Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press

Sisters of the Harlem Renaissance, the Found Generation 1920-1932, a Photographic Postcard Series.

Sisters of the Harlem Renaissance, the Found Generation 1920–1932, a Photographic Postcard Series.

“Sisters of the Harlem Renaissance: The Found Generation” uncovers the personal and political conflicts of our sisters, mothers, and grandmothers. They remind us of triumphs as well as ongoing struggles of African American women during 1920-1932, a time during which Harlem was the focus of a new spirit of race consciousness and pride, embodied in a veritable explosion of artistic, literary, political, and intellectual activity. Much of the mainstream work on this exhilarating period in African American history focuses on the accomplishments of men. This series uncovers the myriad contributions by women. The cards explore African American women who both were shapers of and shaped by the times. The series also seeks to emphasize the connections made between these women as pioneers of the New Negro identity, to restore to prominence their work as it was recognized during the Harlem Renaissance and to add new meaning to our generation.

Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935), one of the first African American women to voice the “lyric cry” of the Harlem Renaissance, was unique as both a precursor to and central participant in the movement. The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, edited by her and dedicated to the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, to whom she was briefly married, was the movement’s first anthology. Educated as an English teacher at Straight University (now Dillard) in her native New Orleans, she found early success as a writer of short stories exploring the lives of the region’s Creoles and Cajuns. Her careers included public lecturer, parole officer, suffragist, politician, and civic worker. She headed the Anti-Page 414 →Lynching Crusade in Delaware and helped to draft the Black clubwomen’s 1920 political manifesto, A Platform of the Colored Women of America. Although certainly best known for her still-uncollected poems, particularly “I Sit and Sew,” and now for her remarkable diary, Dunbar Nelson was known during the period as a prolific journalist whose essays, book reviews, and stage reviews appeared regularly in such magazines as The Crisis, Opportunity, and Colliers.

Anne Spencer (1882-1975) was hailed by critics of the Harlem Renaissance as its most technically sophisticated and modern poet. Born Annie Bethel Bannister to newly freed slaves in Henry County, Virginia, Anne Spencer (as she was “pen-named” by friend and mentor James Weldon Johnson) was, like many of her Harlem Renaissance sisters, already 40 and a working mother of three at the movement’s outset. Strongly influenced by Olive Schreiner, Spencer’s poems are more about gender than race, about rebellious wives, male fantasies, muses, and washerwomen. Yet she founded her hometown of Lynchburg’s first NAACP chapter, spent 20 fitful years as librarian at that town’s Jim Crow library, protested segregation, wore pants as an adult, founded a suffrage club, and cultivated a renowned garden that became both the metaphorical center of her poems, her “soul,” and the centerpiece of what is now an historical landmark—her home and writing cottage. Anne Spencer is the most consistently anthologized woman poet of the Harlem Renaissance.

Rose McClendon (1885-1936) was a celebrated actor and theater organizer. She enthralled audiences by the fidelity of her characterizations and gave the American theater its first authentic depiction of “the Negro woman.” McClendon studied at the Sargent’s American School of Drama and, between 1916 and 1924, appeared in Butler Davenport’s Justice, Frank Wilson's Pa Williams’ Gal, and Ann Stevens's Roseanne. She achieved popular and critical acclaim when she made her notable appearance at the Quadroon Ball in Lawrence Stallings’ Deep River (1926). Ethel Barrymore is reported to have said, after watching her descend the ballroom stairs, “she could teach all [actors] distinction.” McClendon wanted more from the theater than a few fleeting moments on the stage and spent much of her life trying to establish a “Negro Theater which could meet all the needs of Negroes as participants.” Most notable of her efforts were the Repertory Playhouse Associates (1933) and The Negro People’s Theater (1935), which became the Rose McClendon Players (1937) in her memory. Her spirit gave birth to the Negro Wing of the Federal Theater Project, and she was named Co-Director, with John Houseman, of the Harlem Project.

Anita Bush (1883-1974), actor, was a woman of intelligence, vision, and fortitude. At sixteen, she convinced her apprehensive father to let her join the chorus of the Williams and Walker Company (1903-1909). After the company disbanded, Bush was struck with Page 416 →a series of illnesses. She went on, however, to realize her dream of forming a dramatic stock company. On November 15, 1915, the Anita Bush Stock Company made its debut at the New Lincoln Theatre in Harlem with the production The Girl at the Fort. Later, Bush moved to the Lafayette Stock Company. In the early 1920s, she appeared in two westerns produced by the Richard E. Norman Film Manufacturing Company, The Bull Dogger and The Crimson Skull. In a 1921 letter to Norman, she explained: “I can sew, drive, ride a wheel, sail a boat, dance, and do most anything required in pictures.” She signed the letter “Anita Bush, The Mother of Drama in New York among Colored People.” After the film project, Bush returned to the vaudeville circuit for the remainder of the twenties.

Helene Johnson (Hubbell) (b. 1906), like her cousin Dorothy West, was one of the youngest of the Harlem Renaissance poets. Born in Boston, she first visited New York in 1926 to accept Opportunity’s First Honorable Mention prize for her poem “Fulfillment.” After moving to New York in 1927, she met prominent Harlem Renaissance literary figures, including Zora Neale Hurston, who became her close friend, and Wallace Thurman. Thurman published one of her poems, “A Southern Road,” in the only issue of his journal Fire!! About one-third of Johnson’s poems treat themes of youthful sensuality and the joy of life; racial themes dominate many others. From 1925 through the mid-1930s, Helene Johnson’s poems appeared regularly in periodicals such as Opportunity, The Messenger, Palms, Vanity Fair, Harlem, Challenge, and the Boston Saturday Page 417 →Evening Quill. Anthologists of the Harlem Renaissance have continued to include her works in their collections of Black American literature.

Ethel Waters (1896-1977) was an astonishing singer and actress, despite violence, failed marriages, and crooked managers. Gifted with a remarkable memory and ability to mimic, Waters started singing professionally in 1917 in Philadelphia and, in 1918, in Harlem. Over the next few years she made a name for herself recording songs with her pianist and close friend Pearl Wright. Besides being a singer, though, Waters wanted to act. Following her first acting job in a blackface comedy, Hello 1919!, she appeared in musicals on and off Broadway. Her success in musicals led her to the Cotton Club. When Irving Berlin heard her sing “Stormy Weather” there, he offered her a role on Broadway in the otherwise all-white production, As Thousands Cheer. This smash hit, which opened in 1933, was one of the many successes in Waters’ lifetime career as a performer.

Evelyn Preer (1896-1932) was a dramatic actor who performed during the Harlem Renaissance. Born Evelyn Jarvis in Vicksburg, Mississippi, she moved to Chicago with her family at a very early age. She became a film star of the Black movie producer and theatrical pioneer, Oscar Micheaux, and starred in Micheaux's first Black silent film, The Homesteader, produced in 1917. When Preer joined The Lafayette Players in 1920, she Page 418 →soon became the leading lady and was the star of that popular dramatic stock company for twelve years. Lauded for her talent and beauty by leading directors, such as Micheaux and David Belasco, she remained, until her death, popular with the Black theater critics of the day and is credited with opening doors and paving the way for Black performers who were to come after her.

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) ushered in the Harlem Renaissance with her sculptures focusing on African American themes, such as A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence and Ethiopia Awakening. Born in Philadelphia, she attended the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, and at the turn of the century studied in Paris with such artists as Raphael Collins and Auguste Rodin. Fuller’s reputation as a sculptor, however, represents just half of her life’s work; during the early 1920s, she also began to concentrate her talents in the area of theater design. Fuller designed lighting, costumes, scenery, masks, and make-up for church pageants and theater companies such as the Framingham Civic League, a white semi-professional group she worked with for nearly thirty years, and The Allied Arts, a Boston African American group under the direction of Maud Cuney-Hare. Meta Warrick Fuller is remembered as one of the earliest African American stage designers who contributed to all areas of theater design.

Page 419 →Fay M. Jackson (1902-1979) was a pioneering African American journalist, publisher, publicist, and newspaper correspondent. At sixteen she left Dallas for Los Angeles where she attended LA Polytechnic High School. In 1922, she entered the University of Southern California where she majored in journalism and philosophy. During the late twenties, she founded and co-edited Flash, a Los Angeles based Black magazine, and was in close correspondence with Arna Bontemps and Wallace Thurman, two writers who had left the West Coast for Harlem. In the mid-thirties, Jackson became the first Hollywood correspondent for the Associated Negro Press (ANP). It was for the ANP that she covered the coronation of King George VI of England in 1937. While in Europe she interviewed H. G. Wells, Haile Selassie, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and other extraordinary personalities. Her interest in writing and publishing continued throughout her life although she later earned her livelihood as a real estate broker and notary public.

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1886- 1966) gained recognition as a poet of “The Genteel School” of writers prior to the Harlem Renaissance. Because some of her major works were published during this historic period, some historians saw her as “definitely of it, but equally definitely not in it.” She did have, however, an impact on the literati of the New Negro Movement through her “Saturday Soirees,” which she hosted regularly at her home on “S” Street in northwest Washington, D.C. Born in Atlanta, she was educated at Atlanta University and at Oberlin College. She moved to Washington when her husband, Henry Lincoln Johnson, was appointed recorder of deeds by President Taft in 1909. The Page 420 →Johnsons immediately gravitated toward literary, political, and human rights activities along the East Coast. The abundant and kaleidoscopic nature of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s creativity is apparent in her books of poetry, her plays, and in her first love, her music. Johnson’s literary works appeared in books and journals from 1905 until her death.

Gwendolyn Bennett (1902-1981), best known for her striking poetry largely composed during the decade of the 1920s, was actively involved in African American culture and the arts community for over twenty years. Following graduation from Brooklyn’s Girls High, Bennett planned to become a graphic and visual artist. She entered Teacher’s College, Columbia University, taking courses in Art Education; in 1924, she graduated from Pratt Institute. While studying art, Bennett also wrote poetry; she was soon successful in both media. In 1923 Opportunity published her poem “Heritage,” and The Crisis carried a cover which she illustrated. In August of 1926, Bennett began the “Ebony Flute,” a literary and social chit-chat column featured in Opportunity until 1928. Also in 1926, Bennett served on the editorial board of the short-lived Fire!! where “Wedding Day,” her first published short story, appeared. Despite frequent absences from New York, Bennett belonged to the close-knit Harlem Writers Guild. She was a friend and associate of such figures as Langston Hughes, Aaron and Alta Douglas, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Josephine Baker (1906-1979), more than any other female performer of the Harlem Renaissance, came to represent the new Black talent and music that swept Europe following World War I. This “Jazz Cleopatra” wrote five autobiographies, a novel, and a collection of fairy tales that expressed her vision of universal harmony, and she also starred in several “exotic” European films during the 1920s and 1930s. In her 1927 autobiography, Baker limns her own myth: the daughter of a washerwoman, she came out of the slums of St. Louis to make her first nightclub appearance at the age of eight, left St. Louis at fifteen to join Bessie Smith’s traveling show, then went on to New York and the period’s signature musicals, Shuffle Along and Chocolate Dandies. Considered too dark and big-hipped for anything but comedic roles, she soon left color-struck Harlem for Paris and La Revue Negre, the show that transformed her at nineteen from Josephine to La Baker. With the Folies Bergere she internationalized the Black flapper as the personification of le jazz hot and introduced the Black Bottom and Charleston to European audiences, eclipsing the reputation of every other “show girl” from the twenties—when her legend took root—to well into the sixties.

Moms Mabley (1895-1975) always got a big laugh before she opened her mouth. Audiences roared at her bulging eyes, her toothless grin, and her attire – a frumpy hat with mismatched skirt, top, and apron, falling stockings, and oversized shoes. When she Page 422 →spoke, it was in a gravelly voice that called the audience her “chilrun.” On stage she gave advice, told stories about having tea at the White House with Eleanor (Roosevelt, her friend), delivered raunchy jokes with exquisite timing, and sang a little. Mabley was born Loretta Mary Aiken, in Brevard, North Carolina, into a family of fifteen. Her great-grandmother, born into slavery, was the person she most adored and upon whom she based her character. Mabley left home at age fourteen and worked her way north singing and dancing. She arrived in Harlem by the mid-1920s with a comic routine that was a big hit in the two famous Harlem clubs, Connie’s Inn and the Cotton Club. For thirty years she was the star attraction at the Apollo Theater and a frequent guest on television. Her first record album in 1960 went gold, selling over a million copies. From it she earned the title “Funniest Woman in the World.”

The Harlem Community Art Center (established 1937), a product of the arts explosion of the Harlem Renaissance era, was located at 290 Lenox Avenue and 125th St. The Works Progress Administration (WPA)-sponsored Center was established by Harlem community members and professional artists who recognized the relationship between culture and economics. The Center employed artists and provided art education. Day and evening classes, available to students of all ages, included drawing, painting, sculpting, printmaking, graphic design, costume design, and weaving. Artists associated with the Center included Augusta Savage, its first director; Gwendolyn Bennett, interim director from late 1937 until 1941; Pemberton West; Robert Pious; Reva Helfond; and Sara West. Harlem Art Center teachers, from left to right: Gwendolyn Bennett, Louise Jefferson Sara West, Augusta Savage, with Eleanor Roosevelt.

Augusta Savage (1892-1962), sculptor and art teacher, left Florida for New York in 1922, where she attended Cooper Union. Savage helped shape American art through her influence on her contemporaries, including Riva Helfond and Charles Alston, and on her students, including Norman Lewis, Elba Lightfoot, and Gwendolyn Knight. One of the earliest African American artists consistently and sympathetically to use Black physiognomy in her work, she was named the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center in 1937. In addition, she opened an art gallery devoted solely to the works of African American artists. Her best-known work is The Harp, more popularly known as Lift Every Voice and Sing, which was inspired by the Negro National Anthem written by her longtime friend, James Weldon Johnson, and exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair.

Florence Mills (1895-1927) was a pantomimist and singing and dancing comedian. She began her stage career at the age of six as “Baby Florence Mills” and later performed in vaudeville with her sisters as “The Mills Trio.” Her formidable singing and acting talents contributed to the artistic, popular, and financial success of many Black musicals of the 1920s, including Shuffle Along (1921), Plantation Revue (1922), From Dover Street to Dixie (1923), Dixie to Broadway (1924-25), La Revue Negre (1925), and Blackbirds (1926). Her most popular song is titled “I’m a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird Too.”

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961), the first Black woman to be selected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor fraternity (Cornell 1905), also earned advanced degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the Sorbonne, Paris. In 1919, after fourteen years of teaching French at Dunbar High School, Washington, D.C., Fauset left teaching for New York City and the offices of the NAACP’s publication, The Crisis. As literary editor of The Crisis from 1919-1926, Fauset was one of the people who “midwifed” the Harlem Renaissance into being by publishing numerous writers who later became well known. She was also an accomplished writer, publishing four novels between 1922 and 1933, and hundreds of poems, essays, articles, reviews, and children’s works. Many of the latter appeared in the twenty-four issues of the children’s magazine she also edited, The Brownies’ Book (1920-1921).