Music Credit: “NY” written and performed by Kosta T from the cd, Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive

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Jo Reed: This is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National endowment for the Arts—I’m Josephine Reed.

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Jo Reed: If you have any interest in the Harlem Renaissance, then Columbus, Ohio, is the place to be. The city is celebrating the centenary of the Harlem Renaissance with a year of city-wide programming. The catalyst for the celebration is a monumental exhibit at the Columbus Museum of Art called I, Too, Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100. It’s a major survey of the vibrant artistic explosion of African-American culture in Harlem from 1918 to the early 1930s, and it sheds light on the ways in which artists, writers, filmmakers, and performers transformed American culture.

I, Too, Sing America was guest-curated by journalist and Columbus native Wil Haygood. Haygood, who also wrote the superb companion book, has written seven nonfiction books including biographies of Adam Clayton Powell, Thurgood Marshall, and Sugar Ray Robinson. He has worked for both The Boston Globe and The Washington Post—in fact, his Post story about Eugene Allen, an African American who worked in the White House under eight presidents, was made into the film The Butler.

Wil’s background in journalism shows itself—not just in the fluidity of the text of the companion book I, Too, Sing America—but in the choices he made in the exhibition itself. What’s displayed is not just painting and drawing and sculpture; it also includes hundreds of photographs, as well as selections of books, music, films, and posters. And the result is an understanding of the scope of the innovative and expansive cultural output produced in Harlem in that extraordinary time.

When I spoke with Wil Haygood here at the National Endowment for the Arts—one of the proud funders of the exhibition I might add—I was curious about why the Harlem Renaissance unfolded as it did. What was happening socially and politically at that time that led to this flourishing of art?

Wil Haygood: These soldiers who were black who went to fight for America in France, World War I, they found themselves being treated very respectfully and with dignity overseas. So they come back to the United States of America and their attitude is, look, I've shed blood for this country and I don't want to be treated like a second class citizen any longer. And so there was a spasm of rioting that broke out around the country when black soldiers, out of uniform now for the most part, would stand up to brutal police departments that would mistreat them. And this activism got in the mindset of artists—W.E.B. Du Bois, Carl Van Vechten. Artists suddenly wanted to write poems or write music or write books or write novels that had something to do with activism, with struggling for black rights. And the more this moment spread, the more people who had talent around the country heard about it and so they would start making their way to Harlem because there was suddenly this flowering of artists and artistic expression. And the NAACP had a wonderful magazine called The Crisis and they would publish a lot of writers in that. And so, you look at a poem or you look at a short story and you could sense that this was an eruption of black thought, black expression from an artistic angle. And it was a movement. It just was a movement that just started to explode right then and there. It was a very concentrated period of time. You know, really it flowered in the twenties and there were some remnants of it in the early thirties. Of course, the 1929 crash on Wall Street hurt artists all over the world.

Jo Reed: What's so extraordinary about it is, it's not just the depth of the brilliant talent, but the expanse of it.

Wil Haygood: Yeah.

Jo Reed: I mean, it really touched every artistic discipline deeply.

Wil Haygood: Yes. Dance, singing, short story, music, sculpture, painting. It was like the first, actually the first launch of “the new Negro,” as the term was so popularly used amongst Harlem Renaissance artists themselves, you know, that newness being we now have a new attitude about race in this country. We are going to challenge you. We are going to write the kind of stories to bring attention to what's going on. We are going to support the marches in Harlem. We are going to write about figures like Marcus Garvey. We are really going to fight now with words and art and painting and with our voice. And so that was a movement that once it picked up steam it was almost unstoppable.

Jo Reed: One thing I love about the exhibit and I love about the book, is that you really try to include that entire picture. So, there’s a lot about writers and material culture—

Wil Haygood: Yes—

Jo Reed: —in the book, as well as the wonderful painters and visual artists.

Wil Haygood: Right.

Jo Reed: And what I like about it is, obviously people don't work in siloes. They don't live in siloes.

Wil Haygood: Right.

Jo Reed: So can we talk a little bit about that kind of literally integration of the different arts that were happening and how they were really in conversation with each other.

Wil Haygood: I really think that you had the genius of the Harvard educated W.E.B. Du Bois and he used the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, as kind of—

Jo Reed: He was the editor for a long time.

Wil Haygood: Yes. He was the editor for a long time. And he used it to let artists say in Philadelphia or Chicago or Los Angeles or wherever know what was happening in Harlem. And that was very special. So you had a young poet like Langston Hughes who would come to Harlem who would find a little tiny apartment to live in and all of a sudden, he would be knocking heads in a good way with Arna Bontemps or Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Paul Laurence Dunbar. And so they would find places to eat and to drink and to have soirees, to have rooftop parties. They would look at who was running for political office and they would try to get involved in that. And so you had just really a stunning integration of thoughts, ideas, emotion and the entertainment world. All black movies grew out of this movement. You had Eubie Blake going to Broadway. And so, it was almost as if there was something happening in Harlem seven days a week. Arna Bontemps, the writer, called it "a foretaste of Paradise." And it's hard to imagine blacks in this country living with such optimism. I mean, there was a lot of optimism.

Jo Reed: And the great migration, I'm sure, added to that optimism of so many people leaving various parts of the south and—

Wil Haygood: Yeah.

Jo Reed: Going to not just Harlem but to different—

Wil Haygood: Yes.

Jo Reed: Points in the north—

Wil Haygood: Yes.

Jo Reed: Where the hope was they'd be free to live.

Wil Haygood: Right, right. You know, and the Harlem Renaissance also was in a way in the mindset of many blacks a way to bring well-meaning, good-hearted liberal whites over to our side. It was a way to gain followers, to—

Jo Reed: Allies.

Wil Haygood: Allies, exactly. Allies. And that was important you suddenly had great publishers like Alfred A. Knopf and his wife, Blanche Knopf who wanted to publish "the new Negro." They wanted to publish these writers. You had art galleries in New York City who wanted to showcase this work. And that all was new. I mean, during the Harlem Renaissance, we're only about 50 years removed from the end of slavery and the Civil War and so there were people walking around in Harlem who had been born inside slavery and made their way off of some southern plantation up north and hopped off the train in Harlem. I mean, I have no doubt Langston Hughes knew people who had been born in slavery. Zora Neale Hurston found many of them when she went back down to Florida to do field work in the thirties. And so, there was a sense then that these Harlemites now had an opportunity to capture black life in its full—full dimension.

Jo Reed: But despite the insistence of the artists in Harlem to define for themselves what black life looked like and felt like, racial prejudice was running a parallel course. One of the most striking features of the early 1920s was the rapid growth of the second Ku Klux Klan. As Wil Haygood mentioned, there were dozens and dozens of riots throughout urban areas in the north—with white people descending on black parts of town intent on destruction. Nowhere is more infamous than the 1921 Tulsa riot—when white Tulsans invaded the Greenwood section of the city, drove out black residents, and burned the entire area to the ground—some 150 black men, women, and children were killed. The artists of the Harlem Renaissance were deeply impacted by and responded to the turmoil and bigotry around them. Harlem itself wasn’t immune. Even in the famous Cotton Club, African-Americans could entertain, but they were not allowed to patronize the club.

Wil Haygood: I mean, laws about where you can eat, where you can sleep, segregation, et cetera—and then to go back to your studio and refocus your mind is simply amazing to me. I thought about that a lot, just simply getting through the day in 1922 in New York if you go Downtown, doors might be slammed in your face. You might’ve been called a racial slur on any given day of the week.

Jo Reed: More than once?

Wil Haygood: Yeah. Of course it would be—it would be kinder up in Harlem, but still, your whole life couldn't be lived in Harlem. One had to go try to sell one's work. And just the daily indignities might have thrown an average person for a loop. But these were artists and they wanted to create and they didn't let anything stop them.

Jo Reed: We know you're a superb writer.

Wil Haygood: Well, thank you.

Jo Reed: We know you're a great researcher. Curating a show for a museum is a very different skill set.

Wil Haygood: Yes. Yes.

Jo Reed: How did you come to curate I, Too, Sing America?

Wil Haygood: Well, it was very wonderful for me to be approached by some officials at the Columbus Museum of Art, in Columbus, Ohio, which is my hometown. And Nannette Maciejunes, who is the CEO of the museum, and the late Bill Conner, who was an arts patron in the city, and Larry James, also an arts patron—they all realized that three of my major biographies, biographies about Adam Clayton Powell, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Sammy Davis Jr., as well as Thurgood Marshall, all had roots in Harlem. These figures were either born or spent a considerable amount of their time in Harlem. And so, when the museum was thinking about a show to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance, then they got in touch with me and asked me if I would like to do it. And it very quickly brought back memories of 1983 when I was at The Boston Globe and spent a whole month in Harlem writing a two-part series about people who were in the Harlem Renaissance—dancers, actors, singers. And so, all of that came together in a meeting in my hometown and they asked me if I would be willing to put this show together, and I was very excited to do so.

Jo Reed: How did you even begin?

Wil Haygood: I was smart enough to know what I needed to learn, so I got on the phone and called a couple other museum curators around the country and I said, "How do you do this? How do you put a show together?" I certainly was humble enough to ask questions. And then, I sort of said to myself, I want to show the work that hasn't been overexposed. That was number one. And then, myself being a writer, I wanted to pay homage to a lot of writers, so I did. And I wanted to find books, first edition books from the Harlem Renaissance, to showcase, and I did. And I wanted to find letters from writers to showcase. Because to me, it was important not just to mount the show, but to have a sense of the Harlem Renaissance becoming, to have a sense of the birth of it. I wanted—

Jo Reed: It's something in motion.

Wil Haygood: Yes. Yes. I wanted to show artists who you can sense from picture to picture might be growing, might be stretching, might be getting—might be getting better. That was important to show genius as it is being constructed.

Jo Reed: Yeah, because we often think, oh, it comes like Athena from the head of Zeus.

Wil Haygood: Right.

Jo Reed: I mean, fully grown. <laughs>

Wil Haygood: Exactly. Yes. I mean, because that in a way is how Wil Haygood, how he came to the Harlem Renaissance, little by little by little. In high school, no one ever mentioned the Harlem Renaissance to me in the 1970s, which I think is sad. And then in college at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Marianne Musgrave, who was the first tenured African American faculty member at Miami of Ohio in Oxford, Ohio, introduced me to the Harlem Renaissance and to black writers who I had never heard of such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. But I came to the Harlem Renaissance in slow motion because I didn't get a full blast of it at a singular time. And so, my mindset was well, let's have a visitor to the museum walk into the museum and sense that this is the Harlem Renaissance, yes, but it's also the birth of the Harlem Renaissance. This is how it started and this is how it sustained itself because it was just a continuity of excellence. And I wanted that sense with the show. It is not a show for art critics per se; it is a show for the average man, woman or child on the street. I'm not an art critic, but I am someone who has written a lot about art.

Jo Reed: However, I have in my left hand, a pile of reviews about the show, from art critics who uniformly love it.

Wil Haygood: Yes. Yes. Well, that's very lovely.

Jo Reed: So you managed to do both.

Wil Haygood: Yeah.

Jo Reed: I mean, by sticking true to what you wanted to do.

Wil Haygood: Yes. I subconsciously told myself, "Well, I'll write what I know, and I'll go as deep as I can into these personalities." Because I thought, if I could bring in the Harlem Renaissance down to where it started, and it started on the ground. It started out of bloodshed. And I said, "If I can explain that to the reader, or to the person walking into the show," I said, "I think then that the exhibit will mean so much more."

Jo Reed: And bloodshed on both fronts. Bloodshed in war and also Bloodshed in the South.

Wil Haygood: In the streets; right, right here.

Jo Reed: And then the rioting that happened after the war.

Wil Haygood: Yes.

Jo Reed: One of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance is the sculptor Augusta Savage. Born in Florida, Savage came to New York in 1921 where she enrolled in Cooper Union to study sculpture. After graduating, she worked in laundries to support herself, but she also created a bust of W.E.B. Du Bois and one of Marcus Garvey, which brought more commissions and opened doors to a career in the arts. But despite her prominence in the Harlem Renaissance, she is still little-known.

Wil Haygood: Frankly, I knew nothing about her. I had never heard of her. I had probably seen some of her art, without knowing it was her art. I am a trained journalist, and when I'm sent out on a story, I have to do massive amounts of research, first, and that's what I did, and I became very in awe of her. Here was a woman in a male dominated world, Harlem Renaissance. Males dominated that movement...

Jo Reed: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.

Wil Haygood: Yeah. And she had to make her own way. Now, she had a hardy supporter in Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois. He believed in her. But she was, kind of, a self-starter. Sculpting is very male, very difficult, and for her to stay in that field, and she had a lot of knocks. There were grants that she wanted and that she didn't get, and she had to scrimp and save money for her studio and she did, and she became a star. There are now shows of her work being mounted throughout America, and it's long overdue.

Jo Reed: Augusta Savage was not only a brilliant artist—she was also an important teacher whose studio was critical to the careers of the next generation of artists. She taught Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Jacob Lawrence. And even though, Bearden, Lewis, and Lawrence come after the Harlem Renaissance, Wil Haygood included them in the exhibit to demonstrate the Renaissance deep artistic legacy.

Wil Haygood: The Harlem Renaissance still resonates. I think it almost vanished in our memory in the '50s. There wasn't much talk about the Harlem Renaissance. It wasn't celebrated. There were very few showings of these artists, and then with the Civil Rights Movement, suddenly were scholars and teachers who started to pay attention to what had happened in Harlem, and then you had some very good books that came out. When Harlem Was in Vogue by David Levering Lewis, you know, and you had shows in the '80s and '90s, and all of a sudden, there was interest in what happened in Harlem. And then, you had the nation's first African-American President, and he hung Harlem Renaissance art in the White House, and so all of those things have occurred to keep the Harlem Renaissance alive and moving in our mindset.

Jo Reed: The exhibition and the book, I, Too, Sing America, includes many striking photographs which capture the everyday life of people in Harlem as well as prints by professional photographers like James Van Der Zee—who photographed everyone from families on the street to performers in the club.

Wil Haygood: Ordinary black life wasn't considered art, but to people like James Van Der Zee and Roy DeCarava, there was great art sitting on the stoop or just walking down the street in Harlem. This unknown black photographer, James Van Der Zee, knew that there was something special about Harlem, Harlem's life, in a day-to-day basis, and he took hundreds and thousands of photographs of just ordinary people in his studio, or people who were getting married, or black sports teams. He captured a life, and they capture a moment in a movement. When you put all of those ordinary photos together with marches and with bands and with music and with Marcus Garvey waving at you, my goodness. It is still stunning, to me, that in about 60 city blocks, you had the epicenter of black artistic genius in the world. There's a famous quote by Langston Hughes. He said, "You can stand on any street corner in Harlem at the time, during the Renaissance, and throw a rock and you would hit, either, a poet or a singer or a dancer or a non-fiction writer." That's how crowded the art scene was.

Jo Reed: The Columbus Museum of Art is not alone is marking the centenary of the Harlem Renaissance—the entire city of Columbus is celebrating the arts movement—with a full year of programming throughout the city.

Wil Haygood: The city's mayor, Mayor Ginther, and all of these cultural institutions sat down and said, "Well, wow. This is a moment to do something special." And when we started thinking about it, we started right in the middle of the rise of hate crimes in this country, back in 2016, and this art itself, during the Harlem Renaissance, yes, it was art to showcase talent, but it was also art to move the nation forward with the discussion of race and we still have those same hopes and dreams with this show, 100 years later.

Jo Reed: We have to just talk about the book and how the book came together, published by Rizzoli, and as I mentioned, it really is a fabulous, fabulous book. How was the process of putting the book together? Did you feel on firmer ground?

Wil Haygood: It was fun to do the book because I knew, from a scholarly point of view, many of people who I was writing about, and I wanted to write the book as a fast moving narrative. I didn't want to write the book to simply repeat what's on the wall and describing various pieces of art. So I said to...

Jo Reed: Yeah, no, it's very writerly.

Wil Haygood: Yeah, and I said to myself, "So what I would like to do is just write a story almost like a five-part miniseries, if you were thinking of mounting a visual writerly miniseries about the Harlem Renaissance, and what connects miniseries is the characters. You have to fall in love with certain characters to want to go see the second episode. And so once I told myself that I was going to focus on the people—Zora Neale Hurston is a big character. Langston Hughes is a big character. W. E. B. Du Bois is a big character. Ms. Savage is a big character.

Jo Reed: Adam Clayton Powell.

Wil Haygood: Adam Clayton Powell, and his father, big characters. And so once I fastened onto my mindset that that was the road I was going to head down, I felt much more comfortable. I wasn't going to try to become some fancy art critic, overnight. I wanted to write a book that I would enjoy reading, too.

Jo Reed: Yeah, and the pictures, of course, are...

Wil Haygood: Yeah.

Jo Reed: ...knockouts, too.

Wil Haygood: Yes, are just amazing...

Jo Reed: So it's a wonderful book.

Wil Haygood: It is. And there were some great people who helped me along the way, and their names are very prominent throughout the book, as well.

Jo Reed: How do you think the Harlem Renaissance still reverberates through culture today?

Wil Haygood: I think that the Harlem Renaissance, if you're a young black kid, a young white kid, a young Muslim kid, an older person, I think it gives you something to lean on. It was an underdog arts movement. There never was enough money. There never was a promise of another paycheck. You never created your art without having in the back of your mind that something awful could happen. Another riot might break out down the street. Who knows? I mean, there were fires in Harlem and folks lost manuscripts. Just all of the day-to-day madness that can happen in any life, you know, they all had to deal with that, and yet, they inspired. In my own writing life, I mean, goodness, I've been inspired by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. It's easy to find heroism in all of these people in the Harlem Renaissance. It was truly a movement of glory and triumph.

Jo Reed: What do you want people to walk away with, when they see the exhibit or when they read the book?

Wil Haygood: I really want them to know what really made America great. It really was people who believed in equality, people who believed in justice, people who tried valiantly to explain to people why we all should be stitched into the fabric of the Constitution, of the American flag, and that art, in dark times, has often lifted us, be it a song or a play. We can create greatness from art, and we can look at the healing powers of art, too. Art does heal. I mean, we still fall back on writers who we love or works of art. Where would this country be without its art? Where would it be without the Harlem Renaissance? There would be a big void. There'd be just a big gap, a big hole, and so the Harlem Renaissance has helped us fill out the total picture of America.

Jo Reed: Okay. And Wil, that's a great place to leave it. Thank you so much for coming in. I really appreciate it.

Wil Haygood: My pleasure. Thank you.

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Jo Reed: That was Wil Haygood—he is the guest curator of I, Too, Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100—you can see it at the Columbus Museum of Art through January 20, 2019. Wil is also the author of the companion book I, Too, Sing America, which is published by Rizzoli. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscribe to Art Works wherever you get your podcast and leave us a rating on Apple—it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

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