Niggerati
Niggerati was the name used, with deliberate irony, by Wallace Thurman for the group of young African-American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.
[1] The group included Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and several of the people behind Thurman's journal FIRE!!
(which lasted for one issue in 1926), such as Richard Bruce Nugent (the associate editor of the journal), Jonathan Davis, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas.
[2] In his autobiographical novel, Infants of the Spring, Thurman referred to the Harlem literati, whose pretensions he often considered to be spurious and whose achievements he often regarded as second-rate, as the "Niggerati".
(In the novel, Sweetie May Carr, a character modelled on the real-life Hurston, christens the Harlem rooming house where Dr Parkes (modelled on the real life Alain Locke) establishes a salon of artists, "Niggerati Manor", just as Thurman's own rooming house was in real life.)
He himself, as many others of the literati did, would hold parties on Saturday nights, which Langston Hughes described in The Big Sea, observing that "at Wallace Thurman's you met the bohemians of both Harlem and the Village".
The story got out that the bathtubs in the house were always packed with sour mash, while gin flowed from all the water taps and the flush boxes were filled with needle beer.
It was said that the inmates of the house spent wild nights in tuft hunting and in the diversion of the cities of the plains and delirious days fleeing from pink elephants.
Hurston's biographer Valerie Boyd described it as "an inspired moniker that was simultaneously self-mocking and self-glorifying, and sure to shock the stuffy black bourgeoisie".
The quickest wit in what was a very witty group - which encompassed Helene Johnson, Countee Cullen, Augusta Savage, Dorothy West (then a teacher), Harold Jackman, and John P. Davis (a law student at the time), as well as hangers-on, friends, and acquaintances - Hurston dubbed herself the "Queen of the Niggerati".
Cullen, for example, found Carl Van Vechten's novel Nigger Heaven so offensive that he refused to talk to him for 14 years.
Whilst The New Negro was viewed by the Niggerati as subtle propaganda, appropriating their talents for racial propagandist purposes, FIRE!!
was intended to be "devoted to the younger Negro artists", and was edited, paid for, and published by the Niggerati themselves, with the intention both of being purely aesthetic and of causing outrage amongst black literary critics.
[6] This shaky financial foundation was symptomatic of the troubles that beset the journal, one of the most major of which was that none of the Niggerati had time to work on it.
[6] In a final irony, the printer gave the entire print run of the magazine to the Niggerati, in the hope that they would sell better in quantity, only for several hundred copies to be lost in a fire in the basement in which they were stored.
Hurston submitted two stories, one of which, her play Color Struck (a reworked version of what she had won the 1925 'Opportunity contest with), Thurman had considered printing under a pen name, in order to prevent the issue being too "Zoraish".
Like the other stories, Color Struck condemned the bourgeois attitude of envying whites, on biological and intellectual grounds, its subject being that of a woman who was so conscious of the colour of her skin that she missed out on the love of a good man.
[10] Silvera wrote the poems “Jungle Taste” and “Finality” featured in the Flame from the Dark Tower poetry section of FIRE!!
received was a brief announcement in the January 1927 issue, calling it "a beautiful piece of printing" that was "strikingly illustrated by Aaron Douglas" and concluding "We bespeak for it wide support.".
Nugent reported that once all initial submissions had been made, Thurman had asked the group for something that would get the journal banned in Boston, which led to the inclusion of Cordelia the Crude and Smoke, Lilies and Jade.
Whilst still choosing themes that critics considered inappropriate and shocking, the magazine was more politically oriented, was more commercially viable, and had a wider variety of articles, stories, advertisements, and other contents.
She doesn't give white people the impression that all Negroes are gin drinkers, cabaret hounds and of the half world.
Nugent distanced himself from the magazine, and wanted it made clear to Van Vechten that he had not been "in any way responsible for the perpetration of Harlem".
