The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

Two days before Alain Locke trekked to the Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan on March 21, 1935, to enthuse over Benin bronzes and Ife masks, Negroes ninety blocks northward had smashed plate-glass windows, fought police, and looted the trinkets of another decadent civilization. Two Black acts-the visit and the riot-with apparently nothing in common proceeded almost simultaneously. Locke, a professor, returned repeatedly to the temple of high modernism trying to claim an art tradition all but destroyed by European colonialism, then hijacked by European modernists, and now claimed as the intellectual property of American curators and art historians like James Sweeney and Robert Goldwater, while Harlem's African American residents destroyed $2 million worth of property after it massed outside of a Kress's Five-and-Ten because of rumors a young Puerto Rican thief had been mercilessly beaten by store clerks. Moving like a ragtag army, the unemployed-and underemployed-hurled rocks, broke through storefronts, and burned everything they did not take on 125th Street. So often dark and depressing in the evenings of the Great Depression in comparison to well-lit mid-Manhattan, Harlem lit up like New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Yet this was one party Locke missed. No mention of it disturbs his correspondence. No commentary exudes from this usually loquacious cultural critic as to why Negroes living at starvation levels with no exposure to high aestheticism were destroying every symbol of White commodity civilization in A-train New York.

The irony was tragic, but also comic, as Locke's concerns would have seemed ridiculous to the poor Black people exiting Kress Five-and-Ten Store windows with hot combs, lightening cream, and pen knives. Not only poor, Black unemployed, but also highly employed White aesthetes would ask Locke, why bother? Or as Irving Howe famously said to Ralph Ellison, the "Negro is not metaphysical." Locke, however, had tried to establish a Harlem Museum of African Art in the 1920s to no effect to show the Negro that she and he were heirs of a great civilization and thus subjects of the world. But he had failed precisely because neither Negroes nor Whites saw African art and high aestheticism as a means for Black people to rise up again. Instead, the riot dominated the front pages of New York newspapers and cast the Negro as something else-a poor, hungry, but suddenly angry product of American civilization, now bent on tearing it down if she or he could not find justice within it. Unable to confront the contradiction head-on, Locke avoided the burned-out stores, the broken plate-glass windows, and the disheveled people stumbling around aimlessly yet angrily on 125th Street, Black people who knew they had been misused by New York and now decided to burn it down. Historians say the riot marked the end of the renaissance he had announced ten years earlier. Negro art was threatening to become little more than an exquisite corpse, an archived artifact seen only by White people in a mid-Manhattan museum.