The Cultural Turn and the Long Movement: Black Identities and Class in Market Spaces

This paper utilizes pre-Harlem Renaissance cultural history to reconceptualize the Black Freedom Struggle. As African Americans produced and consumed popular culture, they debated about the political power of culture, changing formations of racial identities, and what scholars term “agency.” Neither politically radical “New Negroes” of the A. Phillip Randolph school, nor literary “New Negroes” in Alain Locke’s mold, blacks coming of age in the early-twentieth century initiated new political, economic, and cultural identities that both anticipated and synthesized the competing visions of New Negroes. As rural southerners migrated to the urban North, they met black entrepreneurs and entertainers, creating relationships that open up scholarly notions of “class” in African American history. Rather than stark indications of income or background that bifurcated black communities, “class” signaled a complex set of social performances, style, and bearing that found articulation in popular entertainment. Vaudevillian Bert Williams, for example, drew freely from uplift ideology and black nationalism as he innovated “lowbrow” forms of popular culture alongside his formally-trained “highbrow” musical director Will Marion Cook. Together, Williams and Cook negotiated seemingly contradictory tendencies as they fashioned new forms of black identity. Second, notions of class and identity increasingly took shape in commercial leisure spaces. The heterogeneous black identities that Williams and Cook concocted were not only products of the cultural marketplace, but deliberate personas that they performed on and off stage. In black-owned nightclubs in New York’s Tenderloin, interracial dining rooms in “Black Bohemia,” and white-dominated “lobster palaces” in Times Square, black performers, community leaders, and labor organizers all participated in creating a diverse field of race and class identities. Unlike most of the scholarship on black identity, studies of culture, class, and space also indicate the ways white Americans and white supremacy influenced the shape, sound, and meaning of early New Negro identities.