Notable Deaths
*There were 15 recorded lynchings of African Americans in 1934.
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*Painter Malvin Gray Johnson died in New York City (October 4). The Harmon Foundation would mount a memorial retrospective of his work in 1935.
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*George Alexander McGuire, the founding bishop of the African Orthodox church, died in New York City (November 10).
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*Wallace Thurman, the author of the novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, died in New York City, New York (December 22).
Wallace Henry Thurman (b. August 16, 1902, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S. - d. December 22, 1934, New York, New York), was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.
Thurman was born in Salt Lake City to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. When Thurman was less than a month old, his father abandoned his wife and son. It was not until Wallace was 30 years old that he met his father. Between his mother's many marriages, Wallace and his mother lived in Salt Lake City with Emma Jackson, his maternal grandmother. Jackson ran a saloon from her home, selling alcohol without a license.
Thurman's early life was marked by loneliness, family instability and illness. He began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two-year absence from school, during which he returned to his grandmother Emma in Salt Lake City. From 1910 to 1914, Thurman lived in Chicago. Moving with his mother, he finished grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska. During this time, he suffered from persistent heart attacks. While living in Pasadena, California, in the winter of 1918, Thurman caught influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic. He recovered and returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school.
Thurman was a voracious reader. He enjoyed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and many others. He wrote his first novel at the age of 10. He attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920 as a pre-medical student. In 1922 he transferred to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, but left without earning a degree.
While in Los Angeles, he met and befriended the writer Arna Bontemps, and became a reporter and columnist for a black-owned newspaper. He started a magazine, Outlet, intended to be a West Coast equivalent to The Crisis, operated by the NAACP.
In 1925, Thurman moved to Harlem. During the next decade, he worked as a ghostwriter, a publisher, and editor, as well as writing novels, plays, and articles. In 1926, he became the editor of The Messenger, a socialist journal addressed to blacks. There he was the first to publish the adult-themed stories of Langston Hughes. Thurman left the journal in October 1926 to become the editor of World Tomorrow, which was owned by whites. The following month, he collaborated in founding the literary magazine Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Among its contributors were Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett.
He was able to publish only one issue of Fire!!. It challenged such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and African Americans who had been working for social equality and racial integration. Thurman criticized them for believing that black art should serve as propaganda for those ends. He said that the New Negro movement spent too much energy trying to show white Americans that blacks were respectable and not inferior.
Thurman and others of the "Niggerati" (the deliberately ironic name he used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to show the real lives of African Americans, both the good and the bad. Thurman believed that black artists should fully acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African American lives.
During this time, Thurman's flat in a rooming house, at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem, became the central meeting place of African-American literary avant-garde and visual artists. Thurman and Hurston mockingly called the room "Niggerati Manor." He had painted the walls red and black, which were the colors he used on the cover of Fire!! Nugent painted murals on the walls, some of which contained homoerotic content.
In 1928, Thurman was asked to edit a magazine called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life; its contributors included Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. He put out only two issues. Afterward, Thurman became a reader for a major New York publishing company, the first African American to work in such a position.
Thurman married Louise Thompson on August 22, 1928. The marriage lasted only six months. Thompson said that Wallace was a homosexual and refused to admit it. They had one child together.
Thurman died in 1934 at the age of 32 from tuberculosis, which many suspect was exacerbated by his long fight with alcoholism.
Thurman's dark skin color attracted comment, including negative reactions from both black and white Americans. He used such colorism in his writings, attacking the black community's preference for its lighter-skinned members.
Thurman wrote a play, Harlem, which debuted on Broadway in 1929 to mixed reviews. The same year his first novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) was published. The novel is now recognized as a groundbreaking work of fiction because of its focus on intra-racial prejudice and colorism within the black community, where lighter skin has historically been favored.
Three years later Thurman published Infants of the Spring (1932), a satire of the themes and the individuals of the Harlem Renaissance. He co-authored The Interne (1932), a final novel written with Abraham L. Furman, a white man.
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*Maggie Lena Walker, the first African American female bank president, died in Richmond, Virginia. Walker founded the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia. The bank began as an insurance society in which Walker became active at the time of her marriage in 1886. When she retired because of ill-health in 1933, the bank was strong enough to survive the Depression (December 15).
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*Hemsley Winfield, the first African American dancer to be involved in ballet, died (January 15).
*Hemsley Winfield, the first African American dancer to be involved in ballet, died (January 15).
Hemsley Winfield (April 20, 1907 – January 15, 1934) was an African-American dancer who created the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group.
He was born Osborne Hemsley Winfield to a middle-class, African-American family in Yonkers, New York. Winfield struggled in Yonkers as jobs available to African-Americans remained menial. Contrary to the natural inclination of the residents of Yonkers at that time, Winfield pursued a career in the Arts, developing a strong background as an actor, director, stage technician, dancer and eventually a choreographer. With combination of Winfield's middle-class ambition as well as the growing cultural movement of the African-Americans at that time, Winfield was able to achieve acclaim by the Art world. Winfield first won his fame in the leading role of Oscar Wilde's Salome, which he won acclaim to in 1929. Winfield came upon the role as Salome when the female lead of the company fell ill, causing Winfield to dress in drag as the show was staged at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, New York. Winfield, during this time, continued to attend concerts by the great trailblazers of modern dance, who later served as an influence and sponsor for his choreographic work.
As part of the “Little Theater movement” Winfield started and directed the Sekondi Players of Yonkers in 1925. Taking words from the Negro’s African heritage Sekondi is the name of a city that is located on the south west coast of Ghana. In November of 1927 Winfield and the Sekondi Players were performing a children’s play, The Princess and the Cat, written by his mother, Jeroline Hemsley Winfield. This inaugural opening of children’s plays was under his direction of The New Negro Art Theater. This is the first reference to the New Negro Art Theater group that Winfield directed during the rest of his acting and dance career. On March 6, 1931, at the Saunders Trade School the dance company gave its first performance. Winfield served as the head organizer and director of the company. The first name of the dance company was The Bronze Ballet Plastique, which lasted only one performance. Edna Guy was trained by Ruth St. Denis of the Denis-Shawn School of Dance, and performed as a guest in at least two of Winfield's concerts which soon grew to draw massive crowds. Edna Guy was never a member of the New Negro Art Theater Dance Group, the leading female dancers of the company were Ollie Burgoyne, Drusela Drew, and Midgie Lane. Winfield's choreographic work during this time fused uniquely German Expressionism with African-American themes and spirituals.
In 1933, the company appeared in the premier of Louis Gruenberg's opera The Emperor Jones at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Winfield took on the role of the Congo witch doctor in the piece. His first performance as the Witch Doctor was listed as January 7, 1933 and his last performance was March 18, 1933 Winfield also danced the role of the Witch Doctor in the performances in Philadelphia and Baltimore that year. Controversy around the work resulted from the Met's original request to blacken White dancers' faces rather than use Black dancers, but Tibbett threatened to quit, and the Met relented. His final performance of the 1933 season was reviewed as “a thrilling exhibition of savage dancing” and “his sinister and frantic caperings as the Witch Doctor made even the most sluggish, opera-infected blood run cold.”
On January 15, 1934, Hemsley Winfield died of pneumonia shortly before his 27th birthday, leaving with the final words, "We're building a foundation that will make people take black dance seriously". Hemsley Winfield was considered “the pioneer in Negro concert dancing."
Winfield choreographed and performed with his own company in the Metropolitan Opera's production of Louis Gruenberg's The Emperor Jones. This was a one-time exception to the rules - management did not list the dancers in the program. The next African American dancer would not appear with the company until 1951. Winfield's mother was a playwright, and he made his debut in one of her plays, Wade in the Water (1926). He became a dancer and a pioneer in African American concert dance, organizing the Negro Art Theater Dance Group. This group gave its first concert on April 29, 1931, and appeared in Hall Johnson's Run Little Chillun in 1933.
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Performing Arts
*Hurtig & Seamon's New Burlesque Theater in Harlem re-opened as a venue for black clientele under a new name, the Apollo Theater (January 16).
*Band leader Cab Calloway coined the term "jitterbug" which became associated with a widely popular dance of the era.
*Seventeen-year-old Ella Fitzgerald made her singing debut at Harlem's Apollo Theater, winning first prize in the venue's famous amateur contest (November 21).
The jitterbug is a kind of dance popularized in the United States in the early twentieth century and is associated with various types of swing dances such as the Lindy Hop, jive, and East Coast Swing.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) the word jitterbug is a combination of the words jitter and bug. The word jitter is of unknown origin, as is the word bug. However, the first quote containing the word jitterbug recorded by the OED is from 1934 from the Cab Calloway song titled "Jitter Bug". The lyrics for the 1934 song were printed in Song Hits Magazine on November 19, 1939 as: "They're four little jitter bugs. He has the jitters ev'ry morn, That's why jitter sauce was born."
Cab Calloway's 1934 recording of "Call of the Jitter Bug" (Jitterbug) and the film "Cab Calloway's Jitterbug Party" popularized use of the word "jitterbug" and created a strong association between Calloway and jitterbug. Lyrics to "Call of the Jitter Bug" clearly demonstrate the association between the word jitterbug and the consumption of alcohol:
*Legal Murder by Dennis Donague ran only 7 nights on Broadway, but was the first of a protest-play cycle. It was based on the Scottsboro case.
*William Levi Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony was performed at Carnegie Hall by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra (November 14).
Negro Folk Symphony No. 1 by William L. Dawson (1899-1990), an African American composer, was performed by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. Dawson was born in 1898 in Anniston, Alabama. He ran away to Tuskegee Institute, where Booker T. Washington accepted him as a student. There he learned to play many musical instruments. He attended Horner Institute of Fine Arts in Kansas City and the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. Dawson became director of music at Tuskegee Institute, remaining there until 1955.
*At a White House dinner hosted by President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Etta Moten Barnett sang songs from her roles in the movies Golddiggers of 1933 and Swing Low Sweet Chariot.
*Harlem's Apollo Theatre staged its first live show (January 26).
*Four Saints in Three Acts, the first African American performed opera on Broadway, opened (February 20).
Four Saints in Three Acts is an opera by the composer Virgil Thomson with a libretto by Gertrude Stein. Written in 1927-8, it contains about 20 saints, and is in at least four acts. It was ground breaking for form, content, and its all-black cast, with singers directed by Eva Jessye, a prominent black choral director, and supported by her choir.
Thomson suggested the topic, and the libretto as delivered can be read in Stein's collected works. The opera features two 16th-century Spanish saints—the former mercenary Ignatius of Loyola and the mystic Teresa of Avila — as well as their colleagues, real and imagined: St. Plan, St. Settlement, St. Plot, St. Chavez, etc. Thomson decided to divide St. Teresa's role between two singers, "St. Teresa I" and "St. Teresa II", and added the master and mistress of ceremonies (Compère and Commère—literally, the "godparents") to sing Stein's stage directions.
After its premiere February 7, 1934, at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, Four Saints in Three Acts opened on Broadway at the 44th Street Theatre on February 20, 1934.
*Arthur Mitchell, a dancer and choreographer who created a training school and the first African-American classical ballet company, Dance Theatre of Harlem, was born in Harlem, New York (March 27).
The first African American dancer in the country to become a member of a classical ballet company, the New York City Ballet, was Arthur Mitchell. Born in New York City, Mitchell studied at the city's High School for the Performing Arts and at the School of American Ballet. He founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem as a school of dance -- especially classical ballet -- for children, regardless of race. The first African American classical ballet company in the United States, it made its debut at the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York City. In 1988, the company became the first African American cultural group to tour the Soviet Union under the renewed cultural exchange program.
*William Levi Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony, the first symphony on black folk themes by an African American composer to be performed by a major orchestra, was performed at Carnegie Hall by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra (November 14).
Negro Folk Symphony No. 1 by William L. Dawson (1899-1990), an African American composer, was performed by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. Dawson was born in 1898 in Anniston, Alabama. He ran away to Tuskegee Institute, where Booker T. Washington accepted him as a student. There he learned to play many musical instruments and even began to compose when he was sixteen years old. He attended Horner Institute of Fine Arts in Kansas City and the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. Dawson became director of music at Tuskegee Institute, remaining there until 1955. Under his leadership, the Tuskegee Choir became internationally renowned.
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Politics
*Arthur W. Mitchell of Chicago became the first African American Democrat elected to the United States House of Representatives (November 7).
The popularity President Franklin Roosevelt gained for the Democratic Party among African Americans was manifested in 1934 when Arthur Mitchell, an African American Democrat was elected to Congress from Chicago. Mitchell replaced Oscar De Priest, an African American Republican who had been one of the most popular African Americans in the nation, by virtue of having been the only African American in Congress.
Mitchell, like his predecessor, was born in Alabama to former slaves. He received his education at Tuskegee Institute, where he was Booker T. Washington's office boy, and at Talladega College in Alabama. Mitchell taught school in rural Alabama and served as an assistant law clerk in Washington. When he moved to Chicago, he became involved in Republican ward politics, but joined the Democrats with the shifting African American party preference in the Depression years. In Congress, Mitchell professed to be a "moderate," thus drawing the ire of the African American press and the NAACP. He did, however, sponsor the long and costly suit that led to an end of segregation in Pullman railroad cars. Mitchell served four terms in Congress.
*The Louisiana Legislature repealed the poll tax. However, by 1936, only approximately 2,000 African Americans were registered to vote in Louisiana.
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Publications
*The magazine Challenge, edited by Dorothy West, debuted. It was designed to stimulate interest among African Americans in their African heritage.
A new African American magazine, Challenge, edited by Dorothy West, began publication. Writers such as James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes contributed articles. The main intent of the magazine was to revive the spirit of 1926, i.e., to revive an interest in African and Afro-America. William Attaway, Owen Dodson and Frank Yerby were also published in Challenge. The editor was under constant attack for not being politically radical and for being totally involved with esthetic matters. Three years later the magazine was reorganized and retitled New Challenge.
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*George W. Lee published Beale Street: Where the Blues Began.
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Statistics
*The percentage of the population on relief in major urban areas was 52% among African Americans and 13% among European Americans in northern cities. 52% among African Americans and 10% among European Americans in border-state cities; and 34% among African Americans and 11% among European Americans in southern cities.
In a study of 30 cities (10 Northern, 7 border and 13 Southern), the proportion of African American and European American families on relief was shown to be: North - African American, 52.2%, European American, 13.3%; border - 51.8%, 10.4% and South - 33.7%, 11.4%. The study found that in three cities - Washington, D. C.; Norfolk, Virginia; and Charlotte, North Carolina - between 70 and 80 % of all household receiving relief were African American.
*The average annual income for African American tenant and wage laborers in the South was $278; the average for European Americans was $452. The average annual income for African American cash renters and share tenants was about $300; European Americans $417.
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Visual Arts
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*Aaron Douglas completed his murals Aspects of Negro Life for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library.
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