“The Art Solution To The Negro Problem:” Reading James Weldon Johnson on The Rise of African American Cultural Workerism

This chapter must start with the acknowledgement of a key debt. The argument presented here derives largely from that articulated by the midcentury African American radical Harold Cruse in his classic study The Crisis Of The Negro Intellectual (1966), a major text in the literatures of the New Left, Black Arts, and Black Power movements. Readers of The Crisis Of The Negro Intellectual may be forgiven for having lost sight of this argument: almost nobody remembers it, obscured as it is by the memory of Cruse’s lyrical denunciations of the depredations of the white Left and Communist Party. But the jeremiad that remains so vividly imprinted in the minds of Cruse’s readers was, in fact, constructed in service of a subtler contention: that it was within the African American communities of the urban North in the post-Civil War period that the first viable articulation of “cultural workerism”––conceived of as an orientation towards the advancement of a collective emancipatory politics through the control of aesthetic labor by aesthetic laborers––took root. The seeds of African American “cultural workerism” began to be scattered in the pre-Great Migration period. They came to fruition as millions of African Americans left the South and its increasingly violent Jim Crow regimes. Artists and intellectuals committed to “cultural workerism” came to dominate the political life of Harlem, Chicago, and other “Negro metropolises” of the early twentieth century. In many respects, this is a familiar story, well-covered in the historiographical literature. There is no shortage of texts on African American art and culture in the age of vaudeville, nor any paucity of studies of the New Negro and Harlem Renaissance moments.

The question that poses itself rather urgently, then––the question that serves as the fulcrum of this chapter––is as follows: does anything change in any substantive way if we return Cruse’s argument and foreground African American “cultural workerism” in our story of the post-Civil War and Progressive Eras?

Our answer is: yes. When we stop treating the creative production of this period as the story of African American “writers,” “intellectuals,” “artists,” and “politicians”––when we begin to see that virtually every significant figure in African American public life engaged in some form of “cultural work” and that virtually every significant discussion among African Americans in battle against Jim Crow and white supremacy devoted considerable attention not just to “cultural work” but also to “cultural workerism”––we gain a far more accurate historical picture and are much better able to identify hidden continuities linking putatively discrete moments of African American history.

The best illustration of this tendency may be found by focusing on the writing of a single thinker: the writer, musician, and politician James Weldon Johnson.