e unrefined source for the new art. Men like James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke expected some race genius to appear who would transform that source into high culture (p 10).
In this, they were not terribly different from their white American counterparts and contemporaries. Americans in the decades following the turn of the century were torn by a deep anxiety about their own civilization and its relationship to the standards and canons of Europe. Huggins brings this out in his discussion of the curious similarity between the exaggerated conventions of the minstral show and those of the turn-of-the-century white upper class.
The minstral show is now associated with black stereotypes, summed up in the term "blackface," but as Huggins points out, the minstral-show stereotypes, Jim Crow and Jim Dandy "are unlike any concept of the pl
...