May 4, 2018 08:34 PM
https://www.thenation.com/article/heaven...e-country/
EXCERPT: . . . In Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes saw “a strangely brilliant Black boy who had read everything, and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read.” [...] Thurman was a dark-skinned Westerner who felt like an outsider; born in Salt Lake City, he was one of the only black students in his school. [...] he attended the University of Southern California, where he was treated poorly by the white students and experienced intragroup prejudice from the black students, whom he perceived as pretentious.
After graduation, Thurman settled in Harlem in the 1920s and became a leading (and legendary) figure in the Harlem Renaissance—part of the “niggerati,” as Zora Neale Hurston famously called this influential group of intellectuals and artists. Working with A. Philip Randolph, Thurman became an editor at *The Messenger*, a political and literary journal [...] and in 1926 he co-founded [...] a bold and innovative publication called *Fire!!*, which featured the work of younger artists but was disliked by the black middle class because of its candid presentation of black life. In 1929, Thurman collaborated with the white playwright William Jourdan Rapp to write and produce *Harlem*, which ran for 93 performances and became “the first successful play written entirely or in part by a Negro to appear on Broadway.” Thurman believed that African Americans could overcome racial barriers, but he experienced countless incidents of racism during his short life. In a letter to Rapp, he wrote that he’d purchased center-aisle tickets to Harlem on five separate occasions, including opening night, and found himself seated “on the side in a little section where any other Negro who happened to buy an orchestra seat was also placed.”
Thurman experienced similar incidents everywhere he went. In Salt Lake City, he was troubled by the spread of what he perceived as Southern-style segregation after a taxi driver refused to take him home from the railroad station. In Los Angeles, he tried to make a train reservation, only to have it rejected. Perhaps for this reason, he never gave up on New York, which was “heaven compared to the rest of the country.” One might still have an unpleasant experience there, but at least, as Thurman remarked to Rapp, “people don’t stare at you or jump away as if you were a leper.”
It was in 1929, in his beloved New York, that Thurman achieved his greatest fame. In addition to *Harlem*, he published *The Blacker the Berry*, which was as celebrated at the time as it is underappreciated in our own, neither cited nor read as often as other novels of the Harlem Renaissance. [...] Some literary scholars believe that the popularity of *The Blacker the Berry* waned because its themes of color consciousness and intra-racial conflict clashed with the temper of the civil-rights era. But it may also have been the boldness of its social commentary...
MORE: https://www.thenation.com/article/heaven...e-country/
EXCERPT: . . . In Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes saw “a strangely brilliant Black boy who had read everything, and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read.” [...] Thurman was a dark-skinned Westerner who felt like an outsider; born in Salt Lake City, he was one of the only black students in his school. [...] he attended the University of Southern California, where he was treated poorly by the white students and experienced intragroup prejudice from the black students, whom he perceived as pretentious.
After graduation, Thurman settled in Harlem in the 1920s and became a leading (and legendary) figure in the Harlem Renaissance—part of the “niggerati,” as Zora Neale Hurston famously called this influential group of intellectuals and artists. Working with A. Philip Randolph, Thurman became an editor at *The Messenger*, a political and literary journal [...] and in 1926 he co-founded [...] a bold and innovative publication called *Fire!!*, which featured the work of younger artists but was disliked by the black middle class because of its candid presentation of black life. In 1929, Thurman collaborated with the white playwright William Jourdan Rapp to write and produce *Harlem*, which ran for 93 performances and became “the first successful play written entirely or in part by a Negro to appear on Broadway.” Thurman believed that African Americans could overcome racial barriers, but he experienced countless incidents of racism during his short life. In a letter to Rapp, he wrote that he’d purchased center-aisle tickets to Harlem on five separate occasions, including opening night, and found himself seated “on the side in a little section where any other Negro who happened to buy an orchestra seat was also placed.”
Thurman experienced similar incidents everywhere he went. In Salt Lake City, he was troubled by the spread of what he perceived as Southern-style segregation after a taxi driver refused to take him home from the railroad station. In Los Angeles, he tried to make a train reservation, only to have it rejected. Perhaps for this reason, he never gave up on New York, which was “heaven compared to the rest of the country.” One might still have an unpleasant experience there, but at least, as Thurman remarked to Rapp, “people don’t stare at you or jump away as if you were a leper.”
It was in 1929, in his beloved New York, that Thurman achieved his greatest fame. In addition to *Harlem*, he published *The Blacker the Berry*, which was as celebrated at the time as it is underappreciated in our own, neither cited nor read as often as other novels of the Harlem Renaissance. [...] Some literary scholars believe that the popularity of *The Blacker the Berry* waned because its themes of color consciousness and intra-racial conflict clashed with the temper of the civil-rights era. But it may also have been the boldness of its social commentary...
MORE: https://www.thenation.com/article/heaven...e-country/