Thulani Davis is the author of the piece “African American Literary Movements” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York. A self-described “writer and interdisciplinary artist,” Thulani wrote the libretti for Anthony Davis’s operas Amistad (which premiered at the Lyric Opera in Chicago in 1997) and X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which premiered at the New York City Opera in 1986 and for which she received a Grammy nomination. Thulani later won a Grammy Award for Best Album Notes (for Aretha Franklin’s 1993 album The Atlantic Recordings). As a journalist, Thulani has served as City/State editor for the Village Voice.
In 2006, Thulani published a family history entitled My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots. “I am not a historian,” she writes in the introduction to the book, adding, “I am also not a genealogist, though I am now much more agile in the face of old documents than I once was. But I am a journalist, who is, like many in my trade, very curious, very stubborn … So this text is not a history nor a genealogy but built from my own great interests: how we define being American, how we deal with race, and human character.”
Thulani has also written the foreword to Maurice Berger’s study For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, just published by Yale University Press. An exhibition of images, objects, and clips related to the book will open this May at The International Center of Photography.
Thulani is currently pursuing a doctorate in American Studies at NYU, working on a research project that involves women in the post-Reconstruction era in the South. On one of her back burners is what she calls “a musical theater piece on the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen’s strike.”
For the Cambridge Companion, Thulani adopts the garb of a literary historian. “I often joke,” she writes in the opening paragraph of her chapter, “that whenever Europe sailed off to discover the rest of the world there was always an African aboard. In the case of New York, this was doubly true. A black Portuguese navigator came up the Hudson in 1525, and in 1613 Jan Rodriguez, a free black sailor, was dropped off from a Dutch trader on Manhattan and stayed.”
Here is a longer excerpt:
Arguably the most important antecedent to the work of the Harlem Renaissance was The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), written by James Weldon Johnson, a poet from Jacksonville, Florida, who had come to New York in 1902 to write shows. He and his brother, the composer J. Rosamond Johnson, and the performer Bob Cole formed one of the most successful theater teams in New York. In this novel, which was initially published anonymously and taken to be a genuine autobiography of “passing,” Johnson created a groundbreaking work endowed with an urbane central character whose complex internal life excavates some of the conflicts of racial identity fifty years out of slavery. The ex-colored man, the child of a white man and his black mistress in Georgia, grows up in New England, becomes a ragtime player in the Tenderloin, and is then taken abroad by a white patron. A later trip to Georgia to search out black folk music exposes him to a lynching, and sets his mind on passing. Some of the book’s most detailed passages recall the novelty of New York’s language, food, rhythms, and diversity. He later documented the growth of the city’s black community and its migration to Harlem in Black Manhattan (1930).
Now that we are in an era likely to be named after the country’s first African American president, the work of Wells, Du Bois, and Johnson has even greater signifi cance because of their interest in the breadth of the African American journey out of legal bondage and their focus on our relationship to the American state. They were asking the most pertinent questions, and in time we shall have to examine whether they’ve been answered.
In December 1905 the New York Herald ran a story under the headline, “Negroes Move to Harlem,” announcing that whites had been replaced by black tenants in flats on 134th between Seventh and Lenox Avenues. The article reported “the cause of the colored influx was inexplicable.” A murder had actually allowed a young African American realtor to begin placing black tenants – at higher rents – into buildings on that street. In 1908, the black expansion into Harlem began in earnest. Theater artists were also driven out of Broadway to Harlem from about 1909 until the end of the First World War. Many small bars sprang up along 133rd (“The Jungle”) and 134th, offering blues, booze, and dancing, and some catered to gay night life. The area became home to Florence Mills, Bessie Smith, and Alain Locke, as well as James Weldon Johnson and Fats Waller, to name a few. My uncle, the critic Arthur P. Davis, often told the story of seeing Du Bois and Garvey, who had little use for each other, passing one another on Seventh Avenue without acknowledgment, one in quasi-military gear and the other with fedora and cane.
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Next: Eric Homberger.
Tags: Cambridge Companion
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