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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - X. The Negro Community - 44. Non-Institutional Aspects of the Negro Community - 5. Negro Achievements
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Chapter 44. Non-institutional Aspects 989
Negroes have contributed such popular musical forms as ragtime, jazz,
the blues, swing and boogie-woogie.
Negroes have been greatly hampered In more serious music, but In the
past year Dean Dixon has emerged as a symphony orchestra conductor
under the sponsorship of the white music critic, Samuel Chotzinoff. Negroes
have achieved moderate success in composing serious music (for example,
William Grant Still) and much greater success in composing lighter music
(for example, Will Marion Cook, Duke Ellington, James Reese Europe,
W. C. Handy and Rosamund Johnson). In art, Negroes have had most
influence as subjects for and influences on white artists, but there have
been a few front-rank American Negro painters and sculptors (Richmond
Barthe, Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, Henry O. Tanner). In literature,
Negroes have a forte, and in all branches of literature Negroes have made
really outstanding achievements. The names of Countee Cullen, Langston
Hughes, Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, and Richard Wright (and in the
past Paul Lawrence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson) are well known
to the white reading public, and there are at least a score of other Negro
writers of equal merit but little known to the white reading public.
To understand why Negroes have made outstanding achievements in
these fields, it is necessary to go into their history. We find that there are
two distinct lines of development, which have begun to converge only in the
last twenty years. One is the buffoonery practiced for the entertainment of
whites j
the other is the great variety of expressive activity practiced for
the artists’ own enjoyment.
Under slavery, the chief form of entertainment in the large, isolated
plantation was the slave show. The Negro was the court jester, who pleased
his master by singing, dancing, telling jokes and generally ^‘acting up.”
James Weldon Johnson describes the earliest Negro entertainment:
Every plantation had its talented band that could crack Negro jokes, and sing and
dance to the accompaniment of the banjo and the bones, the bones being the actual
ribs of a sheep or some other small animal, cut the proper length, scraped clean and
bleached in the sun. When the wealthy plantation owner wished to entertain his
guests, he needed only to call his troupe of black minstrels.®^
Even during slavery, but especially after it, there developed the ^^nigger
minstrel show” which had the same features as the entertainment furnished
by slaves. Practically all these shows which were successful had white actors
who put burnt cork on their faces and spoke with a Negro accent 5
only
Bert Williams among the Negroes achieved success as a minstrel come-
dian.®® These shows, which still exist in a modified form,®*^ appealed to the
crudest tastes and accentuated all the Negro stereotypes. Their heyday
lasted from 1875 to 1900, and during this period Negro musicians, song and
play writers, and dancers stooped low to appeal to the popular taste.®® Only
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