Abstract
For a long period prior to the Black Revolution of the nineteen sixties many Black people argued mightily against a substantive definition of themselves as anything other than Americans “whose skin happened to be black.” White liberals, who were supposed to be our friends, offered similar views. In the Harlem of the nineteen twenties, which was exploding with the creative energy of poets, musicians, dancers and artists, Melville J. Herskovits could conclude that there was no unique Black cultural expression. “Why, it’s the same pattern, only a different shade,”he wrote. He also recorded that Black artists, writers and intellectuals themselves were refuting any suggestion of a distinctive racial angle of vision. “The proudest boast of the modern young Negro writer,” he said, “is that he writes of humans, not of Negroes.” He concluded that the acculturation of the Negro in America was complete. To his credit the brilliant, perceptive Alain Locke discerned and registered the distinctiveness of Black cultural expression. “The brands and wounds of social persecution are becoming the proud stigmata of spiritual immunity and moral victory,” he wrote in The New Negro in 1925. Locke, nevertheless, felt obligated to argue toward a universalism that tended to blur that distinctiveness. Locke observed a new emphasis evolving from racial substance which was being used solely for the sake of art . . . “something technically distinctive, something that as an idiom of style may become a contribution to the general resources of art.” The latter qualifier suggests that the legitimacy of a Black aesthetic is judged by what it contributes to art in general, that is, its universality. For although Locke recognized the learning effect of the rich racial experience then being unconsciously drawn upon, his measure of its validity is the wide recognition which that art received before the general (read
“white”) public.