A'Lelia Walker and the Dark Tower

A'Lelia Walker and the Dark Tower may sound like a fantasy adventure. In reality A'Lelia Walker was an entrepreneur and patron of the arts in the 1920s. Her greatest project, the Dark Tower, was among the best-known writers' salons of New York City's Harlem Renaissance. The movement nurtured the country’s most visionary and enduring African American authors.

Born in 1885 in Vicksburg, Miss., A'Lelia grew up in St. Louis, Mo., and attended Knoxville College in Tennessee. In 1910 she helped her mother found the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, and in 1913 they moved to New York City. When Madam Walker died in 1919, A'Lelia became president of the Walker Company and inherited her mother's fortune.

As a person of taste who reveled in cosmopolitan life, Walker made the most of her wealth and the city. She organized lavish literary events and the parties that accompanied them. She also became a patron of writers, artists, and poets, entertaining at her city townhouse and Villa Lewaro in Irvington-on-Hudson. The African American architect Vertner W. Tandy designed both homes.

Walker named the townhouse the Dark Tower after the work of celebrated poet Countee Cullen. Cullen had written a column entitled "The Dark Tower" for the literary magazine Opportunity, a publication of the National Urban League. He also penned the forward-looking poem "From the Dark Tower," which largely expressed the independent spirit of the Harlem Renaissance.

Guests at the tower included poet Langston Hughes, author Zora Neale Hurston, and writer Jean Toomer. Also among the visitors was lyricist, author, and critic James Weldon Johnson. Johnson was also a civil rights activist who believed in integration as the solution to inequality. The Dark Tower, whose visitors were both white and black, provided a place for such noted figures to exhibit and discuss their work. It also offered an environment where their gifts were accepted and cultivated, even by African and European royalty.

Fond of recognition, finery, and the high life, Walker epitomized the gilt-edged roaring twenties. She traveled the world visiting such dignitaries as the Ethiopian empress Waizeru Zauditu in 1922. But Harlem was her home. Her ties there prompted Langston Hughes to hail her as the "joy goddess of Harlem's 1920s." When Walker died in 1931, Hughes observed her passing as the close of the Harlem Renaissance.

Also called the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance had an impact that outlived even its most dedicated patron. The Depression of the 1930s forced the diaspora of the Dark Tower, and the Harlem Renaissance ended around 1940. But the movement was a catalyst for profound change in African American literature. Poetry, fiction, and essay blossomed from works of limited scope into insightful accounts of African American life. In the book entitled, Harlem Renaissance, author Nathan Irvin Huggins noted the importance of an urban setting in fostering this change. Harlem's varied culture was key in the appreciation of the African American experience, roots and culture. The support of A'Lelia Walker and the Dark Tower helped make it happen.