The Art Solution To The Negro Problem: Reading James Weldon Johnson on

The Rise of African American Cultural Workerism

This chapter must start with the acknowledgement of a key debt. The
argument presented here derives largely from that articulated by the
midcentury African American radical Harold Cruse in his classic study The
Crisis Of The Negro Intellectual (1966), a major text in the literatures of the
New Left, Black Arts, and Black Power movements. Readers of The Crisis Of
The Negro Intellectual may be forgiven for having lost sight of this argument:
almost nobody remembers it, obscured as it is by the memory of Cruses
lyrical denunciations of the depredations of the white Left and Communist
Party. But the jeremiad that remains so vividly imprinted in the minds of
Cruses readers was, in fact, constructed in service of a subtler contention:
that it was within the African American communities of the urban North in
the post-Civil War period that the first viable articulation of cultural
workerismconceived of as an orientation towards the advancement of a
collective emancipatory politics through the control of aesthetic labor by
aesthetic laborerstook root. The seeds of African American cultural
workerism began to be scattered in the pre-Great Migration period. They
came to fruition as millions of African Americans left the South and its
increasingly violent Jim Crow regimes. Artists and intellectuals committed to
cultural workerism came to dominate the political life of Harlem, Chicago,
and other Negro metropolises of the early twentieth century. In many
respects, this is a familiar story, well-covered in the historiographical
literature. There is no shortage of texts on African American art and culture
in the age of vaudeville, nor any paucity of studies of the New Negro and
Harlem Renaissance moments.
The question that poses itself rather urgently, thenthe question that
serves as the fulcrum of this chapteris as follows: does anything change in
any substantive way if we return Cruses argument and foreground African
American cultural workerism in our story of the post-Civil War and
Progressive Eras?
Our answer is: yes. When we stop treating the creative production of
this period as the story of African American writers, intellectuals,
artists, and politicianswhen we begin to see that virtually every
significant figure in African American public life engaged in some form of
cultural work and that virtually every significant discussion among African
Americans in battle against Jim Crow and white supremacy devoted
considerable attention not just to cultural work but also to cultural
workerismwe gain a far more accurate historical picture and are much
better able to identify hidden continuities linking putatively discrete
moments of African American history.

The best illustration of this tendency may be found by focusing on the

writing of a single thinker: the writer, musician, and politician James Weldon
Johnson.