The Gist of It

THE Survey is seeking, month by month and year by year; to follow the subtle traces of race growth and interaction through the shifting outline of social organization and by the flickering light of individual achievement. There are times when these forces that work so slowly and so delicately seem suddenly to flower and we become aware that the curtain has lifted on a new act in the drama of part or all of us. Such, we believe, was the case with Ireland on the threshold of political emancipation, and the New Ireland spoke for itself in our issue of November 1921; with the New Russ which was to some degree interpreted in March 1923; and with the newly awakened Mexico, in May 1924. If The Survey reads the signs aright, such a dramatic flowering of a new racespirit is taking place close at home among American Negroes, and the stage of that new episode is Harlem.

FOR the concept of this issue, for painstaking collaboration in its preparation, for the full-length study of The New Negro (p. 631) and for many smaller pieces in the mosaic of this number, The Survey is indebted to Alain Locke, a graduate of Harvard, Oxford and Berlin, now professor of philosophy at Howard University, and himself a brilliant exemplar of that poise and insight which are happy omens for the Negro's future.

THE Making of Harlem is recounted by James Weldon Johnson (p. 635). This journalist, editor, poet, publicist is executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, editor of the Book of American Negro Poetry, and author of Fifty Years and After, and The Autobiography of an Ex- Colored Man.

CHARLES S. JOHNSON, who studies Black Workers and the City (p. 641) is director of publicity and research for the National Urban League and the editor of its organ, Opportunity ; a Journal of Negro Life. A social survey expert, he was assistant secretary of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations Rudolph Fisher, who sketches some Southern strains in the city (p. 644) is a young short story writer of distinctive achievement. A West Indian, a journalist and author, W. A. Domingo writes of The Tropics in New York (p. 648).

WINOLD REISS'S studies of Mexican types will be vividly remembered by readers of the Mexican Number.

THE versatile editor of The Crisis, author of Souls of Black Folk, Darkwater, The Gift of Black Folk, W. E. B. DuBois presents the Negro bringing gifts (p. 655). For the courtesy of permitting the republication of a number of poems, in addition to those here published for the first time, The Survey's thanks go to the authors and publishers mentioned. J. A. Rogers, who characterizes Jazz at Home (p. 665) is the author of From Superman to Man.

WHAT the Negro's creative temperament may mean to America (p. 668) is the theme of Albert C. Barnes, a connoisseur whose galleries at Merion, Pennsylvania, house a distinguished collection. Arthur A. Schomburg (The Negro Digs Up His Past, p. 670), is a member of the American Negro Academy.

TURNING from art expression to sociological fact and social problem" Melville J. Herskovits, an anthropologist engaged in an extended study of the problem of variability under racial crossing, opens the third section of the issue with a study of The Dilemma of Social Pattern (p. 676), to which Konrad Bercovici, with the intuitive vigor which characterized his Around the World in New York, offers an intriguing companion-piece in The Rhythm of Harlem.

WALTER F. WHITE, whose The Fire in the Flint was an outstanding novel of 1924, is assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement o f Colored People. He studies the personal effects of prejudice in Color Lines (p. 680), while Dean Kelly Miller of the Junior College of Howard University, a leader in the Negro Sanhedrin, discusses its social aspects (p. 680). A further sidelight on segregation is carried by Eunice Hinton's Breaking Through (p. 684). Miss Hinton, a recent Smith graduate, is a social worker and writer.

A vocational expert, social worker, leader in women's work, recently appointed assistant principal of Public School No. 89, in Harlem, Mrs. McDougald tells of the double task of Negro women (p. 689). The grim facts of exploitation which must be reckoned with in Harlem are tersely summarized by Winthrop D. Lane (p. 692) a contributing editor of The Survey.

GEORGE E. HAYNES, secretary of the Commission on Church and Race Relations of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, tells of the churches in Harlem (p. 695).

Return to Contents