In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Introduction “The national mental attitude” In 1926 W. E. B. du Bois was addressing an audience in Chicago when he rhetorically asked of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), “how is it that an organization of this kind can turn aside to talk about Art?” Why was it that an organization more commonly associated with courtroom battles and political lobbying should spend time, money, and effort encouraging, publishing, challenging, protesting , and creating poems, novels, short stories, plays, artwork, exhibitions , and films? The beginnings of an answer can be found in an article written by James Weldon Johnson, the NAACP’s first black executive secretary , in 1928. He set out what had been done to try to solve the “Negro problem.” The approaches to date had been “religious, educational, political , industrial, ethical, economic, sociological.” There had been some success , but, he argued, the time had come for a new approach. It was one that “requires a minimum of pleas, or propaganda, or philanthropy. It depends more upon what the Negro himself does than upon what someone does for him.” Johnson’s idea was “the approach along the line of intellectual and artistic achievement by Negroes, and may be called the art approach to the Negro problem.” Johnson was writing during the Harlem Renaissance and so believed that there was already evidence of its success. The effect of black artistic achievement for the African American could be seen on “his condition and status as a man and citizen.” Johnson, reasserting a claim he had made earlier in the decade in his Book of American Negro Poetry, argued that “the ‘race problem’ is fast reaching the stage of being more a question of national mental attitudes toward the Negro than a question of his actual condition.” It was “becoming less a matter of dealing with what he is and more a matter of dealing with what America thinks he is.” It was necessary, Johnson argued, to challenge racial stereotypes; in this way, the national mental attitude would be altered, and its consequence—racial inequality—would be defeated. This idea, though sometimes modified, 2 Art for EquAlity formed the core of the NAACP’s engagement with culture during its first half century.1 The NAACP launched a number of cultural campaigns between 1910 and the 1960s that included publishing art and literature in its magazine, the Crisis, and becoming involved with the Harlem Renaissance; using the arts to change white attitudes toward lynching; and protesting degrading images in film and television and lobbying for more positive depictions. These were not just random excursions followed on a whim or fancy but were driven by a specific strategy. This strategy was to use representations of African Americans in the arts and popular culture to challenge race prejudice. The NAACP believed that racial inequality was caused by the attitudes of whiteAmericans toward blacks. The association hoped that if it could change those views, then it would open the way for greater civil rights. Prejudices were reflected in and reinforced by stereotypical depictions of African Americans. Therefore, the NAACP believed it needed to challenge these representations, enforce their removal, and replace them with more positive images. This would alter white attitudes about African Americans and deliver a blow to race prejudice. Following this logic, the NAACP hoped that cultural forms could influence opinions about specific issues and be used to bring about political change. Furthermore, the NAACP argued that, in some cases, the very creation of the arts should be celebrated and that black talent would provide proof of the race’s status. Its cultural work, therefore, was directly linked to its legal and legislative efforts . These ideas shaped its attitude toward and involvement with a whole range of cultural media and art forms for half a century. The way in which the NAACP conceived of the race problem was central to its development of a cultural strategy. It believed that racial inequality was the result of “race prejudice.” In other words, African Americans suffered political, social, and economic discrimination because of the attitudes of white Americans toward the race. To the NAACP leadership, racism existed as an ideology or doctrine rather than in the structures of society. This reflected discourses about race during this period. As early as the 1850s, Frederick douglass defined racism as the “diseased imagination .” George Frederickson traces the historiography of racism and finds that scholars at the beginning of the twentieth century were concerned with “the history of...

Share