Miss Anne in Harlem : White Women of the Black Renaissance by Carla Kaplan

The Burchfield Penney Art Center Book Club is open to all. Admission to the Center is free to Members.

Please join us Sundays at 3:00 on the dates listed. We begin with a brief docent led tour of the Center, followed by a discussion of the chosen book.

Please check the Museum Store for book availability at 716-878-3595. Please contact Joseph Lonzi at lonzijp@buffalostate.edu with any questions.

Little could be more unusual in the 1920s than for white, upper-class women to seek to become, in effect, honorary blacks.

Miss Anne in Harlem is the first book to tell the story of a number of spirited white women who did just that, crossing race lines viewed as impenetrable to play seminal roles in the great black cultural movement of the early twentieth century that came to be called the Harlem Renaissance. Often viewed with suspicion by people on both sides of the color line, these women were patrons and participants, friends and sometimes lovers—and frequently lightning rods for controversy as their motives for embracing blackness were misinterpreted, misrepresented, and derided. Kaplan's engrossing group biography gives these women their due, exploring the intentions, contributions, and lasting significance of six iconoclasts who left their mark on an emerging black cultural shift.

Kaplan's search for the story of Miss Anne—a collective term applied to white women who invaded Harlem in the Jazz Age—produced dozens of stories, and she focuses on six who exemplify the range of ideas white women brought to Harlem. Now largely relegated to the dustbin of history, "many of the women in this book were once famous," Kaplan writes. "One was America's highest-grossing writer (now largely unread). Two were the subject of lengthy New Yorker profiles. Another was the target of endless society stories and Movietone newsreels. Others appeared frequently in newspaper accounts. One was so infamous in Harlem that her name was hardly uttered, because she strictly forbade it. But trying to capture these women can be like looking at an image drawn in invisible ink."

Interweaving their stories into the larger tapestry of black political, cultural, and social issues, Kaplan paints detailed portraits of these very different women. Lillian E. Wood never ventured north to Harlem, but immersed herself in African American culture at a rural Tennessee college for blacks. As the writer of a classic novel of the black experience, Let My People Go, she has been wrongly categorized as an African American in countless sources. Texas heiress Josephine Cogdell Schulyer defied her upbringing and contemporary conventions, moving to Harlem and marrying one of the eminent black journalists of the age. Adopting a nom de plume, she reconstructed herself based on both the New Woman and the radical race ideas of her husband. Jewish playwright, doctor's wife, and founder of Barnard College, Annie Nathan Meyer befriended Zora Neale Hurston and other eminent black artists and writers, and attempted to give an honest depiction of the disgrace of lynching in her divisive play, Black Souls.

Dubbed the "Mother of the Primitives," Charlotte Osgood Mason was a wealthy Park Avenue matron who became patron to Hurston, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and others, but some found her controlling influence oppressive and even detrimental. As the author of Imitation of Life, which depicts the perils and moral complications of a black girl's trying to pass as white, bestselling writer Fannie Hurst tried to raise her reputation among critics, instead producing one of the most hotly contested, if widely read, visions of the black experiences. British shipping heiress and socialite Nancy Cunard rejected her past, fully immersing herself in the black experience, taking a black lover, and becoming a vocal advocate of the wrongly-convicted Scottsboro Boys. Her flamboyant, if earnest efforts resulted in both one of the finest anthologies of black culture then published and the scorn of many people—white and black—on both sides of the Atlantic. By making themselves socially unintelligible and courting ostracism, these confounded available categories and introduced many of our own critical ideas about the flexibility or "play" of social identity. They are as relevant today as they were in the 1920s. From  http://www.carlakaplan.com/miss-anne-in-harlem.html