Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many to be his most significant. Of mixed race and majority European ancestry, Toomer struggled to identify as “an American” and resisted efforts to classify him as a black writer.
He continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
After leaving college, Toomer returned to Washington, DC. He published some short stories and continued writing in the volatile social period following World War I. He worked for some months in a shipyard in 1919, then escaped to middle-class life. Labor strikes and race riots of whites attacking blacks occurred in several major industrial cities during the summer of 1919, which was known as Red Summer. People in the working class were competing after World War I for jobs and housing, and tensions erupted in violence. In Chicago and other places, blacks fought back. At the same time, it was a period of artistic ferment.
Toomer devoted several months to the study of Eastern philosophies and continued to be interested in this subject. Some of his early writing was political, and he published three essays from 1919-1920 in the prominent socialist paper New York Call. His work drew from the socialist and “New Negro” movements of New York. Toomer was reading much new American writing, for instance Waldo Frank’s Our America (1919). In 1919, he adopted Jean Toomer as his literary name, and it was the way he was known for most of his adult life.
By his early adult years, Toomer resisted racial classifications and wanted to be identified only as an American. Accurately claiming ancestry among seven ethnic and national groups, he gained experience in both white and “colored” societies, and resisted being classified as a Negro writer, although he grudgingly allowed his publisher of Cane to use that term to increase sales.
n 1921 Toomer took a job for a few months as a principal at a new rural agricultural and industrial school for blacks in Sparta, Georgia. Southern schools were continuing to recruit teachers from the North, although they had also trained generations of teachers since the Civil War. The school was in the center of Hancock County and the Black Belt 100 miles southeast of Atlanta, near where his father had lived. Exploring his father’s roots in Hancock County, Toomer learned that he sometimes passed for white. Seeing the life of rural blacks, accompanied by racial segregation and virtual labor peonage in the Deep South, led Toomer to identify more strongly as an African American and with his father’s past. Several lynchings of black men took place in Georgia during 1921-1922, as whites continued to enforce white supremacy with violence. In 1908 the state had ratified a constitution that disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites by raising requirements to voter registration. This situation was virtually maintained into the 1960s, when federal legislation was passed to enforce constitutional rights.
By Toomer’s time, the state was suffering labor shortages due to thousands of rural blacks leaving in the Great Migration to the North and Midwest. Trying to control their movement, the legislature passed laws to prevent outmigration. It also established high license fees for Northern employers recruiting labor in the state. Planters feared losing their pool of cheap labor. This period was a formative experience for Toomer; he started writing about it while still in Georgia and submitted the long story “Georgia Night” to The Liberator in New York from Hancock County.
Content: Wikipedia
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