SOURCE: "Folk Art and the Harlem Renaissance," in PHYLON: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2, December, 1975, pp. 155-63.

In the following essay, Bell compares the forging of an African-American literary consciousness in the writings of James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and others, with the development of national identity in the works of European writers.

Major attempts by Afro-American academicians and artists to identify the strengths of Afro-American folk art and its potentialities for a black American tradition of high art have been strikingly similar to the spirit if not the letter of Herder's folk ideology. There is more than adequate circumstantial evidence that W. E. B. DuBois, Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson—the elder statesmen of the Harlem Renaissance—were familiar with Anglo-American interpretations of Herder's theory that folk art laid the base for high art and the corollary concept of folksong...