IN Vandemark’s Folly and other of his novels, Herbert Quick interpreted the settlement of the Mississippi basin. He gave us its valor and epic qualities. But in that series of remarkable biographical sketches which were cut short by his death, he lamented the cultural wastage of American pioneering. He laid a wreath on the unknown graves of the artists, poets, singers, the talented of youth, who were submerged in the westward trek of peoples on the new continent as, in the course of two hundred and fifty years, they hewed their way through the forests and at last came out on the open prairie. In the northward movement of the Negroes in the last ten years, we have another folk migration which in human significance can be compared only with this pushing back of the Western frontier in the first half of the last century or with the waves of immigration which have swept in from overseas in the last half. Indeed, though numerically far smaller than either of these, this folk movement is unique. For this time we have a people singing as they come—breaking through to cultural expression and economic freedom together.

In our generation the children and grandchildren of the settlers of the Middle West have uprooted themselves as their sires did, but to-day their faces are turned cityward. In this new urban shift, the Negro is sharing, but so swiftly and with such a peculiar quickening as he pours for the first time into this new terrain of American economic and community life, that for him it is more than a migration, it is a rebirth. The full significance of this belated sharing in the American tradition of pioneering by black folk from the South should not escape us; nor the rare fortune that they bring with them cultural talents long buried and only half revealed in the cotton lands from which they come.

In a way, two great modes of impulse have been at work in the settlement of the United States, other than the material one of bettering one’s lot.

In no small part, ours has been the history of the under-dog—of common people rising against kings and overlords, of Pilgrims and Puritans and Catholics working loose from religious intolerance, of rebels seeking a new freedom, of adventurers breaking away from the fixity of things. This tradition we share with England and Western Europe; the impulse became a dominant force in New England and was at flood throughout the tidewater colonies when in the Revolution they threw off the Georges. We may trace its re-emergence in a new form even in the part which the South took in the Civil War. This may be put in terms of its idealists, as resistance to imposed authority by men who sought the governance of their own lives, however much they might deny it to their slaves.

We have another tradition—or, at least, another mode of the same impulse. Not alone rebellion against what has been, but opportunity for what may be, shaped its course. Set off by three thousand miles of sea, settled on a continent which had been kept in reserve ten thousand years, the spirit of our people has been molded by the frontiers we cleared. It drew and grew from the open spaces, from wildernesses giving way to settlements, from the building processes of countryside and commonwealth and nation. Its like is not known in the older countries of the world, still in the process of shaking loose from old tyrannies. We may abuse this heritage, but it is ours, a broader and more dynamic, more creative conception of liberty. Spiritually we are rebels. But we are also pioneers.

The Civil War may be interpreted in its final outcome, as the clash between these two great streams of impulse in American life and the triumph of this newer native embodiment of the thing that has stirred and molded the American soul.

For, while the record of Western settlement in our dealings with the Indians is a chapter not without black pages which may be compared with our slave trade, nonetheless it was the free play of free men on free land that built up the Middle West; and it was the rapidly mounting weight of men and means of that hinterland, flung into the conflict by common faith in an order which meant opportunity for all, which tipped the scales as between North and South, preserved the Union and freed the slaves. Lincoln was its man; not its leader merely, but framed of the bone and marrow of its plain people; his spirit, the embodiment of frontiersmen and settlers.

And what has this to do with the northward migration of the Negro—or its counterpart, his partnership in agricultural reconstruction in the South? It has more to do than that children and grandchildren of the emancipated slaves enter the gates of the cities with the children and grandchildren of the old frontier. Or even that in this new generation they are fellow adventurers as never before in the inveterate quest of our people for new horizons—on the land and in industry. These things are in themselves of tremendous import. But my point is, that in the pioneering of this new epoch, they are getting into stride with that of the old. By way of the typical American experience, they become for the first time a part of its living tradition.

The great folkway which is America need no longer be a thing abstract, apart from them. The Negro boy, who with his satchel steps off the train in Pittsburgh or Chicago, Detroit or New York, to make his way in what Robert Woods called the city wilderness, may draw at the same springs of inspiration as the boy next him from Wisconsin or Kansas, or that other who, still westward bent, throws in his lot in the valley of some irrigation project in the mountain states. The same can be said of the Corn Club boys and girls of Georgia or South Carolina, who are building up farm homes with new tools and husbandry in regions which have been held in the mesh of a worn out economy. The Hampton and Tuskegee graduates, the farm demonstrators and co-operators who break that mesh, its tough warp of the one crop and its binding woof of the credit system, and help weave in its stead the texture of a new and more self-reliant rural life, are settlers in a very real sense. And so are the men and women who, in a great city district like Harlem, against the pressure of overcrowding and high rents, against the drag of black exploiters and white, and the hazards of sickness and precariousness of livelihood, odds which all of us face in our great city machines, and which bear down with redoubled force upon youth and childhood—these men and these women, who strand by strand fashion the fabric of the good life in a city neighborhood, are of the breed of the old pioneers. They are builders.

Do not mistake me, the land they come to is not all milk and honey. Nor was the way of the frontiersman, or the frontier woman, or the frontier child. Nor were these all cast in heroic or congenial, or even tolerable, molds. But the new order in the Southern countryside, the new order in the Northern city, offers an economic foothold, as did the old clearing. It calls on the spirit of team play, as did the old settlement with its road building and its barn raisings. There is a smack of opportunity and freedom in the air. The very process as bound up in those changes in individual fortune, is instinct with that group consciousness of common adventure, is fresh with the tang of growth and expansion, which the wagon trains carried with them to the West, and which became the theme of our pioneering.

The vocational schools for Negroes in the South have encouraged, among other things, the vigorous spirit of individual initiative which we like to associate with American character. The recoil among Negroes against political suppression and terrorism which has animated much of their leadership of protest in the last thirty years has been kin to our old rebel tradition. But here in this new pioneering, we have the nascent beginnings of that other great mode of social impulse. And we catch its gleam in a newer, more positive and creative leadership of self-expression.



Those of us who trace our blazed ways to the Atlantic Seaboard, to Pilgrim Rock or James River blockhouse or Dutch trading post, can perhaps not realize what it means to a people to have their vista of the past shut in by whitewashed wall, mud chimney and whipping ring of a slave street. No wonder in his new racial consciousness, the Negro digs up his past and searches out in Africa the genesis of a proud tradition. My thought is that the new opportunities he is broaching in American life and labor throw open another vista of the past, one of the New World, to which he is not alien. This background may not be his to-day, I grant; but by some compensating law of relativity, it will come to meet him as he presses forward.

Seldom in the history of the world have a people moved North. Our history is of Westward expansion. So coursed the great racial waves that swept into Europe from the East. We have had the experiment of peoples moving Southward—Northmen and Frank and the rest, flowering out in a new and milder climate. Here we are witnessing a reversal of that process. What its outcome will be cannot be forecast. But it is something which, points of compass aside, is kin to the whole trend of American experience. It is search for the new and democratic chance. It is pioneering.

It is, also, an adventure in self-expression—not alone in political and economic terms, but in things of the word and spirit. We have witnessed in the United States the duress in which various immigrant groups have been held until their cause was taken up by rare people, as Jane Addams and Jacob Riis, endowed not alone with understanding, but with the art of interpretation. The Negro has had no language barrier; but he has been hemmed in by barbed wire entanglements of prejudice and fixed conceptions. He is learning ways of his own to surmount them. He employs winged gifts that shoot across them. He brings song, music, dance, poetry, story-telling; rhythms and color and drama, ardent feeling and fleet thought. Not alone is his a Northward migration within the confines of America, challenging new communities with his presence. Not alone is it a shift from soil to city. Not alone a breaking-away from the old inhibitions of a fixed and often adverse social environment. He is readdressing himself to America on a cultural plane; and in arenas where the old inhibitions do not hold. A verse that pierces the heart meets no race barriers. A song that lifts the spirit with its lilt wings free in the democracy of art.

It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of the Negro’s employment of these cultural gifts. A new generation of both races respond to them. They afford white America a new approach to what we have overlong dourly called the Race Problem. They make for swifter understanding than a multitude of heavy treatises. I speak from experience with our special number of the Survey Graphic [Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro: March, 1925] which Dr. Locke edited and which was the forerunner of this book. Harlem presents to the eye the look of any tenement and apartment district of New York so far as its physical make-up is concerned. Occasionally some writer dipped beneath the surface: Negro authors and periodicals had borne witness to it; yet so far as the newspapers were concerned, it had not registered, except as an area of real estate speculation and clashes, and the police news and racial friction of a city quarter. Kipling gave us the High Road to India in Kim. Sinclair Lewis set down America in Main Street. But that contrast is not the whole story of East and West; here was something as alluring as it was portentous happening in our midst; but unobserved and swathed in the commonplace. How to unfold it? Our number was cut from city cloth, it brought out the seams of social problems which underlie it, but also, and in all its sheen, the cultural pattern that gave it texture. It proved a magic carpet which swung the reader not across the minarets and bazaars of some ancient Arabia, but the wells and shrines of a people’s renaissance. The pageant of it swept past in pastel and story, poem and epic prose, and the response was instant. In this volume, what was then done fragmentarily is now done in a way which will endure.

For the Negro to thus make himself, and his, articulate to those about him will count for much; but it is the lesser good of two. He is finding himself anew in his own eyes. His self-expression is giving body to his special racial genius; he gains a new sense of its integrity and distinction. I recall a discussion at the Harlem Forum of the work of Winold Reiss which enriches this volume. There were Negroes who protested against his series of racial types; they clung to the prevailing ideals of beauty and these heads were not beautiful to them. As others were quick to point out, from the picture books they were brought up on as children to the newspaper supplements that reached their homes the Sunday before, they had been encompassed by Nordic conventions. Their imagery had been so long thwarted and warped that they could not grasp the rare service rendered by this Bavarian artist, who came with fresh eyes, who is the first in America to break with sentimentality and caricature and delineate racial types with fidelity, and who is encouraging a group of young Negroes to follow through to mastery the path he has broken.

Mr. Reiss’s pastels were shown that month in the Harlem Public Library, and at the instigation of Mrs. McDougald, hundreds of Negro school children passed before them. There they saw plain people depicted, such as they knew on the street, and, also, poets, philosophers, teachers and leaders, who are the spearheads of a racial revival; forerunners, whose work might be passed on to them, men and women treated with a dignity and beauty and potency altogether new. Images they could carry with them through their lives. Their pioneers!

But, though this latest experience of the American Negro is properly a promisefully racial revival, more fundamentally even it is an induction into the heritage of the national tradition, a baptism of the American spirit that slavery cheated him out of, a maturing experience that Reconstruction delayed. Now that materially and spiritually the Negro pioneers, and by his own initiative, shares the common experience of all the others of America’s composite stock, his venturing Americanism stakes indisputable claims in the benefits and resources of our democracy.