Horne, Frank S. 1899–1974

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Frank S. Horne 1899–1974

Author

Although not among the bestknown poets of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, during his 40-year career Frank Horne wrote poetry, short stories, and essays that spoke to and for the black community. His award-winning work appeared in the magazines Crisis and Opportunity. While still a young man, Horne was struck with a crippling illness. He moved south to Georgia where he became a teacher and school administrator. Eventually Horne became a government housing administrator and an advocate for racial equality and public housing for blacks. Yet he continued to write poetry and essays that bridged the Harlem Renaissance and the black-power and black-art movements of the 1960s.

Frank Smith Horne was born on August 18, 1899, in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Boys High School. His later writings hint at his background: he was raised a Catholic; his mother, Cora Horne, had studied at Atlanta University in Georgia; his brother became a soldier. Horne began writing poetry while attending the College of the City of New York, where he lettered in track. He earned a doctorate of optometry from Northern Illinois College of Ophthalmology and Otology in 1923, and practiced optometry first in Chicago and then in New York.

Found Early Success With Poetry

Charles S. Johnson, editor of the National Urban League’s Opportunity magazine, and the young poet Gwendolyn Bennett encouraged Horne to publish his writing. His review of a black poetry anthology appeared in Opportunity in 1924. Praising the anthologists’ scholarship but criticizing their choice of poems, Horne ended with a call to “makers of black verse”: “Your task is definite, grand, and fine. You are to sing the attributes of a soul. Be superbly conscious of the many tributaries to our pulsing stream of life. You must articulate what the hidden sting of the slaver’s lash leaves reverberating in its train—the subtle hates, the burnt desires, sudden hopes, and dark despairs…. Sing, O black poets, for song is all we have!” The review won an Opportunity prize for critique.

Under the pseudonym Xavier I, Horne submitted “Letters Found near a Suicide,” a collection of 11 poems,

At a Glance…

Born on August 18, 1899, in Brooklyn, NY; died on September 7, 1974, in New York, NY; son of Edwin Fletcher and Cora Catherine (Calhoun) Horne; married Frankye Priestly, 1930 (died 1940); married Mercedes Christopher Rector, 1950. Education: College of the City of New York (now City College of the City University of New York), BS, 1921; Northern Illinois College of Ophthalmology and Otology (now Illinois College of Optometry), OptD, 1922; University of Southern California, AM, 1932.

Career: Optometrist, 1922-26; poet and author, 1924-70; Fort Valley High and Industrial School (Fort Valley Normal and Industrial School, 1932-39, now Fort Valley State College), GA, teacher, dean, and acting president, 1926-36; National Youth Administration, Negro Affairs Division, Washington, DC, assistant director, 1936-38; Housing and Horne Finance Agency, U.S. Housing Authority, Federal Public Housing Administration, Washington, DC, and New York, various positions, including acting special assistant to the U.S Housing Authority administrator, 1938-55; New York City Commission on Intergroup Relations, executive director, 1956-62; New York City Housing Redevelopment Board, human relations consultant, 1962-74.

Selected memberships: American Civil Liberties Union; Krigwa Little Theatre Movement; National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (founder); Phelps-Stokes Fund; Hudson Guild.

Selected awards: Opportunity magazine literary prizes, 1924, 1925, 1925-26, 1926-27, and 1932; Crisis magazine literary prizes, 1925, 1926, 1928; Catholic Inter-Racial Council of New York, Inc., James J. and Jane Hoey Award for Inter-Racial Justice.

to the Crisis magazine’s Amy Spingarn Contest in 1925. Written in the voice of a despairing man planning his suicide, it won the $30 second prize for poetry. Horne subsequently added seven poems to the group. “To James,” the best-known of these poems, describes life as a competitive track race: “At your final drive/Through the finish line/Did not my shout/Tell of the/Triumphant ecstasy/Of victory …?/Live/As I have taught you/To run, Boy—/It’s a short dash….”

Critic Ronald Primeau divided Horne’s poems into three types. Some poems described a quest, such as athletics or planning a suicide. Other poems honored black heritage, including “Nigger, A Chant for Children:” “Little Black boy/Chased down the street—/‘Nigger, nigger never die/Black face an’ shiny eye,/Nigger… nigger… nigger….’” Subsequent stanzas praised black heroes. The final stanza is identical to the first except that the little black boy “Runs down the street.” The third category of Horne’s poetry relied on Christian images to connect black religion and spirituality with black militancy, as in the often reprinted “Kid Stuff (December, 1942).”

Although Horne’s poetry was more traditional than that of many other young blacks of his generation, “Harlem” utilized jazz rhythms and experimental forms that were more typical of the day. Many of Horne’s poems were reprinted in anthologies and two were translated for inclusion in a 1929 German anthology.

Horne’s first published short story, “The Man Who Wanted to be Red,” an allegory for children, told of the “Reds” enslaving the “Greens,” who then labor in the Kingdom of Ur. Some of the Red men have children with the beautiful Green women, resulting in the “Whites,” a new race of outcasts.

Became an Educator

In 1927 Horne moved to the warmer climate of Fort Valley, Georgia. His essay, “I Am Initiated into the Negro Race,” described his transition from the relative privilege and prosperity of the North to the segregated South: “From now on, I am the Enterer of Side Doors, and Back Doors, and sometimes No Door At All.” Horne compared the hopelessness and despair of the southern black to a shadow covering the land.

At the Fort Valley High and Industrial School (later Fort Valley State College), Horne became a teacher and later dean and acting president. Although his days as a runner ended with the illness that left him with a lifelong disability, he soon found himself coaching the high-school track team to several championships. His story “Running Fools: Athletics in a Colored School” described his male and female track stars, as well as life at the Fort Valley school.

Horne became an advocate for the southern industrial school. He visited agricultural and mechanical (A and M) and teachers colleges, normal schools, and county training schools throughout the South, spent a year of graduate study in vocational education, and prepared reports on vocational and adult education. His conclusions were scathing. His lively two-part analysis, published in Opportunity in 1935, was frank: “As factors in training Negro youth to earn a livelihood in industrial America of today, the industrial schools of the South, except in a few rare instances, could practically all be scrapped without appreciable loss to any one…. In the midst of this teeming, complex, kaleidoscopic economic world, the Negro industrial schools of the South sit as though sublimely oblivious…. We are fiddling with ‘man-and-plow’ agriculture in the face of the gang-plow and the tractor; our home economics girls are in bodily danger in a modern kitchen; the language of collective bargaining, company unions and cooperatives is so much Greek to the ears of our industrial students.” The causes of these failures were obvious to Horne: accrediting agencies that recognized only liberal-arts education; a technological revolution that condemned traditional black occupations to obsolescence; lack of educational funding; racial barriers to apprenticeships and job placements; and, above all, the overriding poverty of southern blacks that resulted from sharecropping, exclusion from labor unions, and barriers to voting.

Poems Reached a Wider Audience

After nine years at Fort Valley, Horne became a government administrator, working for the National Youth Administration, and for housing, finance, and health programs in Washington, D.C., and New York City. He continued to write poetry. Paul Breman published a collection of his work in 1963, including the complete “Letters Found near a Suicide (1920-1930)” and eight poems referred to as “Haverstraw (I960).” These later poems were personal stories of physical and emotional pain and suffering.

During the 1960s Horne published new poems in Crisis, reflecting the speech patterns and forms of the civil rights and black arts movements. “Balm in Gilead” compared the deaths of five black girls in a Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing with the political assassinations of the era to Christ’s crucifixion. In “He Won’t Stay Put: A Carol for All Seasons,” Horne wrote: “and mighty Martin Luther King/he ain’t got no Santy this year/Nor blazing Malcolm X/Nor gallant Bobby Kennedy/Nor fearless Medgar Evers/Nor brothers Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney/nor a million pot-bellied Biafran kids/Nor a million red-necked Mississippians….”

In addition to the Crisis and Opportunity, Horne’s writing appeared in Phylon, Carolina magazine, the Interracial Review, and the Journal of Intergroup Relations. A musical version of “Letters Found near a Suicide” is still performed. Horne, a member of numerous civil rights, civic, fraternal, and professional organizations, died of arteriosclerosis in 1974.

Selected writings

Nonfiction

“Black Verse,” Opportunity, November 1924, pp. 330-332; reprinted in Harlem Renaissance, Gale, 2003, pp. 588-590.

“I Am Initiated into the Negro Race,” Opportunity, May 1928, pp. 136-137.

“The Epic of Fort Valley,” Crisis, June 1929, pp. 190, 206-207.

“Running Fools: Athletics in a Colored School,” Crisis, November 1930, pp. 375-376.

“Concerning White People,” Opportunity, March, 1934, p. 77-79.

“The Industrial School of the South” (two-part series), Opportunity, May 1935, pp. 136-139; June 1935, pp. 178-181.

“Dog House Education,” Journal of Negro Education, July 1936, p. 339.

“Providing New Housing for Negroes,” Opportunity, October 1940, pp. 305-308.

Poetry

(As Xavier I) “Letters Found near a Suicide,” Crisis, November 1925, pp. 12-13.

“Harlem,” Crisis, June 1928, p. 196.

“More Letters Found near a Suicide,” Crisis, December 1929, p. 413.

Haverstraw, Breman, 1963.

“Balm in Gilead: A Christmas Jingle, Played with Trumpets and Muffled Drums,” Crisis, December 1965, pp. 646-647.

“Mamma!,” Crisis, April 1966, p. 213.

“He Won’t Stay Put: A Carol for All Seasons,” Crisis, December 1970, pp. 403-404.

Short stories

“The Man Who Wanted to Be Red: A Story,” Crisis, July 1928, pp. 225-226, 242-243.

Sources

Books

Chapman, Abraham, ed., Black Voices, St. Martin’s Press, 1968, pp. 401-403.

Kerlin, Robert T., “The New Forms of Poetry: Frank Horne,” Negro Poets and Their Poems, rev.ed., Associated Publisher, 1947, pp. 206-208.

Primeau, Ronald, “Frank Horne and the Second Echelon Poets of the Harlem Renaissance,” in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, Arna Bontemps, ed., Dodd, Mead & Co., 1972, pp. 247-267.