The Harlem Renaissance made an early splash with millions of Americans through a blatant act of plagiarism.

In March 1925, Alain Locke announced the flourishing of the New Negro in Harlem by guest editing “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” a special issue of a relatively small-circulation magazine called the Survey Graphic that covered the social sciences for a general audience. Before Locke’s publication, the magazine printed numbers on other cultural renaissances in, for example, Russia, Mexico, and Ireland, but Locke’s work dwarfed those earlier efforts. According to David Levering Lewis, Locke’s special issue sold 42,000 copies, which more than doubled the Survey Graphic’s usual circulation. Because of this success, Locke quickly went on to organize the more comprehensive and even more successful New Negro anthology, which was published in December 1925. The New Negro, writes Jeremy Braddock, became “the most important and influential anthology of the modernist period, irrespective of race, nationality, or aesthetic,” and scholars generally agree that the Harlem Renaissance began in earnest with the appearance of Locke’s expanded collection.

But the contents of “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” attracted their largest contemporary audience—of at least 2,414,308 readers—not through Locke’s initial work, but through the sort of  plagiarism that would earn any student a painful visit to a college administrator. On August 8, 1925, just months after the appearance of the Harlem issue of the Survey Graphic, the Saturday Evening Post published an essay by Chester T. Crowell entitled “The World’s Largest Negro City.” Crowell’s article is notable for at least two reasons: first, because he offers one of the very few representations of African Americans in the Saturday Evening Post that does not rely entirely on the anti-Black racist caricatures that were the Post’s typical fare and, second, because Crowell flagrantly stole much of his material from Locke’s issue—and he got away with it.

The Post was the largest-circulation magazine in America during the entirety of the New Negro era, and this periodical’s relationship to the Harlem Renaissance is the subject of my new book, Circulating Jim Crow: The Saturday Evening Post and the War Against Black Modernity. George Horace Lorimer, the magazine’s editor, was a lifelong advocate of white supremacy who made his undying antipathy toward African Americans perfectly clear when he included the following provision in his will: “To each and every white person in my employ at the time of my decease . . . I give and bequeath the sum of $500 in cash absolutely.” This naked statement of racial animus was not lost on Lucius C. Harper. Writing for the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper, Harper denounced Lorimer as “an Enemy . . . the Fascist of literature, so far as our Race was concerned.”

Harper’s denunciation could have been written well before the posthumous announcement of Lorimer’s will because, for decades, Lorimer had shaped the Saturday Evening Post as a consistent source of anti-Black caricature. With the early exception of Paul Laurence Dunbar and an extremely small handful of other Black writers, Lorimer published nothing by African Americans during his almost forty years as editor. The copious material he did include in the Post about African Americans was otherwise always written by white authors, and it was uniformly demeaning and unapologetically racist. Lorimer consistently used his magazine to register and recontain Black modernity—by which I mean that white-authored dialect fiction in the Saturday Evening Post chronicled new historical developments (what we might call “modernity”) but then folded those developments back into older, stereotypical forms of knowledge and racially stratified social norms and practices. Black characters moved through history in the Post, but they were forever squeezed back into formulaic, racist stereotypes. 

The predictability of Lorimer’s editorial practice makes Chester T. Crowell’s essay noteworthy for more than just its plagiarism because it represents—in, I must emphasize, an extremely limited and qualified fashion—Locke’s surprising achievement at penetrating the monolithic, anti-Black practices of America’s favorite magazine. But first I want to substantiate my charge of plagiarism with two examples from “The World’s Largest Negro City.” In that article, Crowell lifts material freely from across Locke’s issue, but he leans most heavily on James Weldon Johnson’s historical overview, “The Making of Harlem.” For example, in Johnson’s discussion of previous concentrations of African Americans in Manhattan, he wrote:

One of these hotels, The Marshall, became famous as the headquarters of Negro talent. . . . There one went to get a close-up of Williams and Walker, Cole and Johnson, Jim Europe, Aida Overton, Ernest Hogan, Will Marion Cook, and of others equally and less known. . . . [F]or seven or eight years the place was one of the sights of New York.

In Crowell’s hands, the passage became:

Fifty-third Street became famous because that was the golden age of negro entertainers. Williams and Walker, Dole [sic] and Johnson, Jim Europe, Aida Overton, Ernest Hogan, Will Marion Cook and numerous others were seen in that neighborhood. Jazz music, according to some authorities, was first heard in New York in a negro hotel that flourished under the name of the Marshall. . . . It was regarded as one of the sights of New York that visitors should not fail to see.

When writing about employment and labor conditions, Crowell turned to the next essay in Locke’s Harlem issue, lifting from Charles S. Johnson’s “Black Workers and the City.” Johnson wrote:

The distinctions are irrational. A Negro worker may not be a street or subway conductor because of the possibility of public objection to contact—but he may be a ticket chopper. He may not be a money changer in a subway station because honesty is required—yet he may be entrusted, as a messenger, with thousands of dollars daily.

Crowell—implying that he conducted an actual interview—offered this unacknowledged revision:

From the colored man’s point of view the restrictions imposed upon him are not very logical. For instance, one of them summarized the situation thus: ‘A negro may not be a street railway or Subway conductor, but he may be a ticket chopper. He may not be a money changer in a Subway station, but he may be intrusted as a messenger with thousands of dollars daily.’

There are many more examples of Crowell’s plagiarism throughout the article; the above are just two samples of his love—and mostly theft—of Locke’s work.

Nevertheless, Crowell’s intellectual thievery did introduce millions of Post readers to several core ideas in Locke’s Harlem issue, including the rise of Black cosmopolitanism and the concomitant development of a new political consciousness. And, stealing from Walter White’s Survey Graphic essay, “Color Lines,” Crowell also touched on racial passing, a phenomenon that was facilitated by the urban anonymity afforded to some African Americans after they fled the South during the Great Migration. Rather than raise an alarm, however, Crowell suggested that the vibrancy of Harlem and a concomitant rise in racial pride makes passing for white less appealing for most African Americans—but this element of his argument may have largely fallen on deaf ears. The editorial board at the Newport News Daily Press, for example, saw only peril in a rising Harlem: “Every negro who thus ‘passes’ from his own race into the white race is liable to mix negro blood with Anglo-Saxon blood, and that is the danger to which the Anglo-Saxon clubs are calling attention and seeking to guard against. The real menace is in the ‘passing’ to which Mr. Crowell refers.” Such antipathy toward interracial relations would have been familiar to regular Post readers, who not only consumed anti-Black fiction but were also fed a steady diet of anti-immigrant and white supremacist ideology in the magazine’s pages.

Because of the Post’s usual racist practices, the Black press welcomed the publication of Crowell’s article in 1925 as a welcome deviation. The New York Age, for example, praised it as “eminently fair. It should have a healthy effect on public sentiment by its appearance in a medium of so widespread circulation as the Saturday Evening Post and prove a corrective to the burlesqueries of Roy Cohen and Hugh Wiley.” For the most part, Crowell’s wholesale plagiarism goes unremarked in African American newspapers, but an unsigned press release (possibly written by James Weldon Johnson) did make the wry note that Crowell “concurs with James Weldon Johnson, Secretary of the N.A.AC.P.” Nevertheless, because “the Saturday Evening Post has published many stories by Octavius [sic] Roy Cohen, appearance of this presentation of another side of Negro life is regarded as significant.”

But the publication of Crowell’s essay, which stands entirely alone as a straightforward treatment of black modernity, did not herald a sea change for the Saturday Evening Post, which would continue to register and recontain Black modernity through its seemingly endless supply of Black dialect stories written by white authors. However, for a moment at least, Locke’s work—through Crowell’s plagiarism—broke through the white noise of Lorimer’s racist editorial practice and thus provided millions of readers with a more objective view of rising Black modernity in Jim Crow America.