CultureWatch Review of Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance

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Reviewed by Jill Norgren

Miss Anne in Harlem expands our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance. It is a story about female independence, race, and most of all unconventional lives — lives, Carla Kaplan writes, that are by definition the most difficult ones to live — and to judge. The book commands attention because it joins other memoir, biography, and political works that give us insight into the personalities and power relations of people who seek to create a different future.

Drawing in two colors / Winold Reiss. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Books

Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance

By Carla Kaplan; c. 2013

Published by HarperCollins; Hardbook; ebook; 505 pp in total including some 160 pages of notes and index

Miss Anne in Harlem was written as the result of Carla Kaplan's inability to find information about the many white women who involved themselves in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. While writing Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters Kaplan, a professor of literature, found that there was ample material about Hurston's black Harlem contemporaries. In the archives of cultural history, however, "Miss Anne" — the often derisive moniker given to white women by blacks — was either ignored or dismissed mockingly. In this fascinating and thoughtful group biography, six of these women have been given voice. Kaplan should be praised for doing the difficult work of researching their lives and, even more, congratulated for the fairness of her presentation, one that neither criticizes nor forgives. Nothing would have been easier than to use her author's perch to judge these women. Kaplan does not, but neither does she shirk in writing down the details of lives that often make the twenty-first century reader cringe.

Miss Anne tells a story of creative, assertive women who, in different ways, crossed race lines in the years after World War I, women who put issues of race and race politics at the center of their lives. These women lived at a time when discrimination and white violence against blacks was the norm. Hundreds of lynchings occurred in the 1920s; mob action and all-white juries undercut any chance of justice at the 1930s trials of the black 'Scottsboro' teenagers falsely accused of rape by a white woman. larger image book jacket

In the same period, however, blacks were increasingly acclaimed for their contributions to music, dance, art, and literature. The "New Negro" was, in the words of poet Langston Hughes, "in vogue." Whites poured into Harlem. They said that white culture was "dull and depleted." Kaplan writes that these visitors "felt entitled to Harlem’s vaunted exotic sensuality and the escape it promised from urban capitalism’s alienation."

Kaplan argues that Harlem was an "imagined community" as well as a geographic center." As a result, it attracted interest from across the country and around the world. One Miss Anne, Lillian E. Wood, who "wanted in on the new black movement" viewed Harlem from her home in Tennessee where, for decades she taught at a black college. In 1925 she published a novel, Let My People Go. Wood hoped to convince southern blacks that they need not go to New York to make a difference. In writing the book she also hoped to prove that a white woman could understand and serve the black community, again, without being in Harlem. A novel about rape and lynching, Wood joined other Misses Anne in blaming white women both for causing lynching and not acting to end it. Wood hoped that her northern Miss Anne sisters would recognize a "kindred sister tucked away in the South." Curiously, Wood was immediately thought to be black, an error she did not correct. As a result, the message of activism and morality aimed at southern white women failed.

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