FIRE! ! nn Retnospect than fifry years have passed since FIREIJ \7,[or. lv^was
published in November, 1926. Copies of the original are treasures beyond price. Langston Hughes reports in his autobiography The Big Sea that several hundred of them were consumed (quite literally) by a real fire in the basement where they were stored. Then FIREII went broke. Indeed, it never was solvent. Only the first issue of this "Quarterly Devoted to Younger Negro Artists" ever appeared. By definition, treasures are not simply rare. They are important. Its table of contents reveals instantly why FIREI J is important. Here is a roster of major names in the chronicles of Afro-American literature and art:
Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, Langston Hughes. These, the most talented and creative of their generation, combined to generate . . . FIREJJ They came to Harlem from throughout the country. Wallace Thurman grew up in Salt Lake Ciry and graduated from the University of Southern California;
Zora Neale Hurston migrated from her home in
Etonville, Florida
to
Baltimore and then to
Washington, D.C., where she studied at Howard University, before arriving in New York in 1925. Richard Bruce Nugent and John Preston Davis were natives of \Tashington. Aaron Dougias came from
at her Villa Lewaro in Irvington.on-Hudson and her Harlem townhouse, the salons of Carl Van Vechten and his sophisticated friends (who included many of the literary and theatrical celebrities of the day), the apartments of ordinary Harlemites throwing parties to pay the rent, and the low.life cabarets, where, in the words of Langston Hughes, "long-headed jazzercplay."
After FIREIJ they went their separate ways. In September, 1926, Langston Hughes entered his sophomore year at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, returning on weekends to New York. His second book of poems, Fine Clothes to the Jew, was published by Knopf in 1927 . For forty years thereafter, Hughes was the central creative force in Afro-American letters, publishing copiously in every conceivable genre, from poems, plays, novels and essays to opera librettos, popular song lyrics and children's books. Zora Neale Hurston remained for a time in New York, studying anthropology at Barnard with Franz Boas. In 1927 she left for Florida to collect folklore. She became a major literary figure, publishing four novels,
an autobiography, two books o{ folklore and innumerable articles and stories, but she died in obscurity in 1960.
Kansas.
They had travelled. Nugent had been to Panama. Langston Hughes was born in Missouri and had lived in
Kansas and Illinois, graduated from high school in Cleveland, and lived with his father in Mexico before he arrived in New York to attend Coiumbia in 1921. After his first year he dropped out, worked his way to Africa, and lived a while in Paris before returning to New York and \il/ashington in 7924. Gwendolyn Bennett, too, had been to Paris. A
native
offices of W. E. B. Du Bois of the NAACP, Charles S. Johnson of the Urban League and A. Philip Randolph of the Messenger, A'Lelia'STalker's extravagant parties
of
Giddings, Texas, she had studied at
Columbia, graduated from the Pratt Institute and
John Preston Davis, who was FIREI/'s
business
manager, returned to Harvard Law School. He had contributed short stories to Opportunicy, a monthly published by the Urban League. After graduation, he entered politics and stumped for La Guardia's Fusion
Party in 1933. From 1936 to 1940, as executive secretary of the National Negro Congress, an association of more than forty civil rights organizations,
he was a leading critic of the New Deal from the perspective of the radical left. Later he became
These seven who collaborated on FIREII were the more adventurous and unconventional ofthe younger
publicity director at Fisk and was editor and publisher of Our World. In 1966 he edited The American Negro Reference Book br the Phelps-Stokes Fund. \Vhen the summer of 1926 was over, Gwendolyn Bennett returned to lil/ashington, D.C., to resume her duties as a member of the Faculry in Fine Arts at
Afro-American intellectuals. Thurman invented
Howard. She continued, however, as
taught at Howard before taking
leave to study art in Paris on a scholarship from Delta Sigma Theta a year's
Sorority.
a
name for them-The Niggeratti. They loved it. The word fit their concept of themselves: clever, cultured, talented, perhaps a bit pretentious, but urbane enough to recognize that fact and to find their own pretense amusing.
The Niggeratti had access to many worlds: the genteel homes of the light-skinned Brooklyn elite, the
a
regular
columnist for Opportunity. She pursued a multifaceted career as a writer, artist and educator. In the Thirdes she worked briefly in the Federal \(/riters'Project, then joined the Federal Art Project at the invitation of Augusta Savage and became Director of the Harlem Community Art Center. Later, she was Director of the George Washington Carver School, a privately
Copyright O 1982 by Thomas H. Wirth