BHBC The Crew Edition: Zora and The Niggerati - Day 1
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Rise and shine!!! It’s game time! It is officially Day 1 of the very first Black History Bootcamp of the year! It will be 21 days of gut-busting laughter, tears, heart pumping walks, and healing - with thousands of Black women around the world. Today’s conversation is juuuuicy and important and POWERFUL for this exact stage-slapping moment. Don’t miss it.
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.... Now, drum roll please, here’s the first story…
Day 1: Zora and the Niggerati
“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.” - Audre Lorde
They called themselves the Niggerati and named their newspaper FIRE!
That’s all you really need to know about today’s crew.
It all went down at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem, New York. It was Zora Neale Hurston’s apartment at a boarding house. The brownstone still stands tall today. The exact stoop where our first heroes of Black History Bootcamp, The Crew Edition ignited a cultural revolution.
They were brilliant. Stylish. The influencers of influencers. They were the hell naws and imagine it.
They defined 1926 and set the agenda for their block, their neighborhood, their Harlem AND an America lynched in crippling politics.
“I too, am America.” said one of the crew members, Langston Hughes.
They called themselves the Niggerati, deliberately - to provoke - to yank the pearls and slap the faces of the Black bourgeoisie who insisted on using THEIR art, popularity, names, faces and radical ideas to dazzle mainstream white liberals into promoting the propaganda of Black exceptionalism.
The exploitation of intellectual and emotional labor radicalizes - even today. Well one of the writers in the crew, Wallace Thurman said that the “New Negro Movement” spent too much energy “trying to show white Americans that blacks were respectable.”
The Niggerati was young. And in the smallness of their own lives, they had experienced deep rage, soft violence, the dysfunctional of black brokenness. They knew the hardship of hustle. And yet, they wanted to celebrate THE BIGGEST TRUTH, that everyday Black people were the real creatives: making a way out of no way each and every day: the basket weavers and hair pressers, the big-bellied comedians and barbershop magicians. From speakeasies in Harlem to the Haitian mobs that imagined a new nation, the Niggerati researched, recorded, wrote, painted but mostly LIVED the blueprint of Black boldness.
Intellectuals would later call it The Harlem Renaissance.
…but it was never a literary trope made for dusty shelves or stuffy museums.
Nope.
It was a liberated crew of Free Black People, whose very essence the world would clamor for years to touch, to own.
“They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”
- Zora Neale Hurston
Meet us in the Streets: Grab your earbuds, put on your sneakers, and join co-founders Morgan and Vanessa for Black History Bootcamp, a walking podcast powered by GirlTrek. We can’t wait to talk…
LIVE! Weekdays, April 1 - 30, 2022
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Crew Conversation Guide:
The Question: Is it ever necessary to be silent about your pain?
The Playlist: 21-Day Crew Edition Playlist
The Origin Story:
It was the height of the Harlem Renaissance.
Zora Neale Hurston was one of the most popular writers and one of THE founders of the very field of anthropology at Columbia University. A brilliant mind.
She sat in the middle of her glamorous Harlem neighborhood with her Florida overalls on. Like a farmer. She loathed the burn of White gaze on Black genius. She refused to perform respectability. She hated what it did to her spirit, her people, her freedom. People were drawn to her bravery. The way she laughed from her belly and cut with her eyes. The certainty of her critiques, the quickness of her wit and daring of her dreams.
She was attractive. Magnetic. And people were drawn to that porch, to her crew. The crew was big and loud and included:
Countee Cullen: a famous writer whose words inspired the creation of jazz music according to Duke Ellington. He, in his cufflink excellence, hated the crew name - for the record lol.
Wallace Thurman: Who wrote The Blacker the Berry is credited with advancing the very idea of colorism.
Dorothy West: Famed writer of The Living is Easy which chronicled the upper-class Black experience in Boston.
And of course, perhaps the most famous, Langston Hughes was there looking like Al B. Sure and spitting lyrics.
Together, their ideas were foundational to the Harlem Renaissance.
(I promise y’all. I’m going to write this screenplay. From my lips to God's ears.)
Closing Crew Commandment:
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
-Zora Neale Hurston
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