James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan and the Kingdom of American Culture

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Michael Nowlin

Johnson's remarkable conception of New York City as a homeland for cosmopolites like himself exiled behind the veil in Jim Crow America suggestively locates it outside that America even as no small part of its legendary allure stems from its stature as the greatest and most "modern" of American cities. (5) Certainly Johnson's New York experience was exceptional enough to justify (or account for) the great faith he had in the power of its many cultural institutions and networks, "high" and "low," to undo the tyranny of the color line. "New York had been a good godmother to me, almost a fairy godmother," he acknowledged in recollecting his remarkably successful career as a lyricist with his brother J. Rosamond and Bob Cole around the turn of the century (ATW 223).

More significant in Johnson's account than the money and modest fame this New York experience brought him are the cross-racial ties he forged: the fact of their studio having become "a center for both Negro and white artists"; the good relations he established with Edward Bok of The Ladies' Home Journal, who laughed with him at the bigoted Southern reader who assumed that Cole and the Johnson brothers were white; the lasting friendship he made with Columbia University's Branders Matthews while taking his course in the history of theater (ATW 195-96, 192-93). Returning to New York in the teens, Johnson continued, through his work with the NAACP and his work as a novelist and poet, to forge close friendships across the color line and to meet as an equal with such prominent white intellectuals as H. L. Mencken, Clarence Darrow, Mary White Ovington, and Carl Van Vechten. And his wife Grace Nail made interracial cultural connections of her own, being the exceptional African American woman member of the Greenwich Village-based feminist group Heterodoxy (Stansell 89). (6)

And yet by his own account in Along This Way, Johnson had to set foot in France before experiencing the kind of "miracle" that New York could only promise; for it was abroad, while touring with his brother and Bob Cole, that "I recaptured for the first time since childhood the sense of being just a human being.... I was suddenly ... free from the conflict within the Man-Negro dualism ... free to be merely a man" (ATW 209). His journey to cosmopolitan France, in effect, accentuates the fact of New York's position within the Jim Crow nation. However exceptional from the standpoint of the southern (American) province, Johnson's backward glance at New York's biracial history reveals a city that has yet to free itself from the racial sins of the nation it would culturally lead. African American slavery, Black Manhattan reminds us, was there from the beginning of "America." This peculiar institution led, of course, to African American struggles for emancipation and pioneering educational enterprises (including the founding of the African Free School, precursor to the New York public school system [BM 20-21]). Fore grounding the black presence in his history of New York, Johnson records historically submerged instances of violent insurrection (such as the slave revolts of 1712 and 1742), and makes the race riots of 1863 and 1900 (the latter occurring at the very moment when New York was playing "fairy godmother" to Johnson) unforgettable signs of the times. Johnson's miraculous black city within the white, furthermore, owes much to the exodus of white tenants and homeowners from Harlem in the face of a perceived black invasion. He reminds us that African Americans were virtually exiled from the stage between 1910 to 1917 (while productions of Thomas Dixon's The Clansmen played to Broadway crowds); he reminds us that segregated seating was common practice in theaters, and that in 1924 racist sentiment was quickly marshaled in the popular press against the impending production of Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings because of its representation of interracial marriage. Perhaps most strikingly, at a key point we find Johnson entertaining the likelihood that Harlem will cease to exist as a black residence once the forces of (white) American business set their sites on developing it for greater profitability--the one consolation for its black residents being that they might reap a profit of their own in the face of forced re-location. (7)