The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

As Locke traveled to Europe during the summer of 1927, Mason's attention shifted to Langston Hughes, himself on the way south. After Hughes's second book of poems, Fine Clothes for the Jew, was almost universally attacked by the popular Black press (one newspaper writer declaring that he was "sickened by the ‘lecherous, lust-reeking characters that Hughes finds time to poeticize about' "), Hughes retaliated with his article titled, "Those Bad New Negroes: A Critique on Critics," published in the April 14 issue of the Pittsburgh Courier. There he declared, "I have a right to portray any side of Negro life I wish to."1 Shortly afterward a more serious condemnation of the entire Negro Renaissance appeared from the pen of Benjamin Brawley, an English Department colleague at Howard University. Unable to find a single quotable line in Color, Brawley argued that Cullen was overrated and singled out Hughes as the saddest case of the younger Negroes. He had talent, Brawley concluded, but "squandered it" under the influence of Carl Van Vechten. Although Van Vechten replied to Brawley's article privately, and Hughes wrote publicly disclaiming the influence of Van Vechten on his poetry, it was clear to Locke that the movement was losing support among educated Blacks in the North. And the stigma of association with Van Vechten was not helping Hughes. Such attacks gave ammunition to someone like Mason who believed that the condemnations were reactions to Van Vechten's influence, which she sought to replace with her own.

Touring the Deep South, beginning in New Orleans, which celebrated and feted him as a still-revered poet of the race, Hughes had the good fortune to run into Zora Neale Hurston, who was collecting research for Franz Boas at Columbia University, where she was a student. Hurston was already well known as an interpreter of the southern rural Negro, most famously for her short story "Spunk." Locke also had suggested Hurston as a potential recipient of Mason's funding, as he had liked Hurston since her student days at Howard University, where she was one of the outstanding students who participated in both the Howard Players and the Stylus literary magazine. Hughes also told Hurston about the white-haired, bespectacled, old benefactor who had so impressed him with her money and her conversation, and recommended that she contact Mason when she returned to New York that fall.