Inventing the New Negro. Daphne Lamothe
by that of Asia. So extraordinary a phenomenon in itself excites curiosity to a high degree” (Waters 187–89). Newell’s remarks underscore the ambivalence that many felt about the value of African American folklore, suggesting that it preserves the race’s “depths,” but that it also embodies a cultural dynamism that could edify the race. These remarks, mere drops of enlightenment in a sea of negative racial constructs, would take on new and previously unimagined manifestations in the hands of New Negro intellectuals who found inspiration and insight in the proponents of this emerging science.
Heartening as Newell’s support proved to be, Lee Baker’s descriptions of HFS members’ participation in the national meetings of the AFLS illustrate some of the complexities faced by African American scholars who were sometimes treated as native informants as often as they were considered ethnologists. For example, when a Hampton delegation, consisting of Robert Moton, F. D. Banks, William Daggs, and J. H. Wainwright, attended the December 1894 meeting in Washington, D.C., they were well received by well-known scholars of ethnological research like Boas, Frank Hamilton Cushing, J. Walter Fewkes, and Newell. Here, Moton challenged the deformation of African American music by minstrels and categorized “Negro Folk Songs” into secular and spiritual music. He and his colleagues then formed a quartet and performed samples of the music to illustrate Moton’s descriptions. The reaction of the audience while positive and enthusiastic, was telling. Newell and Thomas Wilson’s proposal that they record the performance on phonograph suggests the wall between scientist and informant had been breeched with the introduction of the phonographic equipment.20 Their enthusiasm for the equipment’s ability to reproduce sound with “exactness” would seem to suggest that they believed themselves to be witnessing a moment of cultural authenticity as opposed to a demonstration that might approximate the music in its indigenous setting (Baker, “Research” 64–65). Moton and colleagues were not alone in finding their academic personae stripped away. For example, on another occasion, while waiting for the arrival of a graphophone when preparing to travel to the AFLS’s annual meeting, Bacon realized it would not arrive in time for her group’s presentation. In its stead she proposed, as Baker puts it, “the real thing”:
a most delightful paper by Prof. D. W. Davis of Richmond, on ‘Echoes from a Plantation Party,’ which may be worth studying up on. Davis is a full blooded Negro, a teacher in Richmond and the authority of a number of dialect processes. He takes a real interest in the old customs of his own people, and has been at considerable pains to collect all he can …. I asked him if he would be willing to describe it [his paper] in New York at the annual meeting and he says that he can …. The songs are a great part of it. It is rather better than a phonographic reprint as he gives it.21
Davis’s “full blooded” Black body wedged him into a paradoxical corner, rendering him simultaneously more fit (because there was ocular proof of his cultural authenticity) and less fit (because he troubled the line between scientist and subject) to assume the ethnologist’s identity.
Despite the obvious difficulties of the Hampton folklorists’ attempts to establish their scientific credentials, obvious links can be made between their groundbreaking work and the more radical work and politics of the New Negro intellectuals. But first, significant changes had to be made in the social and historical landscape before American society could see an upsurge of interest in African American folklore in the twentieth century. Waters notes that folklore studies at Hampton slowed to a “standstill” after 1900 because Bacon moved to Japan, weakening the links with Shaler, Newell, and Boas, and more importantly because funding from philanthropists dried up. In that time between 1900 and 1920s, however, Black activists mounted “a major political and organizational effort to balance the influence of the Hampton idea [of African American inferiority].” This shift in thinking accompanied a change in anthropological studies, which did not focus on African American culture until well into the twentieth century.22
Only after the emergence of influential groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the twenties, Waters argues, “were the educational forces sufficiently balanced that room again appeared for the academic study of Negro folklore” (Waters 51–52). In the intervening years, moreover, Franz Boas became a major force in the shaping of the American school of anthropology, introducing new ideas about cultural relativism that would transform social constructions of race. He also trained or worked with a generation of students and scholars who would go on to make a deep impression on the American consciousness including, among many others, Melville Herskovits, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Zora Neale Hurston. Finally, the ethic of the Black intellectual shifts from this period in the late 1890s. Where, for example, Armstrong sought to train and morally elevate Black teachers, who would then go on to instill “character” in other Blacks at the elementary level, the next generation of Black intellectuals, who often repeated or represented the schoolteacher’s trajectory southward into Black rural communities, were less interested in the transference of character and far more interested in the translation of culture across geographic, historical, and social boundaries.23 They strove, in other words, to articulate a cohesive idea of Negro culture that would be recognized as a valid part of American national identity. These ideas did not come to fruition until a generation of folklorists and ethnologists, following in the footsteps of the HFS members, had been trained to regard folklore as the fullest expression of a people’s lived experiences, as opposed to evidence of a community’s quaintness or backwardness.24
Franz Boas and the Attack on Scientific Racism
Lee Baker has argued that in examining New Negro representations of Black culture, it is crucial to consider the geographic proximity of the movement to Columbia University at the precise moment that Franz Boas was spearheading new anthropological approaches to race and culture through his theories of racial equality and cultural relativity.25 New York’s density and compactness made it an ideal setting for fostering bohemian, intellectual communities that strived to overturn convention; the cultural innovators of the Harlem Renaissance could easily find affinity with the academic advances taking place on Columbia’s campus.26 Boas began teaching at Columbia in 1896 as a lecturer in physical anthropology, and was promoted to professor in 1899. The position became permanent in 1901. He would usher in a sea change in the field from his perch at Columbia, transforming anthropology from a discipline that constructed and affirmed racist constructs to one that bolstered egalitarian notions, anti-racist activism and legislation, and integrationist social policies.27 The American school of anthropology, under Boas’s leadership, favored meticulous descriptions of cultures that represented the circulation of cultural traits among bordering groups through the exhaustive comparison of evidence from “material culture, ceremonial, social organization, recorded history, language, mythology, and folklore” (Deacon 149). In order to understand any culture, Boas argued, it had to be situated within its historical and geographic context, and its particular traditions had to be taken into consideration. This approach to understanding culture, he argued, challenged the idea that any culture possessed a higher or lower value than another.
Boas, born in Minden, Germany in 1858, was educated at the Universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel, where he was trained in conducting empiricist and positivist research, methods that influenced his future scholarship.28 He retained throughout his career a commitment to empirical research. Boas rarely proposed grand theories and he rejected the notion that the social sciences should be used to engineer social policies or relations. Nonetheless, his progressive views on race and immigration were well known and his theories were enthusiastically taken up and appropriated by racial vindicationists29 like the New Negro intellectuals. Most likely, Boas’s radical racial politics arose from his personal struggles with anti-Semitism. Although born into middle-class privilege, as a Jew he suffered from political persecution, which caused him to migrate to the United States in 1886.30 Once in the States, Boas continued to experience anti-Semitic discrimination. For example after serving as assistant chief to Frederick Ward Putnam at the World Columbian Exposition in 1893, despite his impressive credentials, he had difficulty securing a permanent position in an American university until his appointment at Columbia.
From that point on he would begin to teach and extend his influence over an impressive range of individuals, many of whom gained stellar national reputations, including