Cullen joins Opportunity and begins The Dark Tower
Poet involved
What happened
Returning from Harvard to New York, Countee Cullen became assistant editor of Opportunity, the National Urban League journal, under Charles S. Johnson. From 1926 until June 1928 he wrote editorials and book reviews for the column The Dark Tower. From that Harlem desk he praised work he found beautiful and criticised what he thought narrowed Black writers into “racial artists,” including jazz poems in Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues.
Literary impact
The column made Cullen a gatekeeper as well as a poet. Its reviews preserve his aesthetic of lofty feeling, formal beauty, and racial tact, and they document the public quarrel with Hughes over jazz, dialect, and whether a Negro poet should write as poet first.
Source: Wikipedia
