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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 993
logically. But they were cheerful, rhythmical songs which expressed much
of the Negro’s interests, problems and attitudes. These songs are still
being created. They have achieved a great popularity in the white world:
sometimes they are ^^jazzed up” or ^^swung” and become popular songs;
sometimes they became popular in their original form (for example, most
of the blues); sometimes they are sung as semi-popular folk-songs; some-
times they are mistakenly grouped with the spirituals because they have a
few religious words. It was a white man, Stephen Foster, who was the
chief popuJarizer of the secular Negro folk-songs.
Until recently, the puritanical spirit has been a powerful influence on
entertainment and the arts in America. To a large degree white Americans
have considered it somewhat immoral to be an entertainer, and white
American men have considered it beneath their dignity and their capacity
to cultivate the arts. Nevertheless, practically all Americans have enjoyed
stage entertainment, and many Americans show “appreciation of the arts.”
Since whites stereotype the Negroes as immoral and somewhat bestial, they
have been willing to let Negroes entertain them. They could enjoy the
bawdy and frivolous songs, dances and jokes without “sinning” them-
selves.®^ White men have also been willing to let their women and their
Negroes cultivate the arts.*
Negroes, on their side, have developed entertainment and the arts
because they were relatively free of puritanical traditions and because there
they were offered relatively attractive economic opportunities. Also with-
out the means of paying for entertainment, they have learned how to
entertain themselves. They have been so successful at this that they have
taken over the whites’ false racial belief that Negroes are innately superior
in emotional expression. This has, however, helped to provide a tradition
of success which has spurred them on. Further, novels, poetry, songs, and
even painting and sculpture have proven excellent media for expressing
the Negro protest or rationalizing the Negro’s accommodation to caste.®®
Even the spirituals often have these themes, sometimes under the guise of
religious words to avoid censure from the whites (“Didn’t my Lord
deliver Daniel, and why not every man?” “Let My People Go”). The race
issue is often a source of inspiration, and it provides a limitless set of high
ideals. Whether all these influences make Negroes superior to whites in the
arts we are not in a position to judge. We are merely interested in explain-
ing why Negro achievements in this field are so much greater than in
other fields, and why they have been so popular among whites. There are
* At first, whites may have thought it a little presumptuous of Negroes to go into the arts,
but even under slavery, “Negro craftsmen were well-known as cabinet-makers, marquetry
setters, wood carvers and iron-smiths as the workmanship of many colonial mansions in
Charleston, New Orleans and other colonial centers of wealth and luxury will attest.” (Alain
Locke, Negro Art: Past and Present [1936], pp. i and 3.)
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