Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture, 1920-1940

Lorraine Elena Roses

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781613764787
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the 1920s and 1930s Boston became a rich and distinctive site of African American artistic production, unfolding at the same time as the Harlem Renaissance and encompassing literature, theater, music, and visual art. Owing to the ephemeral nature of much of this work, many of the era's primary sources have been lost.In this book, Lorraine Elena Roses employs archival sources and personal interviews to recover this artistic output, examining the work of celebrated figures such as Dorothy West, Helene Johnson, Meta Warrick Fuller, and Allan Rohan Crite, as well as lesser-known artists including Eugene Gordon, Ralf Coleman, Gertrude "Toki" Schalk, and Alvira Hazzard. Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture, 1920–1940 demonstrates how this creative community militated against the color line not solely through powerful acts of civil disobedience but also by way of a strong repertoire of artistic projects.

1

Where Is Black Boston?

Geographies of Experience in the Cradle of Liberty, 1638–1900

One of the things you have to remember is that the black community in Boston back in the ’30s was relatively small. It was almost like a village, everybody knew everybody, and everybody knew everybody’s business.

—Allan Rohan Crite

In a corner park in Boston’s tree-lined South End stands a bronze sculpture of two imposing figures, a man and a woman. They step forward unafraid onto the unknown road that lies before them. Some passersby pausing to admire the commanding ensemble would be hard pressed to identify Emancipation by Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968) were it not for the engraved stone plaque; but others, more informed, would recognize the hand of the distinguished African American sculptor, a participant in the vibrant black arts scene that flourished in Boston between the two World Wars.1 In their era Fuller and her fellow artists were widely admired for exhibiting their art, writing and performing plays, and concertizing.2 Fuller’s work links her to a century-old legacy of Afro-Bostonian accomplishments in the twin arenas of political activism and art.3 Identifying as both Negro and Bostonian, Fuller and her peers created a significant body of visual art, books, play scripts, and musical scores reflective of their political concerns. To fathom the significance of their legacy requires a historically grounded discussion of race, place, and space. This chapter and the next focus on black Boston’s social geography and its literary, artistic, and performance cultures.

Emancipation, by Meta Warrick Fuller. Courtesy Jonathan Leigh Roses.

Meta Warrick Fuller, sculptor. Courtesy Moorland-Spingarn Research in Black Culture, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

The Convergence of Race, Place, and Space

According to legal scholar David Delaney geography may be understood as “the shifting arrangement of social space, the creation and transformation of real places, and the differing experiential geographies of real people.” His dynamic definition underscores “the significance of conflicts over space and the historical politics of race relations between blacks and whites,” and is particularly useful for understanding the entity called “Black Boston.”4 I contend that this alliterative phrase can serve to reference both the physical presence and the lived reality of African Americans who have long occupied a distinctive place in Boston’s and, by extension, New England’s cultural history. Geography as an element of social reality is particularly relevant in a city of ethno-racial enclaves, considered by some to be the most segregated of all American cities. A mapping of the shifting spatial coordinates of the black presence will better enable us to trace the evolution of black cultural production across the centuries. My three-fold goal is to identify the principal neighborhoods associated with Afro-Bostonians, to highlight the dynamics of a cohesive and accomplished community, and to explore the cultural continuum that gave rise to a Boston renascence, a term I use in contradistinction to the celebrated and controversial New Negro or Harlem Renaissance of New York. But in discussing this phenomenon from a historical perspective one cannot ignore the existence of slavery, which persisted in Massachusetts from 1638 to 1780 and haunts us still. In recent decades racial conflict has prompted scholars to bring “the peculiar institution” out of the shadows and to expand the body of knowledge upon which I draw in the following synthetic narrative.

Origins: Africans on New England Soil

In February 1638, just eight years after the founding of the town of Boston, the first contingent of black people arrived—in chains—on the ship Desire, licensed to the Salem privateer William Pierce. Governor John Winthrop had originally contracted with Pierce to transport “Indians” to Bermuda, but “he, missing it, carried them to Providence Isle,” the “other Puritan colony.”5 The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first governor recorded in his journal that Pierce traded seventeen Indian captives for an unspecified number of Africans with whom the Desire sailed to Boston. The ship’s exact landing point in Boston Harbor, long unknown, is now thought to be the Town Cove, in what would become Dock Square.6 The landing site is buried underneath today’s Faneuil Hall, the bustling marketplace known for its dining, entertainment, and other commercial establishments. Winthrop makes no mention of the names, genders, or ages of the Africans or of their languages, appearance, or deportment. He lists “negroes” after specifying the commodities cotton and tobacco—ample evidence that dehumanization was the first principle of slavery. The voyage of the Desire, a tragic event for the captive Africans, nonetheless inaugurated the black history that is celebrated in contemporary Boston.

Winthrop’s vision of a godly polity of Christian worship could not be realized without a plentiful labor supply. In a letter of 1645, his brother-in-law made the point that “a stock of slaves” was necessary for the colony’s survival. African slaves would be far less costly than servants from England, for “to maintain 20 moors” would be “cheaper than one English servant.”7 So it was that slaves’ unpaid labor made it possible for England to maintain her colonies. Three years after the landing of the Desire, the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first to legalize slavery. By the same token, a century and a half later, the first state to enshrine the abolition of slavery into its constitution was the commonwealth of Massachusetts.8

The Puritan colony qualifies as a “society with slaves,” unlike the thorough-going “slave societies” of the American South.9 For nearly two centuries the enslaved tilled the land; tended to the children of Puritans; managed their homes, farms, and livestock; and worked as apprentices to craftsmen—coopers, potters, printers, and weavers. They were part of a workforce that included enslaved Native Americans as well as white indentured servants, all constituents in a society that was far more diverse than is often imagined.10 The regime of slavery in Massachusetts has sometimes been described as an attenuated version of the peculiar institution of the South, based on the fact that slaves enjoyed full legal status, contracted legal marriages, could appear in court as litigants and witnesses, and retained access to the courts throughout the colonial era. However valid these assertions, scholars have rejected the notion that New England slavery was somehow a milder form of enforced labor. Sociologist Adelaide M. Cromwell notes that the mere fact “that slavery in any form could have co-existed with the ethical principles on which this country was founded was and continues to be an embarrassment.”11 Historian William D. Piersen too, while allowing that family slavery in New England fostered “close and relatively humane relationships that approached a fictional kinship between masters and slaves,” was clear that such relationships were rife with bitter internal inconsistencies and disempowerment inflicted by the slaveholder.12

Through slavery wealthy ship owners, property holders, and merchants could purchase luxury goods, travel, and enjoy time at leisure, while for the enslaved there was no such thing as luxury, leisure, or even travel without permission. Their incorporation into New England households did not amount to true assimilation, which was never allowed: instead, the enslaved and the indentured were subject to rigid work regimes, violence, and, for the enslaved, the possibility of sale at the whim of their owners. While it is obvious that African men, women, and children contributed to the viability of the economy, it is less often recognized that they also planted the seeds for the emergence of a distinguished community of free black Bostonians with its own cultural practices and pursuit of self-expression.

Indeed, even under the shadow of slavery, strong and courageous African men and women mounted resistance to oppression. In New England slavery was largely domestic, as the rocky soil precluded the establishment of plantations—unlike in the South, where Africans and their American-born descendants lived in close quarters—and New England colonists with sufficient income to purchase slaves held only a few or even just one. Under circumstances of constant surveillance the chances that the African-born could retain their oral traditions and craftsmanship were slimmer than in the South, and it is not surprising that northern societies with slaves developed no rich treasure trove of oral culture and traditional crafts comparable to those of the South.

The closest New England analogue to a southern plantation may be found at Ten Hill Farm, on the southern bank of the Mystic River in today’s Medford, some six miles north of Boston. Its owner, Isaac Royall, from one of New England’s richest families, owed his wealth to his family’s plantations in Antigua. (Royall’s estate endowed a professorship at Harvard Law School).13

Meanwhile, the slave quarters at Ten Hill Farm represent the last such structure standing in the northern United States. Visitors to the site learn about one house slave who had no bed but slept on the floor outside her mistress’s door, at her beck and call at all hours.14 Over the course of more than half a century sixty-three servants labored on the six hundred acre property until Royall, being a Tory, fled to Canada at the outbreak of the American Revolution. The servants’ names have been lost, with the exception of the African-born Belinda, who from 1765 to 1783 initiated some eighteen freedom suits against the Royalls in Massachusetts courts.15 In 1783, she petitioned the legislature for her freedom and sued for reparations. The sixty-three-year-old’s suit was successful: she won her freedom, and the Royall estate was ordered to pay compensation for her years of servitude.16

One of the darkest outcomes of emancipation was that the freed men, women, and children were left to fend for themselves. A study by historian Elise Lemire reveals that in wealthy Concord, Massachusetts, some twenty-five miles west of Boston, freed slaves were abandoned by their owners and exposed to brutal winters. Prevented from settling in other towns with “warning out laws” designed to avoid the burden of supporting indigents, countless numbers of black men, women, and children endured desperate conditions with remarkable bravery and resourcefulness.17

In Boston proper, deeply prejudiced white people treated manumitted slaves inhumanely, denying them employment and maligning them, to the point that Beacon Hill resident Prince Hall (1745–1807), the son of a biracial mother and an English father, declared in a 1797 speech: “Were we not possessed of a great measure of [patience], you could not bear up under the daily insults you meet with in the streets of Boston; much more on public days of recreation. How are you shamefully abused, and that at such a degree, that you may truly be said to carry your lives in our hands, and the arrows of death are flying about our heads.”18

With respect to the beginnings of black self-expression and cultural production during the colonial era and beyond, the black population was widely distributed and denied the right to free assembly, minimizing the opportunity to collaborate creatively. There were no proprietary black spaces and no “neighborhoods” to speak of. Any concerted effort at formal cultural association or intellectual exchange would have prompted suppression and varying degrees of punishment. Unlike free blacks, the enslaved could scarcely form affinity groups like those that would emerge after 1780. Even so, enslaved men and women mingled in church and at public events, markets, and festivals. Some also handled business matters on their masters’ behalf and were entrusted to travel, thus potentially establishing communication networks far more often than we can know due to lack of documentation.

The Nature of Incipient Cultural Production, 1773–1780

For all the limitations imposed by slavery, colonial-era African Americans—whether enslaved, free, emancipated, or fugitive—left considerable evidence of their engagement in creative activities. William Piersen painstakingly documents the perpetuation of such seventeenth- and eighteenth-century activities as festivals and ceremonies derived from ancestral practices. Historians of oral traditions note that even as they were slowly displaced by mainstream modes of communication through writing and printing, such traditions did not entirely disappear. The case of Lucy Bijah Terry Prince (1730–1821) of Deerfield Village in western Massachusetts illustrates the resilience of the oral tradition and its perpetuation in the form of versifying and speech-making. This African-born woman embodied the art of appropriating white discourse to great advantage in her struggle for justice, as in the many court appearances she and her sons made to defend the family’s right to their land.19 Terry was also a peop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction. A Veiled History
• 1. Where Is Black Boston? Geographies of Experience in the Cradle of Liberty, 1638–1900
• 2. The Black Bostonian Elites: Color, Class, Culture, and Family, 1880–1920
• 3. Gender and Culture: Black Women as Arts Organizers, 1917–1930
• 4. Black Faces on the White Stage: Space and Race, 1925–1930
• 5. Writing While Black: The Saturday Evening Quill, 1925–1930
• 6. The Boston Players: Broadway Bound, 1930–1935
• 7. The New Deal for Boston’s Black Theatre: Four Golden Years, 1935–1939
• Afterword. A Retrospective View of the Boston Renascence, 1920–1940
• Notes
• Index