But even during what were at least perceived as far more socially restrictive times there have always been black people who have dared to live by their own rules, who have carved out communities of unimaginable possibilities for themselves, often at the risk of potentially huge social sanctions.
BLACK HEIR
If I close my eyes, I can practically smell the perfumed air: aftershave, whisky, pomade, and cigar smoke combine in a heady concoction. I’m in a darkly paneled room. It’s packed. The great and the good of the black cultural renaissance converge alongside rogues, royalty, waifs, and strays, brought together by chance, new opportunities, and a sense of adventure. Chandeliers diffuse light throughout the room, highlighting multihued blackness: tawny yellows, golden browns, and midnight blues. Lean figures strike modish poses, oblique against the plush furnishings. Important allegiances form and dissolve, transforming the political, literary, sexual, and racial landscape forevermore.
In the smoky atmosphere hard edges soften, as do strict moral codes. Glamour is nonnegotiable. Honey-tongued men dressed for heartbreak whisper into willing ears framed by sharply marcelled waves. Cupid-bow lips issue assent between insouciant puffs on cigarette holders. Anything can happen and everything often does. The new strains of jazz—the soundtrack of the decade—infuse the proceedings. This is hip. This is where it’s at! Bold and beautiful, and black and brave. Harlem in the 1920s. The center of the universe. What a time to be alive!
If I could be reborn at any point in modern history, it would be in the Harlem Renaissance, a period when an explosion of black literary and cultural talent was ushered into being, not least by the combined energies of an earlier group of educated black professionals known as the Talented Tenth.
Yet these days I am a little less naive than I once was. The thing about elites is that they are, as a result of privilege and stratification, often comprised of snobs. And I tend to find elite pretentions insufferable.
The Talented Tenth believed that if the world could bear witness to their refinement, the result would be universal social acceptance for all black people. Ensuring access to these rights for themselves would eventually extend to the other (socially inferior) 90 percent of black life. W. E. B. Du Bois, who coined the phrase “Talented Tenth,” was a huge advocate for the arts, particularly literature, understanding it to be one of the most powerful tools to demonstrate the positives of African American cultural life.
Before long, an industrious group of individuals were establishing and supporting an array of literary initiatives, events, and awards. African American publications came on board. Wealthy whites, in thrall to the earthy delights of Harlem, got involved as patrons, while networks emerged between black literary talents and the bohemian white Greenwich Village writers.
It worked. From this environment there emerged an outpouring of stellar black creative energy. The era produced writers including Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay. To this day, the period remains associated with a multitude of beautiful and compelling African American literary works.
Prior to the renaissance, Du Bois had written The Souls of Black Folks, a seminal text in articulating the black experience of dislocation in the West. He famously writes:
. . . the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.12 [my italics]
Yet despite its noble aims, accusations of elitism and colorism plagued the movement. Critics ranged from the working-class Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey to members of the in-crowd itself. Langston Hughes challenged what he saw as an assimilationist attitude and agitated to change the tone and direction.
Du Bois himself became far more radical as time went on. A committed communist, he was one of the most prominent advocates of black liberation, not just in the US but globally. Du Bois is recognized as the father of Pan-Africanism and was hugely influential on post-independence African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. In fact, hounded by the American authorities, Du Bois would spend his final years in self-imposed exile in Ghana, where he passed away on August 27, 1963, the eve of Martin Luther King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” speech.
While these contestations of Hughes and others were to a degree effective, the Harlem Renaissance remained a culture extremely aware of skin shade and hair texture, with entry into its upper echelons (with some notable exceptions) often predicated upon conforming to the light-skinned/good-hair gang. Yet here, as ever, the politics remained complicated and at times contradictory. While features that were the product of mixed ancestry were prized, there was a stigma associated with recently identifiable “race mixing,” for example, having a white parent. It remained more desirable to have acquired such features from light-skinned parents (which required mixing further back) than via one black and one white parent. While evidence of “mixing” was the recipe for beauty and success, mixing that was too recent was distasteful.
At the center of this decadent and image-conscious world was a glamorous young heiress and socialite called A’Lelia Walker. Her parties were legendary, providing a safe and discreet environment where the scene’s brightest stars could get up to get down. Membership was a diverse cross section of black life and inclusive of many men and women who would today be described as queer.
Despite the systemic violence and racism that continued post-emancipation, the official abolition of slavery in the US in 1865 created economic opportunities previously unimaginable for anyone black. Thus, in the early twentieth century, we begin to see the emergence of the first black millionaires.
Black heirs (excuse the pun) were thin on the ground in the first place, but for a young black woman to have inherited such fabulous wealth as A’Lelia had was simply unheard of. The source of her fortune? Black hair, of course. Vast creative energy is poured into black hair and its cultural expression. Du Bois (who himself had wavy, almost straight hair) described Negros as “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Chemical hair straightening was seen as an example of this tendency and one of the most pronounced displays of internalized oppression. Yet it was also one of very few avenues that could provide financial liberation to black women at a time when such opportunities were practically non-existent. With all the business acumen of the West African market traders she was descended from, A’Lelia’s mother, the famous Madam C. J. Walker, had identified a gap in the market and made a financial killing.
Madam was a formidable figure, a self-made black female millionaire at a time when pretty much all conceivable odds were stacked against her. She is eulogized as the mother of black commercial haircare, as well as the first self-made American female millionaire. Yet evidence suggests that the real mother of black commercial haircare, the woman who inspired Madam herself, is someone whose name remains far less familiar. It was Annie Turnbo Pope Malone, and she was Madam Walker’s former employer.