Taking the Blues Away: The Second Edition of The New Negro

The early publication history of Alain Locke’s The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925)—universally regarded as the key text for what later became known as the Harlem Renaissance—is well-known in its general outlines. After a dinner at the Civic Club in Greenwich Village on 21 March 1924, organized by Charles S. Johnson (editor of Opportunity magazine) with Locke as master of ceremonies, Paul Kellogg (editor of Survey Graphic magazine) suggested a special issue to showcase the new work he had just heard about. Locke was enlisted as guest editor. Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro appeared on 1 March 1925. A considerably expanded version followed in book form in December that year as The New Negro, with a second printing in March 1927 completing the textual trilogy. Here, I suggest that the seemingly innocuous phrase “second printing” in fact conceals some significant fault lines in Black cultural politics that shed light on the equivocal position of jazz and the blues in the 1920s. In particular, I attend to the underacknowledged importance of the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias. Walter White, assistant national secretary of the NAACP, first glimpsed the potential for expanding the Survey Graphic special issue into a book. In January 1925—well before the actual appearance of Harlem—White telephoned Lewis Baer, chief editor at Albert and Charles Boni Publishers, and Albert Boni then called Kellogg to inquire whether it would be possible to publish the contents of that special issue in book form. Boni soon decided that he wanted what Kellogg characterized to Locke in a 20 March 1925 letter as “a much more formidable volume,” twice the size of the Survey Graphic issue, its scope the cultural ......................................................................................................