Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth- Century African American Literature

CONCLUSION: Race, History, and Editorial Ethics

[ 183 ] CONCLUSION Race, History, and Editorial Ethics In the December 1945 issue of Negro Digest, Zora Neale Hurston published a bitingly satirical article entitled “Crazy for This Democracy,” in which she wonders if she has misunderstood Franklin D. Roosevelt referring to the “arse-and-all”of American democracy“when I thought he said plain arsenal?” (I Love Myself 165–66). With the war over and without the editorial constraints imposed by Lippincott, Hurston included in this piece much of the social criticism she had allowed to be deleted or softened in Dust Tracks on a Road three years earlier. Within the African American community, the end of the war served as a bitter reminder of continuing racial injustice domestically, even as black soldiers returned from service overseas, often in segregated units. In 1941, a black private was lynched in Fort Benning, and other episodes of racial violence erupted across the country’s military bases, in a pattern that would continue over the next four years (Potter 68–70).1 In keeping with this tension between domestic discrimination and the international presence of hundreds of thousands of black soldiers, Hurston identifies Jim Crow as “common in all colonial Africa, Asia and the Netherlands East Indies,” calling for “complete repeal of All Jim Crow Laws in the United States once and for all, and right now. For the benefit of this nation and as a precedent to the world” (I Love Myself 167, 168). Like most of Hurston’s work from this period, “Crazy for This Democracy” was not reprinted during her lifetime and fell into obscurity until its inclusion in the 1979 Feminist Press collection I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive, edited by Alice Walker. There the essay appears in a volume that promotes itself in the frontispiece as“an essential part of a recent reevaluation of Hurston, an attempt to grant her her rightful place among the major American writers of the 1930s and 1940s.” Following “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (first published in World Tomorrow in 1928), the collection’s second section features “Crazy for This Democracy,” two other wartime essays—“The ‘Pet’ Negro System” (American Mercury, 1943) and “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience” (Negro Digest, 1944)—and “What White Publishers Won’t Print” (Negro Digest, 1950). For the three selections from the 1940s, the headnote offers the year of original publication, but no other textual or contextual history.2 The publication of I Love Myself responds indirectly to the earlier muting of Hurston’s political commentary in Dust Tracks, granting Hurston’s more ephemeral periodical publications the stability of a book. The changed cultural circumstances surrounding this collected edition also recall the political tensions Hurston had confronted with her autobiography.Valerie Boyd notes that Bertram Lippincott was particularly sensitive to perceived attacks on the American government in the wake of Pearl Harbor. After Lippincott had cut “whole chunks” of Hurston’s manuscript (V. Boyd 357), the resulting text drew praise from white critics in large part because “Hurston eliminated—or allowed her editor to eliminate—all overt statements in Dust Tracks that might have been viewed as inflammatory” (360). Trudier Harris-Lopez,however,reads Hurston’s acquiescence to such changes as part of a “duping” strategy in which “Hurston’s readers concluded that they were getting what her editors intended” (66) when, in fact, the autobiography carefully “executes physical or psychological violence upon substitutes for authorial coercion”(53). While Harris-Lopez presents a compelling argument for Hurston’s subtle subversion of Lippincott’s circumscription of her raced authorial image, the fact of that power imbalance is most important for the historical background I am tracing here. Thus, to read“Crazy for This Democracy”in 1945 in Negro Digest, a magazine launched three years previously, is a different kind of textual event than to read this essay in I Love Myself, a collection which contributed importantly both to Hurston’s return to college curricula and the canon and to the revaluation of New Negro Renaissance writers, especially women, that has extended from the 1970s to the present. With its direct engagement of Roosevelt’s reluctance to reform military racial practices,“Crazy for This [ 184 ] CONCLUSION Democracy” in its original publishing context contributes interestingly to postwar black protests, through a new magazine seeking a national African American audience. Reprinted in a collection of Hurston...