African American History in New Mexico: Portraits from Five Hundred Years

11: Anita Scott Coleman: New Mexico’s “Unfinished Masterpiece”

144 11 Anita Scott Coleman New Mexico’s “Unfinished Masterpiece” bruce a. glasrud • • • Beginning with the First World War and lasting to the end of the 1930s, an African American cultural reawakening occurred on the East Coast that was centered in New York City. Referred to as the Harlem Renaissance, the movement emphasized the political, social, and cultural emergence of a “New Negro.” The major participants/ contributors were black Americans residing in the Harlem district of New York City; ironically, most contributors were not native New Yorkers but migrators from the South, the Midwest, and especially the West who were drawn to New York City by this colorful movement.1 Kansas-born artist Aaron Douglas, for example, matriculated at the University of Nebraska before heading for Harlem. Prominent Harlem Renaissance author and resident, the Missouri-born Langston Hughes published a novel set in rural Kansas, Not Without Laughter (1930).2 Not, however, physically present with those distinguished writers was New Mexico–reared author Anita Scott Coleman.3 Other westerners participated in the renaissance variously. Utahborn Wallace Thurman enrolled at the University of Southern California (USC) and briefly edited a literary magazine, the Outlet, to encourage a West Coast renaissance. While at USC Thurman met Arna Bontemps, who resided in Los Angeles at that time and whose Depression-era novel God Sends Sunday (1931) was set in that city. By 1925, however, Thurman abandoned his efforts to establish a western Anita Scott Coleman 145 “New Negro” movement and joined Bontemps and Langston Hughes in Harlem. Hughes, Bontemps, and other writers periodically visited Los Angeles’s “ever enlarging artistic colony,” where Fay Jackson’s Flash magazine (1928–1929) and the publication Ink Slingers continued the quest for a successful black literary journal in the West. The latter magazine was published by a Los Angeles black literary and community group of that name. Anita Scott Coleman published in Flash, and her activities continually overlapped this flurry of artistic activity. On the other hand, like Coleman, novelist and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux left South Dakota for Los Angeles. There, too, Noble Johnson and his Nebraska-born brother George produced films based in Watts until the company folded in 1921. Among the writers who provided scenarios for the Los Angeles film industry during the twenties was Anita Scott Coleman, working for Pathé.4 Despite their significant contributions, black women writers such as Anita Scott Coleman remain neglected; also neglected is the relationship of other artists and writers of the period to the West that produced Anita Scott Coleman. In El Paso, for example, Bernice Love Wiggins, “the female [Paul Laurence] Dunbar,” published Tuneful Tales, a book of compelling poetry, but she left for the West Coast, disappeared from the historical record, and has been long forgotten. Dallas, Houston, and San Diego supported numerous cultural and musical entertainments sponsored by their African American communities . African American writers in Texas during this period were well positioned with the 1936 publication of J. Mason Brewer’s collection of their works, Heralding Dawn. Missouri-born Wiley College, Texas, professor Melvin B. Tolson spent his summers in Harlem, writing and studying.5 As the examples above note, not all notable African American artists of the period joined the Harlem Renaissance participants in New York City. Among those who remained geographically distanced from the East Coast “New Negro” movement was short story writer and poet Anita Scott Coleman. For various reasons Coleman remained in New Mexico and California, where she participated in this cultural revival through her writings. Although Coleman published awardwinning short stories, essays, and poems in national magazines such as Half-Century Magazine, the Crisis, the Messenger, the Competitor , and Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life as well as in regional ones 146 bruce a. glasrud such as Flash and Southwest Review during the 1920s and 1930s, she frequently was excluded from discussions about the Harlem Renaissance .6 She also is not located in New Mexico histories, in histories of the West, or in earlier accounts of the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro Movement. Anita Scott Coleman’s heritage was varied and unique. Her life began in Mexico. She was born in Guaymas, Sonora, in 1890. Coleman’s mother, Mary Ann, met her father, William Scott, near Fort Elliott in Texas, where he served as a black soldier (one of the Buffalo Soldiers). He retired and they subsequently moved to Mexico; following Anita’s birth the family returned...