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Harlem renaissance intellectual group

Niggerati was the name used, with deliberate irony, by Wallace Thurman for the group of young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. "Niggerati" is a portmanteau of "nigger" and "literati". The rooming house where he lived, and where that group often met, was similarly christened Niggerati Manor. The group included Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and several of the people behind Thurman's journal FIRE!! (which lasted for one issue in 1926), such as Richard Bruce Nugent (the associate editor of the journal), Jonathan Davis, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas. quote|Those were the days when Niggerati Manor was the talk of the town. The story got out that the bathtubs in the house were always packed with sour mash, while gin flowed from all the water taps and the flush boxes were filled with needle beer. It was said that the inmates of the house spent wild nights in tuft hunting and in the diversion of the cities of the plains and delirious days fleeing from pink elephants. [ ] Needless to say, the rumours were not wholly groundless; Where there is smoke there must be fire. In the case of Niggerati Manor, a great deal more smoke came out of the windows than was warranted by the size of the fire in the house.|sign=Theophilus Lewis|source=

Whilst Hughes, Hurston, and Thurman were comfortable with the appellation, others were less so. Cullen, for example, found Carl Van Vechten's novel Nigger Heaven so offensive that he refused to talk to him for 14 years. Hurston, though, had no trouble with language that challenged the sensibilities of others. She dubbed the well heeled white liberals who were involved in the Harlem Renaissance "Negrotarians" (c. f. rotarian).

FIRE!! itself represented the aesthetic frustrations of the Niggerati. Its single issue was published in November 1926, a year after the publication of Alain Locke's The New Negro. Whilst The New Negro was viewed by the Niggerati as subtle propaganda, appropriating their talents for racial propagandist purposes, FIRE!! was intended to be "devoted to the younger Negro artists", and was edited, paid for, and published by the Niggerati themselves, with the intention both of being purely aesthetic and of causing outrage amongst black literary critics. The journal's title came from a poem that Hughes had written, which was a sinner's lament in the fashion of a Negro spiritual. In a letter written to Locke, Hurston stated that there needed to be "more outlets for Negro fire", and the Niggerati distanced themselves even from Locke, declining his offer of patronage for the journal.

In addition to Nugent; Bennett, Douglas, Thurman, Hurston, and Hughes formed the journal's editorial board, with Thurman at the head. Davis was the business manager. Each editor was supposed to contribute 50 dollars towards the publication costs, although only three (not including Hurston) actually did. Thurman signed an I. O. U. for the printer, making him personally liable for the bill of nearly $1,000. He borrowed $150 from the Harlem Community Church, and another $150 from the Mutual League, only to be mugged on a street corner in Harlem, losing both all of the money and his clothing. For the next four years, Thurman's pay was attached in order to pay the debt. Hurston solicited subscriptions on a folklore collecting trip to the South in 1927, in order to help, and both she and Hughes submitted essays to World Tomorrow, which had loaned money to FIRE!, to repay that loan. Silvera wrote the poems “Jungle Taste” and “Finality” featured in the Flame from the Dark Tower poetry section of FIRE!! alongside poems by Hurston and Hughes. “Jungle Taste” is often studied by Harlem Renaissance experts although little else is documented about Edward Silvera.

The Niggerati sought to challenge borgeoise attitudes with FIRE! !, and intended it (in Thurman's own words from his solicitation letters) to be "provocative to provide the shocks necessary to encourage new types of artistic interest and new types of artistic energy". However, their efforts failed. They were not taken very seriously. Most of the negative reactions were little stronger than slaps on the wrist. Locke criticized their "effete echoes of contemporary decadence" and yet praised their anti Puritanism. The NAACP even handled some of the journal's prepublication publicity. Du Bois, editor of Crisis, simply ignored them.

Most of the editors of FIRE!! also contributed to Harlem. They also approached other writers. One such was Nella Larsen, a friend of Peterson. Peterson had wanted no part in another magazine published by Thurman, and had been approached by Nugent and Scholley Alexander, to write a monthly theatrical column, under the pretext that Alexander was the editor. Upon receiving a thank you letter with Thurman's name as editor on the letterhead, she withdrew, despite pleas from Alexander acknowledging Thurman's "selfish treatment of those who have helped him gain a place in the literary world" and stating that he would not let Thurman run amok. Alexander asked Peterson to ask her friends "to forbear — to with hold their criticism until they have the first issue at hand to criticize" (original emphasis and underlining). Larsen also declined, on the grounds that she was not going to be paid for her submissions, confessing that her ultimate goal in writing was "money". "I write so slowly and with such great reluctance that it seems a waste of time. ", she also observed.

The first issue of Harlem contained essays by Lewis, Locke, Nugent, and Walter Francis White; poems by Helene Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and Effie Newsom; stories by Roy de Coverly and George Little; and illustrations. Although intended to be more moderate than FIRE! !, Thurman abandoned this stance in later pages of the issue. His review of Larsen's Quicksand gave closer attention to the review of the novel given by Du Bois than it did to the novel itself, saying that Larsen "no doubt pleases Dr. Du Bois for she stays in her own sphere and writes about the sort of people one can invite to one's home without losing one's social prestige. She doesn't give white people the impression that all Negroes are gin drinkers, cabaret hounds and of the half world. Her Negroes are all of the upper class. And how! ".