Color

Countee Cullen. Color. New York, George Doran, 1925.

“They have developed new ideas of their own place in the category of races and have evolved new conceptions of their power and destiny. These ideas have quickened their race consciousness and they are making new demands on themselves, on their leaders and on the white people in whose midst they live. These new demands apply to politics, domestic and international, to education and culture, to commerce and industry.”
Herbert Harrison. When Africa Awakes, the inside story of the stirring of the New Negro (1920)

“the double obligation of being both Negro and American is not so unified as we are often led to believe.”
Countee Cullen. Introduction, Caroling Dusk (1927)

The New Negro. At first Countee Cullen (1903-1946) seems an odd choice as central to the movement. He was shy, appeared diffident and was too friendly perhaps to the white race. He was sometimes accused of being too conservative, and sometimes accused others (Wallace Thurman) of being too radical. Both Thurman and Langston Hughes attacked Cullen in the white press, respectively The New Republic and The Nation. Despite graduating from mostly white schools (DeWitt Clinton High School and Harvard University), in the fullness of time, Cullen’s work presented most fully and carefully, the difficult positions of Black Americans. He was courageous in his difference, and despite his own protestations (“I am going to be a POET and not NEGRO POET”) most of his poetry is fully race conscious. He wrote a literary column for the black magazine Opportunity in which he was involved in the literary and cultural debates of the black community. In April of 1928 he married Yolande, the daughter of W. E. B. DuBois, in the most heavily reported and attended social event of the Harlem Renaissance (the marriage did not last more than two years).

Along with Edna Millay, Countee Cullen was for a time, the most famous of the new poets of the decade, awarded as a young man a plethora of prizes, his work and promise was acclaimed from all sides (he published three volumes of poems and one anthology during the decade). His first book was published when he was a Senior at NYU. Unlike most of his colleagues Cullen was a traditionalist and wrote in forms, including ballads and sonnets Shakespearean and Petrarchan. Cullen also wrote a novel and two children’s books, but after 1930 he devoted most of his energy to his job teaching High School French.

“For me to be the social equal of Mr.. Loeb does not mean that I should care to eat dinner at his table; I am too fond of home cooking for that. Nor does it mean that I would want to marry any of his relative or friends; there are too many beautiful girls of my own race for that, if only the white boys would cease worrying them with their attentions.” Countee Cullen. Letter to the Editor, New York University News, 1926