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

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Michael Nowlin

Johnson's most obvious motive for writing Black Manhattan stems from the gulf separating biracial New York from that kingdom of culture it seems to beckon towards. For as the rhetorical relation between the author Johnson and that citizen-reader taking a tour of the city suggests, the transracial, cosmopolitan readership that Johnson's idealized New York City should already have formed is in fact, like Harlem itself, "still in the process of making" (BM 281). As his recent essay on the newly emergent African American author made clear, Johnson was preoccupied at this moment by the problem of the "double audience," claiming that "when a Negro author does write so as to fuse white and black America into one interested and approving audience he has performed no slight feat, and has most likely done a sound piece of literary work" ("Double Audience" 412). Indeed we might speculate that Johnson's deferral of his "literary" projects--specifically a novel he promised to write--in favor of history and autobiography owe something to the dilemma he outlined in the 1928 essay. (8)

In furnishing in Black Manhattan "the story of the Negro in the City and State of New York," which entails both an impressive record of cultural achievements and a larger social and political story of the Negro in America, Johnson worked to awaken his white readership to a fuller knowledge of its actual cultural milieu so that it might become more receptive to the very idea of a black, cosmopolitan city and an African American literature. In effect, while marking the achievements of what we think of as the Harlem Renaissance in the past tense, Black Manhattan advances the Renaissance agenda of securing cultural recognition as a crucial means of securing full citizenship and civil rights for African Americans. Johnson still speaks throughout Black Manhattan across the color line to a readership he imagines as willing to transcend it, while simultaneously re-vitalizing the cultural memory of his own people.

In Along This Way, Johnson described one of his main purposes for writing Black Manhattan as setting down "a continuous record of the Negro's progress on the New York theatrical stage ..." (406); and indeed, as Robert Fleming reminds us, "More chapters are devoted to the various aspects of black show business than to any other topic" (82). The book remains of chief importance as a chronicle of black achievement in the performing arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I would argue finally that its vision of Harlem as the black cultural capital is entangled with the more complex subject of black cultural capital itself, which at once promises to forge the cosmopolitan audience that might make New York a transracial beacon of American civilization and yet suffers an ambiguous, precarious status within a cultural field permeated by hierarchical distinctions, the most obvious being that between popular entertainment and "serious" art. Most of the black cultural achievement recorded in Black Manhattan falls in the domain of the popular, and is predominantly physical, spectacular, and prone to date rapidly, let alone conditioned by what Locke called the "very fixed limitations of popular taste" ("Negro and the American Stage" 80). That "Negro stock" was up in the 1920s, in Rudolph Fisher's memorable phrase (397), no doubt owed something to the high visibility of black urban entertainers who took advantage of the theatrical opportunities afforded by New York's undisputed claim to be, in Johnson's words, "the centre from which all the main forces and activities of the American theatre radiate" (BM 226). And several of these entertainers--Florence Mills, Paul Robeson, Bill Robinson, Josephine Baker, Noble Sissle, and Eubie Blake, like the earlier Williams and Walker--achieved international recognition as bearers of a distinctly racial culture that was also modern (and) American. These artists were emerging at a crucial moment when the American culture industry was being revolutionized by new technologies and new promotional mechanisms, and when it made sense for urban writers and performers "to speculate," as Douglas has compellingly argued, "that entertainment was to be America's biggest business and surest export and the most reliable source material for its history" (20).