Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages between the Two World Wars

2 NEW NEGRO HUSBANDS

As African Americans discussed the place of sexuality and race work in interwar marriages, they also sought to define marital roles for husbands and wives. They used ideals of masculinity and femininity as touchstones for how married men and women ought to act. As we will see in the final two chapters, some of the Curwoods’ most searing debates were over the behaviors that each expected of the other; in this they were not unlike countless other American and African American couples of the time. For husbands, perhaps the most consistent marker of success was maintaining authority, financial and emotional. In many ways this emphasis was neither new nor unique to African Americans. Along with work, husbands’ dominance over wives and children represented men’s primary claim to full participation in mainstream American society. This belief had been further inscribed into American norms after the Civil War. As Republicans in Congress discussed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, they often mentioned the need to ensure that newly freed black men had the right to rule their households as an essential step toward civic participation. Northerners thought that, through this step, marriage would foster citizenship among men who had recently been slaves. And federal policymakers made male-­ headed households the basic unit of society. To this end, the FreedNewNegro Husbands 2  54 new negro husbands man’s Bureau encouraged contracts between freedmen and employers as part of a family wage system that enabled husbands and fathers to own the fruits of their wives’ and children’s labor and promoted a healthy work ethic in men who had a family to support.1 The idea of male financial leadership within households persisted through the later decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. What was new after World War I was the ideal of male New Negro political leadership, in which men “[took] charge of the racial household” and also of their individual households. New Negro men claimed freedom of mobility— ​ geographical, social, and political.2 This philosophy bled into attitudes about wives’ roles in marriages, the subject of the next chapter. At the same time that black women sought to develop their own mobility— ​an increased presence in the professions, politics, and the arts— ​nostalgia about women’s withdrawal from the paid labor force and public life actually gained power.3 After 1929, the Great Depression would make maintaining financial authority, which many saw as signifying emotional authority, much harder for all men. After a brief discussion of the masculine New Negro ideal, in this chapter I look at three places where New Negro men constructed husbands’ roles: the pages of the magazine the Messenger, the writings of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and the unpublished journals and correspondence of the writer Jean Toomer. These three sites contradicted one another at times, especially with respect to the appropriate role of breadwinning, but all of them named authority over the household as the hallmark of the New Negro husband ideal. The Ideal of the New Negro Man Although the descriptor “New Negro” applied to both men and women, the ideal New Negro was male, and New Negro men prioritized the rights and responsibilities of manhood as central to the New Negro project. Language emerged that privileged enlightened consumer consumption and the sexual and physical capabilities of the body as hallmarks of masculinity. Older notions of manhood as defined by success in the commercial world were ridiculed as bourgeois and stifling. Many of the key figures in the Harlem Renaissance, the 55  new negro husbands artistic expression of the New Negro, were jaded at the conformity and materialism they saw in respectable middle-­ class black families.4 Still, many were eager to experience upward mobility. For example , Alain Locke cast the artists and writers in his famous anthology The New Negro (1925) as producers and full participants in capitalism who were transforming their talents and experiences into financial independence, a prerequisite to early-­twentieth-­century masculinity. Locke explained that “the vital inner grip of prejudice has been broken ” and that the New Negro was throwing o∏ internalized racism and dependency on whites and emerging as a self-­ actualized man.5 In many ways, then, Locke’s New Negro ideal was a project in the “assertion of manliness.”6 A vivid representation of a gendered New Negro can be found in the portraits by the German immigrant and modernist artist Winold Reiss...