O’Fallon professor digs into Harlem Renaissance at Harvard

With a passion for print publications and a desire to delve more into early 20th century black press, Dr. Martha Patterson of O’Fallon is pinching herself at her good fortune to land a semester-long prestigious fellowship at Harvard University this fall

An English professor at McKendree University since 2004, Patterson will continue her study of Harlem Renaissance literature as a fellow of The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. She is researching the influence of African American newspapers on American culture.

“It has been a surreal journey,” she said during a phone interview.

However, instead of being at the Cambridge campus, she will tackle it virtually and write at home starting next month. The fellowship program will adapt to a virtual format this fall due to the COVID-19 pandemic and give Patterson remote access to Harvard’s library and other resources.

She and her husband, William Thomas Jr., have lived in O’Fallon for about 15 years. Patterson will be taking leave instead of a sabbatical.

During her career, she has written several books and spent a semester in Norway as a Fulbright Scholar. She specializes in American late 19th and early 20th century studies, women’s studies, African American literature and culture, and composition. Besides being on the English Department faculty, she is the coordinator of prestigious scholarships and fellowships at McKendree.

Her latest book project is “The Harlem Renaissance Weekly,” which examines the work of African American writers who published serials in popular black newspapers during the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s.

A Crucial Time in History

“My research process has uncovered African American writers and works lost or forgotten in the pages of what most considered an ephemeral medium — newspapers. The stories these newspaper writers tell were, most often, written quickly and under deadline with the objective of selling papers and making a living. At the same time, many of these writers were vitally engaged with pressing civil rights struggles and literary debates of their day,” she said.

“Some published books won prizes and became part of what we know now as the Harlem Renaissance literary canon. Others did not. But, regardless, given the limited opportunities for black writers in the period and the critical avenue for publication that newspapers provided, understanding the literary work in these papers will, I hope, provide an important contribution to African American studies and American literature more broadly,” she said.

During the Great Migration, the Harlem neighborhood of New York City became a popular destination, and from the social and artistic explosion that resulted, it became a cultural mecca, thriving in the 1920s. This golden age in African American culture encompassed literature, music, stage performance and art.

At the time, people referred to it as the “New Negro Movement,” which was a term popularized after “The New Negro,” a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. It signifies a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation and implies a more outspoken advocacy of dignity.

The Jim Crow era refers to the “separate but equal” racial segregation laws that were enforced in the Southern states from the late 19th century through 1965, and were meant to keep black people as second class citizens and remove any political and economic gains during the Reconstruction period.

Patterson will be the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow of the W.E.B Du Bois Research Institute in the Hutchins Center. The center supports research on the history and culture of people of African descent and provides a forum for collaboration and exchange of ideas. Fellows participate in activities including workshops and a weekly colloquium, sharing their work with Institute colleagues, Harvard faculty, graduate students and others.

“Being part of a Hutchins Fellowship community of scholars will offer me an invaluable intellectual environment and the time necessary to complete a project that highlights one of the most important vehicles for black protest, affirmation, and literary accomplishment — the immensely rich landscape of American black newspapers,” she said.

Black Newspapers Provide Historic Record

Patterson said it was important for her to bring out the sense of community in these publications for people “who often feel they don’t have a voice.”

“I hope to illuminate these people. The press is a crucial part of our democracy,” she said. “These documents are history.”

She is collaborating on a series of essays with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a renowned American literary critic, teacher, historian, filmmaker and public intellectual. He is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Her proposal has its roots in her scholarship on the New Woman. She wrote a paper on the Gibson Girl in American advertisement that eventually led to her book, “Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman 1895-1915 (University of Illinois Press, 2005)

“A statuesque, white icon of female beauty in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Gibson Girl defined white women not only as consumers and as guardians of so-called racial progress, but also as marginally transgressive figures who sought higher education, physical activity and dominance in the mating game,” she said. “I became fascinated with how women of color writing in the periodical press appropriated this popular icon of New Womanhood for their own reform efforts.”

Patterson said the American periodical press was burgeoning at that time, and she wanted to explore African American, Jewish and foreign-language newspapers. In 2008, she published the book, “The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader 1894-1930” with Rutgers University Press.

Latest Book in the Works

She hopes to finish her latest book this fall. It has been years in the making.

“Most of the book is completed but there remain some critical gaps,” she said.

She has published two chapters from this work: “Chocolate Baby, a Story of Ambition, Deception and Success: Refiguring the New Negro Woman in the Pittsburgh Courier,” and “Fascist Parody and Wish Fulfillment: George Schuyler’s Periodical Fiction of the 1930s.”

A chapter on Prohibition makes interesting points about debates within black serial fiction.

“They are fascinating and reflect tensions between desires for racial uplift, civil rights, and personal freedom. The Chicago Defender argued, for example, that the ‘black man needs a clear brain 365 days a year to cope with his white brother.’ Alcohol was likewise a drain on a black man’s finances that he could ill afford in a land where the ‘dollar was king.’

“For the Defender, women were at particular risk in this wet ‘Flapper Age’: ‘Modesty and kindred virtues have been thrown to the winds ... It is not an uncommon sight to see young girls smoking cigarets (sic), drinking, lounging publicly in the arms of ‘Daddy’ or dancing suggestively to a ‘jazz,’” she said.

“At the same time, however, satirist George Schuyler argued in Pittsburgh Courier, a view shared by many Americans, that Prohibition had only worsened crime: ‘We were told that the saloon and booze led young people astray down the broad path to Hell, but I don’t recall that there were so many young people strangling their grandmothers, shooting their mothers, knifing their fathers and terrorizing the countryside, as we find under the vaunted edict of Papa Volstead,’” she said.

A chapter will look at the Depression, the vice economy and the failure of uplift ideology. She discusses Schuyler’s satiric 1934 serialized novel “The Cat Man of Manhattan,” in which he expressed his growing disdain for the left and proponents of uplift ideology, while presenting the entanglements of the vice economy as almost impossible to escape.

She wants to include a reading of at least two more serialized novels that examine the contradictions of underworld economies, which offered money but compromised morality in times made more desperate by Jim Crow discrimination, she said.

A Fresh Discovery and New Collaboration

Patterson discovered certain black Americans deployed the New Negro trope routinely as a rallying cry while others eschewed it. The cultural diversity was critical to understanding the Renaissance, she said. During her research on the evolution, she discovered two previously unknown articles on the New Negro by W.E.B. DuBois.

After she heard Gates on NPR’s “Fresh Air” discuss his continued interest in the New Negro, she contacted him. He suggested they co-edit an anthology of the period essays she found, along with those he and Gene Jarrett had assembled.

“We are in the midst of that exciting project, which will be published by Princeton University Press,” she said.

The importance of black Harlem Renaissance serial fiction will be a more pointed discussion, she said. The literature fostered empathy — people had feelings that were shared by others.

“Most black newspapers published at least some literary work, either on the editorial page, within an arts section, or as part of a supplement, and most of the major Harlem Renaissance writers — including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, George Schuyler, Countee Cullen and Wallace Thurman — published at least some of literary work in black newspapers,” she said.

“This is very much relevant to what we see today. We see a continuation of the struggle for racial justice. It was frustrating because race-baiting articles were sensationalized in the yellow journalism of the 1920s in the white press,” she said, noting racial stereotypes were perpetuated after the movie “The Birth of a Nation” came out in 1915.

‘They were courageous’

“They were courageous because their history is so compelling and moving. These editors had vibrant political discussion in the black press. It was an outlet for these critical voices. They faced daily degradations. They were saying ‘we are citizens too,’” she said.

Mob violence, lynching, executions, fires — real threats that were horrifying, she noted. Patterson is hoping with more awareness will come further understanding.

“There is this dialogue now,” she said. “I think this is good timing. I think understanding what happened in history is really important, and these newspapers are the record of that.”

Patterson grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. In 1988. She received a master’s degree in literary studies from the University of Iowa in August 1990, and a Ph.D. in English also from Iowa in 1996.

This story was originally published August 11, 2020 at 10:27 AM.