Thanks to eClub Rotarian Jean for suggesting this program
The Dinner Party That Started the Harlem Renaissance
By Veronica Chambers and Michelle May-Curry
A century ago, a dinner party in New York set in motion one of the most influential cultural movements of the 20th century. It was an interracial soirée that included intellectual and artistic luminaries. It was barely covered at the time. But we explored archival material and have reconstructed much of it.
In the years after the dinner party, Black writers published more than 40 volumes of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. But most importantly, it organized a creative movement that reverberates to this day.
If the Harlem Renaissance had a birthplace, this party was it. On March 21, 1924, Jessie Fauset sat inside the Civic Club in downtown Manhattan, wondering how the party for her debut novel had been commandeered. The celebration around her was originally intended to honor that book, “There Is Confusion.” But Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke thought the dinner could serve a larger purpose. What if the two Black academic titans invited the best and brightest of the Harlem creative and political scene? What if, over a spread of fine food and drink, they brought together African American talent and white purveyors of culture? If they could marry the talent all around them with the opportunity that was so elusive, what would it mean to Black culture, both present and future?
What the resulting dinner led to, nurtured over the years in the pristine sitting rooms of brownstones and the buzzing corner booths of jazz clubs, was the Harlem Renaissance: a flowering of intellectual and artistic activity that would give the neighborhood and its resident’s global renown.
While there are plenty of galas and gatherings today, the goal of the 1924 dinner was far broader: It was intended to bring together that talent and those opportunities. “Benefits are celebrations. They’re not operational meetings,” said Lisa Lucas, the senior vice president and publisher at Pantheon and Schocken Books who was the first woman and African American to head the National Book Foundation. “It’s unusual to really have an honest space for people to meet and hammer out what’s working and what’s not.”
Alain Locke, one of the organizers of the dinner at the Civic Club. A column in a Black political and literary magazine called him “the high priest of intellectual snobocracy.” Credit...Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library
Charles S. Johnson was a sociologist and the founding editor of Opportunity magazine.
He and Alain Locke chose the Civic Club as the venue for the dinner in part because it was the only private club in the city that would allow Black and white people, including women, to dine together. Credit...U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Photo by Gordon Parks
Johnson and Locke chose the Civic Club because, as the historian David Levering Lewis would later write, “It was the only upper crust New York club without a color bar where Afro-American intellectuals and distinguished white liberals foregathered, more often than not around a table haloed by Benson and Hedges cigarette smoke exhaled by Du Bois” — W.E.B. Du Bois, arguably the center of the coalescing Harlem galaxy.
Among the party organizers: Locke was a dapper, Harvard-educated professor who was the first Black Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford; a column in the Black political and literary magazine The Messenger called him “the high priest of intellectual snobbocracy.” Johnson was a sociologist and the founding editor of Opportunity magazine, the pre-eminent Black magazine of the time. “The thing has gone over big,” Johnson wrote to Locke in the days leading up to the dinner. “Nothing can be allowed to go wrong now.”
The evening is impossible to capture in full because so little was written about it in the mainstream news media. But we’ve reconstructed as much as we can, relying on rarely seen letters and other archival material to piece together the evening that set the Renaissance in motion.
W.E.B. Du Bois in his office at The Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P. magazine. He arrived at the dinner freshly returned from Africa, Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library
A Call for Cultural Revolution
In the Civic Club, among over 100 attendees, Locke and Johnson rubbed shoulders with a cadre of white publishers. Elsewhere, leaders from the National Urban League, the N.A.A.C.P. and the Y.M.C.A. compared notes. Every relationship was a matrix of creative possibility and promise.
The evening’s guest list had been drawn up by, among others, Regina Andrews (then Anderson), one of a number of women essential to the movement who went unrecognized for decades. As one of the few Black librarians in the city, she found herself assigned to the branch in Harlem. (That library branch would become the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, named for Arturo Schomburg.)
Her nearby apartment, which she would eventually share with two roommates, both of whom worked at Opportunity magazine, became known as “Dream Haven.” The apartment was where friends and neighbors workshopped poems, got book recommendations and couch-surfed.
The most recognizable figure at the dinner, to guests both Black and white, was Du Bois, the first African American to earn a doctorate at Harvard University and one of the most important public intellectuals of the 20th century. His 1903 book “The Souls of Black Folk” was an instant classic, and he was both a pre-eminent scholar and activist. He arrived at the dinner freshly returned from Liberia, where he traveled as a representative of President Calvin Coolidge, as well as Senegal and Sierra Leone.
When Fauset, the 41-year-old literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the N.A.A.C.P., stood up to thank her friends who had supported the publishing of her debut novel, she praised Du Bois, calling him her “best friend and severest critic.”
The evening’s programming also highlighted a new, young Black guard. Gwendolyn Bennett, 21, read “To Usward,” a poem dedicated to Fauset and to every Black youth “who have a song to sing, a story to tell or a vision for the sons of earth.” Countee Cullen, an N.Y.U. undergraduate who had already been published, also read a recent work.
The more established among the group used their remarks to call for a generational shift.
Carl Van Doren, a white Columbia University professor and literary critic, spoke earnestly about how essential it was for the publishing world, and the nation at large, to hear from young Black writers.
“What American literature decidedly needs at this moment is color, gusto, the free expression of gay or desperate moods,” he said. “If the Negroes are not in a position to contribute these items, I do not know what Americans are.” Van Doren was referencing the growing interest in Black American voices during the Roaring Twenties, in part because the soundtrack of the time was blues and jazz. “Shuffle Along,” among the earliest, major all-Black Broadway musicals, and one of its breakout songs, “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” were both hits. Louis Armstrong’s first recorded solo appeared in 1923, the same year Duke Ellington moved to Harlem. The attendees of the dinner — Black and white — were plotting how to capture some of the magic of the Jazz Age in books, magazines, plays and paintings.
Sheet music from 1921 for “Shuffle Along,” one of the first hit Black Broadway shows. Credit...Music Division, The New York Public Library
Though the event itself may have glittered with promise, the writers at the Civic dinner were very aware that beyond the doors of the club, Jim Crow was still rampant — including uptown in Harlem. By 1920, largely because of the Great Migration, Black people made up over 30 percent of Central Harlem (compared with just under 1.5 percent of the entire city). Yet even as lynching numbers began to drop, in October 1925, a young Black man from Harlem was beaten by a mob who believed he had attacked a white girl.
“We can’t lose sight of the fact that the weight of these artists’ contributions is not only due to their mastery of form,” Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, said in a recent interview, “but also the juxtaposition of the beauty they created against the ugliness and indignities they had to endure at that time.”
The playwright Eugene O’Neill attended the dinner the same week he appeared on the cover of Time.
A Complicated Legacy
It would take time for the seeds of the Civic Club event to fully take root. Locke, Du Bois and Johnson spent the next year writing letters, raising money and convincing young artists like the painter Aaron Douglas to come to Harlem. Zora Neale Hurston arrived in Harlem in 1925 as the first African American student at Barnard College. She spent her first few nights in town sleeping on the couch at Dream Haven.
Du Bois remained the elder statesman of the emerging movement. When Regina Anderson and her Dream Haven roommates, Ethel Nance (then Ray) and Louella Ray Tucker, would find themselves short on money at the end of the month, DuBois would take them out for a meal.
For Cullen, the N.Y.U. student, Du Bois’s influence was both professional and personal. Four years later, Du Bois would bless the union of his rebellious only surviving child, Yolande, and Cullen. Just weeks before the wedding, Cullen became one of the first Black writers to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, a sum so great that it would allow him to live in Europe for a year. He wrote to his soon to be father-in-law that he was sure that the award was “due to no small degree to your endorsement of my application.”
The Black news media covered every detail of the wedding; 1,200 people were invited, 3,000 showed up. Shortly after, Cullen took off on a yearlong trip to Europe — with his best man. Two years later, he admitted to his wife that he was attracted to men and the couple divorced.
Fauset, for her part, never got over having her event appropriated. In 1933, she wrote Locke a scathing letter, reminding him that in his “consummate cleverness,” he had managed, on that evening in 1924, to “keep speech and comment away from the person for whom the occasion was meant.”
A little over a year after the Civic Club dinner, Carl Van Vechten, a white writer and photographer, said in a letter to the white journalist and critic H.L. Mencken that “Jazz, the blues, Negro spirituals, all stimulate me enormously at the moment. Doubtless I shall discard them too in time.” During the economic trials of the Great Depression, support for Black artists plummeted and many of the most talented members of the Renaissance felt they had been discarded, just as Van Vechten had flippantly predicted.
“We always have the talent, but then the opportunity collapsed,” Farah Griffin, a professor of English and comparative literature and African American studies at Columbia University, said in a recent interview. “And I think the Black Arts movement in the ’60s and ’70s tried to learn from what happened when Black artists were dependent upon white philanthropy and white publishing institutions.”
Still, the audacious bet by Locke, Johnson, Du Bois, Anderson, and many others in the room that first night more than paid off. In the decade after the dinner, the writers who were associated with the Renaissance published more than 40 volumes of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. That body of work transformed a community as well as the landscape of American literature. And the Harlem Renaissance is still both inspiration and object lesson for groups of Black writers. Over the past three decades, members of the Cave Canem artists’ collective, for example, have won, as of November 2023, six Pulitzer Prizes, three MacArthur “genius” fellowships and 24 Guggenheim fellowships.
“The Harlem Renaissance is both mythology and history,” said Lucas, the publisher. “It really happened. Those works were really created. It’s a beautiful thing that all American boys and girls get to grow up and read about this magical moment when these people that America didn’t want to be free took their instruments and their paint brushes and their pens, their feet and their fingers, and they got free.”
Guests at a 1925 breakfast party for Langston Hughes, hosted by Regina Andrews (then Anderson) and Ethel Nance
Credit...Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library
That freedom took more time and strategy than the mythology sometimes suggests. On May 1, 1925, Johnson hosted the first Opportunity Literary Awards dinner at the Fifth Avenue Restaurant, off 24th Street. This time, more than 300 guests gathered, including figures that would come to define the Renaissance: the singer and actor Paul Robeson; Van Vechten; Hurston; and Langston Hughes, who signed his first book contract just four weeks later with the publisher Alfred Knopf.
A little over a year after the Civic Club dinner, the writer, and photographer Carl Van Vechten wrote to the white journalist and critic H.L. Mencken that “Jazz, the blues, Negro spirituals, all stimulate me enormously at the moment.” Credit...Carl Van Vechten, via Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and The Van Vechten Trust.
The After-Party
If the Civic Club dinner was the seed of the movement, the Opportunity dinner was where its growth gained momentum. Hughes, then in his early 20s, had returned from Paris and won first prize for what would be considered his signature poem, “The Weary Blues.” Hurston had come to Harlem and won second prize for her play “Color Struck.”
Finally, the Renaissance had the attention of the mainstream news media. The New York Herald Tribune wrote in May 1925 that the Opportunity dinner was “A novel sight, that dinner — white critics, whom ‘everybody’ knows, Negro writers, whom ‘nobody’ knew — meeting on common ground.”
It was, as The Herald Tribune observed, a moment when “the American Negro is finding his artistic voice and that we are on the edge, if not already in the midst of, what might not be improperly called a Negro Renaissance.”