methods of collection. AFLS founders discovered that their agenda intersected with that of the Hampton Folklore Society, so much so that Newell, acting as secretary of the AFLS, traveled to Hampton in May 1894 in order to personally address the group at one of its first meetings and to recruit its members for his organizations membership.18 Newell’s address, which was later published in the Southern Workman in July 1894, covered familiar rhetorical ground, including remarks on the importance of recording cultural traditions that were in the process of disappearing. Newell defined folklore as “the learning or knowledge peculiar to the Negro race. It is that mass of information which they brought with them from Africa, and which has subsequently been increased, remodeled, and Anglicized by their contact with the whites” (Waters 186). Calling folklore a “body of thought [that] belongs to the past,” that was vanishing under the march of African Americans’ educational progress, he asked the society members to consider what purpose was served by their turning their attention to “these out-grown notions and usages” (Waters 186).
Newell’s answers to that question diverged. On the one hand, he professed a humanistic vision, claiming membership in no race other than the human race and declaring that races existed “to be merged in the unity of races, as rivers flow to disappear in the ocean.”19 Yet he also suggested that folklore reveals that “each [race] has its distinctive customs, ideas, and manners.” Newell expressed ambivalence over the impending erasure of “racial memory” and suggested that only folklore (defined as race-knowledge) could preserve it. Thus, he declared, it was the responsibility of the individual to preserve the “memory of his race” in order to “to tell of the height to which they rose, the depth through which they have passed.” Finally, Newell also touched on the mobility and dynamism of African traditions, a subject that Black scholars like Du Bois and Locke would remark on to much greater effect in their own writings. Newell stated that Negro folktales were cosmopolitan by virtue of the ground they had traversed: “These tales are by no means solely the possession of Negroes; on the contrary, a good many are nearly cosmopolitan. Proceeding from some common center, they have traveled about the world, and that by several different routes, meeting in America by the way of Africa, by that of Europe, and it may be, also by that of Asia. So extraordinary a phenomenon in itself excites curiosity to a high degree” (Waters 187–89). Newell’s remarks underscore the ambivalence that many felt about the value of African American folklore, suggesting that it preserves the race’s “depths,” but that it also embodies a cultural dynamism that could edify the race. These remarks, mere drops of enlightenment in a sea of negative racial constructs, would take on new and previously unimagined manifestations in the hands of New Negro intellectuals who found inspiration and insight in the proponents of this emerging science.
Heartening as Newell’s support proved to be, Lee Baker’s descriptions of HFS members’ participation in the national meetings of the AFLS illustrate some of the complexities faced by African American scholars who were sometimes treated as native informants as often as they were considered ethnologists. For example, when a Hampton delegation, consisting of Robert Moton, F. D. Banks, William Daggs, and J. H. Wainwright, attended the December 1894 meeting in Washington, D.C., they were well received by well-known scholars of ethnological research like Boas, Frank Hamilton Cushing, J. Walter Fewkes, and Newell. Here, Moton challenged the deformation of African American music by minstrels and categorized “Negro Folk Songs” into secular and spiritual music. He and his colleagues then formed a quartet and performed samples of the music to illustrate Moton’s descriptions. The reaction of the audience while positive and enthusiastic, was telling. Newell and Thomas Wilson’s proposal that they record the performance on phonograph suggests the wall between scientist and informant had been breeched with the introduction of the phonographic equipment.20 Their enthusiasm for the equipment’s ability to reproduce sound with “exactness” would seem to suggest that they believed themselves to be witnessing a moment of cultural authenticity as opposed to a demonstration that might approximate the music in its indigenous setting (Baker, “Research” 64–65). Moton and colleagues were not alone in finding their academic personae stripped away. For example, on another occasion, while waiting for the arrival of a graphophone when preparing to travel to the AFLS’s annual meeting, Bacon realized it would not arrive in time for her group’s presentation. In its stead she proposed, as Baker puts it, “the real thing”:
a most delightful paper by Prof. D. W. Davis of Richmond, on ‘Echoes from a Plantation Party,’ which may be worth studying up on. Davis is a full blooded Negro, a teacher in Richmond and the authority of a number of dialect processes. He takes a real interest in the old customs of his own people, and has been at considerable pains to collect all he can …. I asked him if he would be willing to describe it [his paper] in New York at the annual meeting and he says that he can …. The songs are a great part of it. It is rather better than a phonographic reprint as he gives it.21
Davis’s “full blooded” Black body wedged him into a paradoxical corner, rendering him simultaneously more fit (because there was ocular proof of his cultural authenticity) and less fit (because he troubled the line between scientist and subject) to assume the ethnologist’s identity.
Despite the obvious difficulties of the Hampton folklorists’ attempts to establish their scientific credentials, obvious links can be made between their groundbreaking work and the more radical work and politics of the New Negro intellectuals. But first, significant changes had to be made in the social and historical landscape before American society could see an upsurge of interest in African American folklore in the twentieth century. Waters notes that folklore studies at Hampton slowed to a “standstill” after 1900 because Bacon moved to Japan, weakening the links with Shaler, Newell, and Boas, and more importantly because funding from philanthropists dried up. In that time between 1900 and 1920s, however, Black activists mounted “a major political and organizational effort to balance the influence of the Hampton idea [of African American inferiority].” This shift in thinking accompanied a change in anthropological studies, which did not focus on African American culture until well into the twentieth century.22
Only after the emergence of influential groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the twenties, Waters argues, “were the educational forces sufficiently balanced that room again appeared for the academic study of Negro folklore” (Waters 51–52). In the intervening years, moreover, Franz Boas became a major force in the shaping of the American school of anthropology, introducing new ideas about cultural relativism that would transform social constructions of race. He also trained or worked with a generation of students and scholars who would go on to make a deep impression on the American consciousness including, among many others, Melville Herskovits, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Zora Neale Hurston. Finally, the ethic of the Black intellectual shifts from this period in the late 1890s. Where, for example, Armstrong sought to train and morally elevate Black teachers, who would then go on to instill “character” in other Blacks at the elementary level, the next generation of Black intellectuals, who often repeated or represented the schoolteacher’s trajectory southward into Black rural communities, were less interested in the transference of character and far more interested in the translation of culture across geographic, historical, and social boundaries.23 They strove, in other words, to articulate a cohesive idea of Negro culture that would be recognized as a valid part of American national identity. These ideas did not come to fruition until a generation of folklorists and ethnologists, following in the footsteps of the HFS members, had been trained to regard folklore as the fullest expression of a people’s lived experiences, as opposed to evidence of a community’s quaintness or backwardness.24
Franz Boas and the Attack on Scientific Racism
Lee Baker has argued that in examining New Negro representations of Black culture, it is crucial to consider the geographic proximity of the movement to Columbia University at the precise moment that Franz Boas was spearheading new anthropological approaches to race and culture through his theories of racial equality and cultural relativity.25 New York’s density and compactness made it an ideal setting for fostering bohemian, intellectual communities that strived to overturn convention;
