The Outsiders Book Vocabulary

We apprehend from journalist Bilal Qureshi and a bulk of artists, historians, and writers from Germany and the United States – Darryl Pinckney, David Dibosa, E. Ethelbert Miller, Jeffrey Stewart, Michon Boston, Stuart Braun, Claudia von der Heyde, Uli Hanisch, and Claudia Perren.

Bilal Qureshi is a radio announcer and ability biographer whose appointment has appeared on NPR and in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Film Quarterly.

Transcript

Bilal Qureshi: My name is Bilal Qureshi and I’m a radio announcer based in Washington DC. I generally awning race, character and American culture. But this is a Berlin Story.

[BERLIN STORIES PODCAST OPENING CREDITS: “… THIS IS BERLIN STORIES.”] 

Eight years ago, I was alleged for a journalism acquaintance to alive in Berlin. I was athrill to leave my anteroom in the newsroom for a accomplished year and my appointment was to advance a new radio appearance about all-embracing activity in Berlin. 

[BERLIN STORIES PODCAST OPENING CREDITS: “WELCOME TO THE SUMMER EPISODE OF BERLIN STORIES, A MAGAZINE OF CULTURE AND IDEAS IN BERLIN.”] 

We alleged the appearance Berlin Stories, afterwards the acclaimed book by Christopher Isherwood set in the burghal in the 1920s. Personally, I had never lived in a European capital, dabbling in parks and museums, interviewing artists. With my decayed bike and newsboy hats, I was the postcard expat cliché.

[STREET MUSIC AND A COFFEE SHOP SCENE: “… ICH HÄTTE GERN EINEN KAFFEE BITTE, SCHWARZ, DANKE.“] 

Parked with my laptop at coffee shops in Berlin. But the adventure of expats, of travelers, of bodies who go and draw their afflatus from added places has consistently absorbed me. What makes you go about else? What appulse does it accept on the appointment that you make? But on a claimed note, aback it came to the association we were accoutrement — American expats — the artists and writers cartoon their afflatus from one of Europe’s best aesthetic cities — I generally noticed that it was not a actual assorted group. The American expats active in Berlin rarely looked like me, were not abnormally assorted or an abnormally assorted absorption of what America looks like. One of the aboriginal books I anytime apprehend about an American expat of color, an African-American artisan active in Berlin, was a atypical by the biographer Darryl Pinckney. It was alleged Atramentous Deutschland, Atramentous Germany.

Darryl Pinckney: Nothing in Atramentous Deutschland is true. The alone affair I allotment with the narrator is his activity for Berlin. He is meant to be one of those bodies who blossoms — or tries to — in this affectionate of chargeless soil.

Bilal Qureshi: The adventure of a anomalous atramentous artisan award his abode in Berlin reminded me about how African-American artists accept generally fatigued their afflatus and abandon from above American shores. James Baldwin, Nina Simone, and Josephine Baker to name a few. All artists who larboard the limitations of America for the amore of added suns.

Darryl Pinckney: Richard Wright generally said that there may not be abandon in France, but there’s no Jim Crow in Paris.

David Dibosa: As anon as I cantankerous a border, I am atramentous in a altered way.

Bilal Qureshi: The British art historian David Dibosa says while chase is a political fact, it is additionally a amusing and cerebral architecture and the way chase accouterment beyond borders can be the antecedent of aesthetic freedom, abnormally for atramentous artists. 

David Dibosa: One absolutely feels it. It’s not aloof article one has to anticipate about. One feels it. It comes from the airport, or wherever and you alpha to move about a altered city, one is looked at in a altered in a way. Bodies appear abutting or don’t in a altered way. Bodies abode one in a altered away. So the means in which these formations about-face and change according to ambience are absolutely important. They’re attenuate and yet they’re apparent in every move that we make.

Bilal Qureshi: Talking to atramentous artists about chase and biking fabricated me apprehend aloof how greatly my own time in Berlin years ago helped me appear to agreement with myself. Berlin gave me breath room. Afterwards I came home to DC from Berlin, I assuredly came out. I absitively to accompany my own autograph career. Now as a analyzer and as a writer, I am consistently fatigued to belief and travelogues by writers of blush and of the transformative ability of their movement. Aftermost year, I activate the best book I’ve anytime apprehend on the subject, and a book that absolutely hit abutting to home.

[DC STREET NOISE]

It’s an amazing adventure of a activity and a mind. A adventure that moves from the absolute neighborhoods of DC to the boulevards of Berlin. The book is alleged The New Negro, and it’s the adventures of an African-American bookish who already lived in DC alleged Alain Locke. I accustomed the name at because I airing by a abode actual generally in my adjacency that has a applique to mark breadth Alain Locke already lived.

[DC STREET MUSIC AND CHATTER]

[STAND-UP] … and this is what it says. Alain Locke, 1886 to 1954, a arch 20th aeon bookish and the nation’s aboriginal atramentous Rhodes Scholar, was a axial amount in the New Negro, sometimes alleged the Harlem Renaissance. Locke edited the New Negro, 1925, an album of poems, book and art that helped ascertain this analytical cultural movement.          

Once aloft a time, afore the condos and the adamant gentrification here, atramentous intellectuals and artists from DC helped affect a advocate movement in the 1920s. Afresh alleged the Negro Renaissance, and now accepted as the Harlem Renaissance.

E. Ethelbert Miller: A lot of bodies airing aback and alternating bottomward these streets and they don’t apperceive who lived and who died actuality and that’s sad.

Bilal Qureshi: E. Ethelbert Miller is a Washingtonian and a self-professed arcane activist.

He has helped the burghal put actual markers breadth Duke Ellington already played, breadth Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes wrote, and breadth one man in accurate helped accompany the Harlem Renaissance to life. 

[HARLEM JAZZ MUSIC]

To be honest, I didn’t apperceive who Alain Locke was or what absolutely he had done. His activity had become addition bashful applique from DC’s fast crumbling history. That is, until aftermost year and a battleground new book about his life.

Jeffrey Stewart: This abstraction of the ‘New Negro’ is addition who can bend in the blaze and not be burned. 

Bilal Qureshi: Jeffrey Stewart is the columnist of The New Negro, the Activity of Alain Locke. He’s a Professor of African-American History at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Jeffrey Stewart’s adventures of Alain Locke won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and in 2019, the National Book Award. In a renewed age of white supremacy and the backroom of hate, The New Negro is the adventure of why atramentous lives amount and added specifically, why atramentous art matters. My own adventure to trace the footsteps and the bequest of Alain Locke begins with his biographer, Jeffrey Stewart.

Jeffrey Stewart: Bodies realized, abnormally afterwards the admiral of Barack Obama and, you know, what we’ve gone through, that backroom is not enough. I anticipate that was article that Locke at sometimes was criticized for. That he wasn’t added of an activist, added of a beef actuality like Dubois, but I anticipate Locke was adage able-bodied accept that’s fine. But there’s article abroad that you accept to do, there’s about a affectionate of decolonization of the apperception that has to go on in Western ability and additionally alike in bodies of blush to about bright out these notions: that we are not beautiful, that we are inept, that we are not as accomplished as added bodies because afterwards all, all of that credo was put calm to ascendancy us.

Bilal Qureshi: Afore the Harlem Renaissance, atramentous Americans had never had the ability to acquaint their story. They had been depicted in accepted ability through and by the white boring as apes, caricatures, and minstrels. Dr. Alain Locke was accepting none of that. In the 1920s, both DC and New York were active with aesthetic aplomb and the music of atramentous balladry and prose, applesauce and blues, fur coats and brownstones and aloof so abundant swag. Balladry like The Atramentous Finger by Angeline Grimke. Apprehend actuality by New Orleans-based artisan Stephanie DeWolfe.

Stephanie DeWolfe: I accept aloof apparent a best admirable thingSlim and still adjoin a gold, gold skyA beeline atramentous cypress, sensitive, exquisiteA atramentous feel pointing upwardsWhy admirable still feel are you black?And why are you pointing upwards?

Bilal Qureshi: Pointing upwards and assiduously was the axial bulletin of The New Negro. The biographer Darryl Pinckney tells me that the key to compassionate the Harlem Renaissance lies in the after-effects of the Aboriginal Apple War.

Darryl Pinckney: It was an amazing aeon and it was absolutely a acknowledgment to the end of the war. The end of the Aboriginal Apple War, like the war itself, was a common accident in that so abundant had changed.

Bilal Qureshi: As the war concluded in 1919, atramentous soldiers had fought on the frontlines in Europe and accomplished the possibilities of a freer life. They were advancing home to America adapted by their experiences, as the biographer E. Ethelbert Miller explains.

E. Ethelbert Miller: Actuality were bodies who ability accept been in the rural areas of Mississippi or some abode in the South, now on the apple stage. In cities like Paris, they’re acceptable burghal people, they’re acceptable new people, they’re become absolutely the ‘Modern Man.’ Because if you go afore the aboriginal 1900s, you’re about into bodies who had acquainted the lash, you’re ambidextrous with reconstruction, so actuality in 1900 you activate to see this new idea.

Bilal Qureshi: As Professor Jeffrey Stewart explains, at the alpha of the 20th century, the Abundant Migration was underway.

Jeffrey Stewart: The abstraction of abrogation the South for the North in the aboriginal allotment of the 20th aeon occurs, Locke says, not because of amusing or bread-and-butter forces, but because of a cerebral change and a eyes of oneself as possibly actuality a new affectionate of actuality in a new place.

Bilal Qureshi: Alain Locke was already addition who banned to break in his place. A ablaze apprentice from Philadelphia, he advised aesthetics at Harvard and Oxford as the aboriginal African-American Rhodes scholar. By the time he accustomed in DC to advise at Howard University, he was chiefly self-confident.

Jeffrey Stewart: He basic you to apperceive he was altered and additionally superior.

Bilal Qureshi: Again, biographer Jeffrey Stewart.

Jeffrey Stewart: Locke was apparently the best awful Europeanized, or Europhilic let’s say, of the African-American intellectuals of the aboriginal 20th century.

Bilal Qureshi: Defying all conventions for breadth and what a atramentous man could be in the aboriginal 1900s, Alain Locke, 4’11” and beneath than a 100 pounds, would set captain for the Old Apple whenever he had the chance. He was afterward in the footsteps of his abreast and sometimes rival, W.E.B. Dubois, luxuriating in the apple of European universities and fashions.

Jeffrey Stewart: Both of them had so absolutely adopted the German representation of ‘Herr Professor’ in their dress and manner. So if you attending at these photographs of Dubois and Locke, I beggarly they’re consistently dressed in an acutely academic style, walking with a cane, consistently accepting a three-piece clothing on. That’s a little bit odd in a abode like Washington, alike a abode that’s adequately academic like Washington.

Bilal Qureshi: Regardless of his catholic tastes, Alain Locke was still an American Negro, physically bedfast by allegory alike if his apperception and acuteness banned to settle. Michon Boston is a Washingtonian and a cultural historian. I’ve appear to accommodated her alfresco Alain Locke’s above home.

Michon Boston: Breadth we’re continuing would accept been allotment of absolute Washington, so I’ve said in my tours, it was a burghal aural a city. There were places atramentous bodies could go and there were places white bodies could go. Now here’s the caveat, white bodies could go to the atramentous establishments and clubs, but atramentous bodies couldn’t go to the white establishments and clubs.

Jeffrey Stewart: So one duke there’s a active African-American accomplished community. On the added duke it’s in a colonial accord with the blow of Washington DC in the breadth he best cares about, which is the breadth of art, literature, music and culture. So he has to cross a apple that consistently has barriers for him.

Bilal Qureshi: As Jeffrey Stewart explains, his movement was bedfast to this burghal aural a city.

Jeffrey Stewart: But he additionally is walking through. He’s actual small, actual awful dressed, about like a little jewel walking bottomward the artery in a burghal that on the one hand, has a lot of average chic atramentous people, but additionally has a lot of poor people. Recent migrants from the South who charge think, who is this guy, right?

Bilal Qureshi: His airs was a artefact of his bookish prowess, but it was additionally a aegis mechanism. Alain Locke carefully lived at an bend from his community. He was a gay man in a time and a abode that character was about impossible.

Jeffrey Stewart: He alleged himself at times paralyzingly discreet, but the acumen was all-important to survive in an acutely homophobic apple and in a atramentous common apple that knew he was gay, but was activity to absolutely acknowledge abnormally if he did annihilation that drew their absorption about to him actuality gay.

Bilal Qureshi: Jeffrey Stewart says Washington’s atramentous association in accurate was congenital on the foundations of admirable marriages and ancestors life.

Jeffrey Stewart: The animal astriction is consistently there for him, and what I feel it produces in him is a akin of breach because he will never absolutely accept the abutment of this community.

Bilal Qureshi: In 1922, we’re talking about somebody, it’s absolute America, ability issues, pre-air travel. Alike the concrete movement of somebody baby and atramentous to Europe on a Grand Bout and I assumption aback I anticipate of the Grand Tour, I don’t anticipate of a gay atramentous man on that bout so he is above in the faculty that he ups and leaves and goes places?

Jeffrey Stewart: Exactly. Able-bodied it’s absorbing you say that because I’ve been talking about this in my class. One of the few benefits, let’s say, that African-Americans get out of Emancipation and the Civilian War is mobility. You don’t get the appropriate to vote, you don’t get the appropriate absolutely to acquire a lot of money but you do get the appropriate to move, so that appropriate of advancement becomes about a allegory for atramentous life. That’s why so abundant of the dejection songs are about trains and benumbed in trains and walking and riding, the abnormality blues, right? So that advancement is article cherished, it’s not article taken for granted. So for Locke afresh the advancement to go to Europe and consistently so is a right, it’s array of like his Declaration of Independence. He knows it’s not set up for him, but at the aforementioned time he’ll booty advantage of it.

[BERLIN STREET MUSIC]

Bilal Qureshi: In 1922, Alain Locke’s mother died. She was his sole family, and he was devastated. He aggregate himself and set captain for the burghal he admired most: Berlin, Germany. So I followed Alain Locke aback to Berlin. Berlin, the adventurous basic of Café Society, academics, and amaranthine reinvention.

Stuart Braun: As I started to ability out to that era, there were so abounding absorbing bodies who no one had anytime heard of.

Bilal Qureshi: I’ve appear to a café in Berlin to accommodated the announcer and biographer Stuart Braun. He’s accounting a book alleged the Burghal of Exiles that traces the ancestors of outsiders who accept alleged Berlin home.

Stuart Braun: We’re sitting on Paul-Lincke-Ufer on the aqueduct actuality in Kreuzberg, and Paul Lincke was a artisan aback in the backward 19th century. He wrote a acclaimed song alleged the Berliner Luft, and it was all about the attraction of Berlin’s air, of advance not actuality oxygen, but actuality this affectionate of abstract aspect of Berlin that already you breathe it, it draws bodies in. Already you get a detect of the ‘Berliner Luft’ [LAUGHS] you, it’s intoxicating.

Bilal Qureshi: Germany in the 1920s was at the centermost of an exhilarant experiment. Shattered and destroyed by the accident of the Aboriginal Apple War, the country arising from the ashes of 1919 was a brittle and hopeful democracy, a association authentic by experimentation.

Jeffrey Stewart: Berlin in the Weimar Aeon is a abode with amazing promise.

Claudia von der Heyde: It was the spirit of the Enlightenment, really. That’s what they approved to put into the new architecture for this new democracy, this new republic.

Bilal Qureshi: Claudia von der Heyde is a adviser with the Weimar Klassik Foundation in the burghal of Weimar. In the capital alfresco the Weimar National Theater, acceptance are skateboarding about the bronze of Goethe and Schiller, the writers who ascertain German Romanticism.

[STUDENTS CHATTING AND LAUGHING]

It’s the cairn alfresco the abode breadth politicians aggregate 100 years ago to abstract the architecture of a new republic.

Claudia von der Heyde: They had to canyon this cairn every day aback they went to work. And it’s affectionate of accustomed that they approved to absorb some of the spirit of this aeon into their appointment and into the architecture and they chose the name Weimar Architecture for it.

Bilal Qureshi: As America entered its Applesauce Age — the roaring 20s as it were — Berlin became ‘Babylon Berlin,’ the anguish automated and cultural affection of the Weimar years, the Golden 20s. And this was the amazing moment in time into which Alain Locke accustomed from Washington.

Uli Hanisch: Brainstorm yourself in a surrounding breadth aggregate about you affectionate of changes on a circadian base in a way you’ve never apparent afore and cipher was able to acquaint you about it before, because it didn’t abide before.

Bilal Qureshi: Uli Hanisch is one of the artists abaft the award-winning German television alternation Babylon Berlin. He’s a assembly artisan and has led the aggregation that anxiously recreates Weimar Berlin for one of the best big-ticket TV shows anytime fabricated in Germany.

Uli Hanisch: Applesauce music acutely has been invented absolutely about else, but if you accept to jazz, and afresh you accept the aforementioned motifs, you accept the speed, you accept the improvisation, the addition to about-face aggregate upside down, try article else, absolutely in the schemes of what was accident here.

Bilal Qureshi: Afresh Uli Hanisch and the biographer Stuart Braun on the spirit of 1920s Berlin.

Stuart Braun: It went from 400,000 bodies and it went up to 4 actor by 1930 and that was fueled by this massive arrival of people.

Uli Hanisch: It was like growing, you know, like a virus.

Stuart Braun: It was so vibrant, there were so abounding gigs, you know, there was a lot of money around.

Uli Hanisch: Bodies go to appointment actual early, would appear home, re-dress, go out, ball all night, go aback to work, accommodated people, go from one bar to the other, afresh afresh to a architecture or whatever or an exhibition and afresh there’s addition ball achievement and addition affair and everything, all the time, article is up. I anticipate bodies charge accept been absolutely crazy.

Stuart Braun: And you had all these transgressive clubs and this accomplished underground worlds, appropriate actuality in Kreuzberg you had Auden and Isherwood and those guys activity to these bedfast breadth they you know, they acquainted they could be themselves.

Jeffrey Stewart: Locke hardly has that acquaintance in the United States.         

Bilal Qureshi: Alain Locke’s biographer Jeffrey Stewart is talking accurately about gay sex and the activity that was denied to him at home in America. In the summer of 1922, Locke affable into Berlin’s music scene, its galleries, the modernist amphitheater and the literature. He lingered in cafés, wrote criticism and advantaged in the pleasures of the flesh, as well, as Jeffrey Stewart explains:

Jeffrey Stewart: Berlin is beginning in a way in which Washington never is. Washington is consistently activity to chase the approved and true. Berlin admitting adds that added aspect that your character is actuality uplifted, that you’re actuality fueled by the possibilities of a new civilization, a new ability advancing into actuality that is racially tolerant, that is sexually tolerant, and that about is an artful world.

Bilal Qureshi: At the beginning of defining that artful apple was the actualization of Weimar Germany’s allegorical Bauhaus Academy for art and design. 

Claudia Perren: My name is Claudia Perren, and we’re affair at the Bauhaus in Dessau. So this is absolutely the aboriginal academy building, congenital in 1925. One hundred years ago, Germany was, you know, aboriginal democracy, aboriginal time a woman could vote and was additionally a aboriginal time a woman could absolutely study. So in that time a academy was set up that absolutely basic to accord to a absolutely new society, to absolutely go forward, to accept consistently a accelerating way and not attractive back.

Bilal Qureshi: The appellation addition and avant-garde is a appellation that we now use about this aeon but I’m apprehensive in this academy and aback the masters were actuality and the administration, what accent would they accept been using? Would they accept been words like modern, progressive, I mean, radical, like these are the things we now use to call what they were doing, but I’m analytical what the accent and the cant of their appearance was here?

Claudia Perren: Yeah that’s absolutely a acceptable question. They acclimated a lot ‘new.’ It was about new architecture and new academy and alike new bodies and new time. So aggregate bare to be new.

Bilal Qureshi: So the appellation was new. New was absolutely the word?

Claudia Perren: New was absolutely the word. Yeah.

Bilal Qureshi: Amid the apple-pie curve and minimalist white walls of the new Bauhaus Architecture in Weimar, my adviser Claudia von der Heyde tells me the Bauhaus eyes for architecture was not based on an artful sensibility, but it was about a abstract question.

So we’re attractive out actuality at this abstraction of the New Man. Acquaint me a little about this?

Claudia von der Heyde: Able-bodied the abstraction of the New Man has been about aback about 1900 because bodies acquainted that activity had afflicted so abundant and that the challenges of avant-garde activity were to be met, and they were allurement themselves if they didn’t charge New Man to absolutely do that and achieve that and there were altered approaches, so accept a little arcade of altered ideas…

Bilal Qureshi: In the 1920s Germany was in the bosom of an bookish awakening. It was absolutely that spirit that the Nazis approved to drove aback they shut bottomward the Bauhaus and austere the Weimar Republic to the ground. But in those agitative aboriginal years, Alain Locke had a front-row bench to the authoritative of a renaissance. He accomplished that for there to be a ‘New Man,’ there had to be the afterlife of the ‘Old.’ For there to be a ‘New Negro,’ there had to be the end of the ‘Old Negro.’ Jeffrey Stewart tells me that Locke’s belletrist home to Washington from Germany acknowledge that while he was adequate his exile, he knew he had to appear aback to the United States.

Jeffrey Stewart: I’m over there, it’s great, I’m in the summer, I’m active this affairs –and yes, it is accurate he has a job actuality and he has to acknowledgment for that reason. But additionally the appointment to be done is here, and there’s article he gets out of accomplishing that appointment that artlessly actuality in banishment in Europe would never absolutely satisfy.

Bilal Qureshi: So Alain Locke alternate to Washington in the abatement of 1922.

Michon Boston: Able-bodied one affair about traveling slow, it gives you a lot of time to anticipate and process, and it additionally gives you a faculty of ambit of breadth you’re advancing from and breadth you’re going.

Bilal Qureshi: Afresh cultural historian Michon Boston.

Michon Boston: Accepting no aeroplane travel, at atomic across for approved cartage at the time, it gave Alain Locke a lot of time to action what he basic to do and what he basic to accomplish.

Bilal Qureshi: And what he basic to achieve was badly ambitious. He basic to anatomy a atramentous aesthetic movement in the spirit of what he’d apparent in Germany — freed from the tentacles of the white boring — undeniable in its abandon and self-confidence.

Michon Boston: One affair that has consistently aggressive me is that he did anatomy the “Negro Arts Movement,” as it was alleged actuality in Washington DC

Bilal Qureshi: Locke catholic aback and alternating amid Harlem and DC, accumulating salons and absorbing new writers with his charms. Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, amid others.

E. Ethelbert Miller: So you’ve got Jean Toomer here, you got Alain Locke here, you got Georgia Douglas Johnson here, you got Langston actuality at that time, so that’s aback you activate to say, this is a New Negro Movement.

Bilal Qureshi: The biographer E. Ethelbert Miller says Locke was an editor on a mission.

E. Ethelbert Miller: Aback you’re an editor and seeing the big account and authoritative comparisons and maybe interacting with people’s work. That’s a altered thing, you know, you ability say, okay, Bilal, address added of this, affirmation that, what are you aggravating to say here, accord me more. No altered than your Duke Ellington cogent somebody, stop here, let’s comedy that again, appropriate actuality again, because I charge you to get that added complete out of your horn.

Bilal Qureshi: Locke became the curator, the convener, and the allegorical force of the Harlem Renaissance. The aftereffect were pieces like this composition by Georgia Douglas Johnson, apprehend actuality by the accompanist Priska Neely.

Priska Neelly: Ho! my brother,Pass me not by so scornfully                    I’m accomplishing this active of actuality black,                      Perhaps I buck your own life-pack,And heavy, abundant is the load                      That aeroembolism my anatomy to the road.But I accept kept a smile for fate,I neither cry, nor cringe, nor hate,Intrepidly, I strive to bearThis handicap. The planets wearThe Maker’s imprint, and with mineI beat into their adroit line;I ask — alone for destiny,Mine, not thine.

Bilal Qureshi: What began for Locke as a appropriate affair of Survey Graphic Magazine grew into a abounding book, edited and composed by Professor Alain Locke. It was alleged The New Negro.

Jeffrey Stewart: Accepting your own calendar and accept you can apprehend it is key to The New Negro.

Bilal Qureshi: As Jeffrey Stewart explains, Locke basic atramentous artists to accept in their accommodation to be added than what America had told them they could and should be.

Jeffrey Stewart: Because I accept that those bodies accept the accommodation to become dreamers and creators and brainstorm a new and bigger America out of that ability than exists already today.

Bilal Qureshi: Jeffrey Stewart tells me that Germany remained a actual access on Locke’s appointment in The New Negro. He commissioned artisan Winold Reiss to allegorize The New Negro. The artisan created amazing portraits of atramentous men and women, axis abroad from the caricatures that they had been apparent as and transforming these atramentous men and women into stylish, avant-garde icons of beauty.

Jeffrey Stewart: Aback you attending at those pictures, there’s a activity that comes through of the ‘New Negro’ — self-confidence, pride, assertiveness, abridgement of acquiescence to white supremacy, all of those kinds of attitudes he was able to abduction and express.

Bilal Qureshi: And consistently the spirit of Weimar Germany was on Locke’s mind, the across bearing and the adventure for the ‘New Man.’

Jeffrey Stewart: Locke is aggravating to brainstorm Harlem as Berlin aback he writes some of his essays about Harlem. He wants it to be a abode breadth there is animal tolerance, breadth there is aesthetic experimentation.

Bilal Qureshi: Sadly, the Abundant Depression wiped out the actual affairs that fabricated the Harlem Renaissance possible. On the added ancillary of the Atlantic, the Nazis destroyed Weimar Germany already and for all. Locke knew he could never return. Apple War II and the Cold War followed. Alain Locke died in 1954, but his bulletin of atramentous adorableness lived on in the civilian rights movement and in the Atramentous Arts Movements of the 1960s and 1970. The appellation ‘negro’ may be out of fashion, but the spirit of the movement lives on.

Jeffrey Stewart: This affair of adorableness I anticipate remains. Alike today, it’s a attempt activity on. We’re still absolutely aggravating to get out from beneath about colonial notions of who is important, and what is beautiful.

Bilal Qureshi: Jeffrey Stewart says Alain Locke would accept admired what’s accident in 2019. To see his eyes buck bake-apple at the calibration it does now.

Jeffrey Stewart: I anticipate we’re absolutely active in Alain Locke’s moment.

Bilal Qureshi: In the cinema of filmmakers like Barry Jenkins and Ava DuVernay, in the writings of Ta Nahesi Coates and Kendrick Lamar. Jeffrey Stewart says one assignment to be fatigued from Locke’s activity is not to feel bedfast by society’s limitations. Alain Locke didn’t break in his lane or in his own country. He never approved the abundance of safe spaces. As a gay atramentous man in 1920s America, there were actual few places that were safe for him. Instead, he proudly created his abode in added people’s spaces.

Jeffrey Stewart: Locke had his sanctuaries, but at the end of the day he acquainted he could go out and appoint bodies who were altered from him and arrive them to his calendar and his affairs rather than activity that if I appoint with these people, somehow I’ll lose my way and myself.

Bilal Qureshi: Claudia Perren, who you heard from earlier, is the administrator of the Bauhaus foundation in Dessau. She says that as Germany celebrates the 100th ceremony of the Bauhaus, that spirit of addition and new account – that the aforementioned catechism is actuality asked again. What is the way to booty things forward?

Claudia Perren: You accept to see the altitude of our time and to acquisition answers. And what helps with the Bauhaus, I think, is that you try to animate yourself to go forward, you apperceive to not try to attending aback so abundant and anticipate ‘oh you apperceive the angelic times, that was admirable in the 20s’ but say no, it’s a altered time, we accept to go forward, new conditions, and it’s absolutely up to us what we do with it.

Bilal Qureshi: In 1925, Alain Locke committed The New Negro to ‘the adolescent generation.’ In his own coda to his adventures of Alain Locke, Jeffrey Stewart dedicates his book to a new bearing and he writes this: ‘A ‘New Negro’ is in all of us — not aloof African-Americans — but every American who embraces this accommodation for reinvention through African forms, because those forms are in them too, waiting, like the blow of us, to be appear to soar.’

Jeffrey Stewart: … and I anticipate that affectionate of aplomb is absolutely the aspect of The New Negro as I would like to see it accomplished today, that aplomb that we accept a abundant tradition, we accept a abundant art, we accept a abundant history. We don’t absolutely charge to be intimidated. I anticipate there’s a akin of browbeating that’s generally allotment of the appointment of racism, and I anticipate allotment of The New Negro is ‘I will not be intimidated’.

[BERLIN STREET MUSIC]

Bilal Qureshi: Jeffrey Stewart is the Pulitzer-Prize acceptable columnist of the book The New Negro — The Activity of Alain Locke. From Washington DC, the burghal breadth ‘New Negro Renaissance’ was built-in and breadth Alain Locke already lived, I’m Bilal Qureshi.

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