 2000
pages 30-32 | 5220 words
An UnAmerican in New York
Lewis Nkosi
- Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Waldrond Reader edited by Louis Parascandola
Wayne State, 350 pp, US $24.95, December 1998, ISBN 0 8143 2709 5
Between the end of World War One and the Great Depression there occurred in Harlem such a flowering of music, dance, theatre and painting as to change white American perceptions of African American artistic expression. In a little over a decade, more books by black Americans appeared in print than had been published in the entire history of black American writing. In December 1923, Opportunity, the mouthpiece of the National Urban League, declared in its editorial: ‘There are new voices speaking from the depths and fullness of the Negro’s life, and they are harbingers of the new period into which Negroes appear to be emerging.’ Opportunity’s editor was Charles Johnson, a key figure in the New Negro movement, who thirty years later recalled the Harlem Renaissance as ‘that sudden and altogether phenomenal outburst of emotional expression, unmatched by any comparable period in American or Negro American history.’
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 17 · 7 September 2000
From Leonard Pepper
In his overview of the Harlem Renaissance (LRB, 24 August), Lewis Nkosi says that Claude McKay 'knew a great many people, including Shaw and Trotsky'. As far as I know, McKay had one unsatisfactory meeting with Shaw in London in 1919, when he arrived at his door with a letter of introduction from Frank Harris. Shaw was evidently bored, gave McKay a lecture on cathedrals, and told him to put aside poetry and take up boxing. Likewise, McKay had one interview with Trotsky: at the end of a discussion of the problems of African Americans, Trotsky, sublimely, suggested training a cadre of black officers in the Red Army as the way forward. McKay went to Moscow in 1922 as an unofficial delegate to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. He apparently went to raise the race issue because he did not believe the official delegation wanted to do it. Although he later denied it and muddied the traces in his past, it is fairly certain that McKay was a member of the newly formed Communist Party in the United States, as were other prominent Harlem figures, such as Cyril Briggs and Richard Moore. The Party was a significant presence in Harlem in the 1920s, whether it was mobilising activity on its own account, or forcing black organisations to consider where they stood. Sadly, the absence of any mention of this in Nkosi's panorama is another sign of how completely the Communist Party is being erased from the history it helped to shape.
Leonard Pepper
Oxford
