Tuesdays & Thursdays, August 1950, 11:00 am

“You should also note one serious omission. There is no Negro among us,” F.O. Matthiessen said in his opening remarks in the Great Hall back in 1947. “But that was not an oversight. The Negro scholar whom we invited was unable to come, and we will do our best to remedy that omission another year.” That other year was 1950. The scholar was Alain Leroy Locke, the first Black doctoral student of philosophy at Harvard University, the first Black Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, and editor of the landmark volume, The New Negro, with which Locke intended, as he wrote in the introduction, “to register the transformations of the inner and outer life” of Black Americans two generations after the abolition of slavery. “As in India, in China, in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, Bohemia, Palestine and Mexico,” Locke wrote, “we are witnessing the resurgence of a people.” He spoke of discovering “a new soul” for Black Americans.

If you had walked into the Venetian Salon, shortly after 11 o’clock on any Tuesday or Thursday morning in August 1950, you would have heard the 64-year-old professor of philosophy holding a series of lectures beneath the crystal chandelier, his image reflected in the mirrors embedded in the gold-gilt wall coverings. Locke had joined the faculty of Salzburg Seminar Session 10, “General Session in American Studies.” The presence of the first Black member of a Salzburg faculty was highly anticipated by many of the nearly 70 Fellows in attendance that summer. “Their curiosity, if it had any particular focus,” a Session 10 Faculty member recalled, “was aroused by those aspects of American life which, like the Negro question and the problem of academic freedom, reveal the greatest disparity between professed national ideals and reality.” In this respect, Alain Leroy Locke disappointed. 

Instead of discussing the horrific racial disparities in America that were so contradictory to the ideals the United States attempted to project to the world, Locke lectured on the philosophical origins of American Puritanism and individualism and pragmatism. He assigned readings by Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and William James. He was noticeably reserved in discussing the plight of Black people in America. “He represented the Negro problem in the United States,” one Fellow complained, “although he did not speak very much about it.” A Salzburg Seminar in-house report from the time confirms Locke’s reticence to address racial issues, noting that Locke convened a small informal group discussion, but explicitly did not want to “to make the issue a general one.” Locke was there first as a philosopher, then as an American, then as a Black American philosopher. It would be left to other faculty members to highlight the myriad injustices and inequalities suffered by Black people in America. In 1951, John Hope Franklin served on the faculty for a program on American studies. Franklin was author of the landmark book, From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947. “My challenge was to weave into the fabric of American history,” the great historian once said, “enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly.” 

Early in 1954, the Seminar extended an invitation to Ralph Ellison, who had won the US National Book Award for his 1952 novel, Invisible Man, a fierce and unsparing chronicle of American racial hatred, prejudice, and malevolent indifference. “I am invisible, understand,” Ellison wrote, “simply because people refuse to see me.” Unlike Locke’s carefully curated list of titles, or Franklin’s historical contextualization, Ellison assigned readings that exposed the nightmare world of contemporary Black America: James Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical novel of life in Harlem, Go Tell it on the Mountain; and Richard Wright’s Native Son, a novel about crushing poverty in Chicago’s South Side; as well as Wright’s Black Boy, his searing autobiographical account of racism across America; and of course, Ellison’s own novel Invisible Man, along with his essay “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity.” Ellison also brought a collection of jazz recordings. 

“I am wondering whether there is a tape recorder available at the Schloss Leopoldskron or if the Seminar could conveniently borrow one,” Ellison wrote in his May 17 acceptance letter. “The lectures on jazz are not, of course, dependent on illustration but their interest would undoubtedly be heightened if they were illustrated with actual music.” 

In those same hours of Tuesday, May 17, 1954, as Ellison was writing his letter of acceptance, addressed from Apartment 2B at 730 Riverside Drive on the west side of Manhattan, the United States Supreme Court announced a decision, in a 9 to 0 vote, to overturn the 1896 ruling, Plessey v. Ferguson, that established a legal basis for racial segregation—“separate but equal”—in the United States. In its 1954 landmark ruling, Brown v. the Board of Education, the nine justices formally acknowledged the pernicious and debilitating effects of racial prejudice on American citizens, in particular, among young Black Americans, noting that “it generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.” With a high heart over the high court ruling, Ralph Ellison travelled to Salzburg. 

The Salzburg Global archives contain only the scantest traces of Ellison’s time at the Schloss, namely six items that include his lecture schedule, list of recommended readings, his typed, modest half-page CV, and his May 17, 1954, letter of acceptance, signed in green ink with his name rendered in a cascade of fine line, filigreed elegance. However, the Rare Books and Manuscripts division at the Library of Congress, home to Ellison’s private papers, more than 74,800 items, in 314 boxes, with 25 oversize containers, a total of 143 linear feet of documents, preserve the details of Ellison’s summer at the Schloss.

When I searched the Schloss Library shelves for Ellison’s copy of Invisible Man, catalogued as 813.ELL, on a shelf in the library gallery, I discovered it was missing. I did however come across a catalogue of jazz recordings, typed on yellowing index cards, while rummaging through a storage area on the third floor of the Schloss, where I also discovered a letter with Alain Locke’s New York City address, 12 Grove Street, near Washington Square, in lower Manhattan. “In the summer of 1950 it was my good fortune to be a member of the instructorial staff of The Salzburg Seminar in American Studies,” Locke wrote in the undated letter. “I regard the experience more and more in the perspective of four years as one of the most rewarding and educative episodes of forty-one years of college teaching.” 

But while many people, like Locke, find their experiences in Salzburg rewarding and educative, others can find it challenging. One such moment was Saturday morning, October 21, 2018, when photocopied racist images of men in blackface and others dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes and still others posing before a Confederate flag were found taped to the gold framed paintings of a black-faced Harlequin figure in the Venetian Salon, with a note in black marker: “This is BLACK FACE.” It was the closing morning of the Young Cultural Innovators Forum that had brought Fellows from around the world, including many people of color who were stunned by the Venetian Salon’s apparent racist iconography. 

“It was lazy at best and dangerous at worst that there was no context or acknowledgement of the minstrelsy and mockery present in that painting that has plagued our community for so long,” one Fellow asserted. It was “disheartening”, Fellows remarked, to travel so far to an allegedly “safe space” to be confronted with images that were so shocking and offensive. Some Fellows called for the images to be contextualized. Others called for their total removal. 

The Salzburg Global staff responded by noting that the Schloss had been “a place of renewal and inspiration for 38,000 Fellows from 180 countries” for more than seven decades, but conceded to the need for “more nuanced and critical ways” of contextualizing these complex legacies. An inventory was made of the Schloss’s collective transgressions and offenses. The Prince Archbishop had vowed to “root out and expatriate” the “unruly, seditious and insurgent population” of Protestants. More than 20,000 men, women and children were given ten days to liquidate their assets and leave. Max Reinhardt had been similarly dispossessed of Schloss Leopoldskron and forced to live in exile because of his Jewish heritage. The Schloss had then served for seven years as gathering place for Nazis. Salzburg Global now displays various placards with images and text in relevant rooms around the Schloss in an attempt to contextualize and bring greater nuance to these dark periods in the Schloss’ history. 

As part of its “Contested Histories” project, Salzburg Global devoted particular attention to the offending paintings in the Venetian Salon. It was first determined that images of the Harlequin figure dated back to the 16th century and appeared to have no connection with racism, though Salzburg Global conceded that the figure wearing a black mask “can appear to be a depiction of blackface.” Further research revealed, in fact, that the black-masked Harlequin figure could sometimes be “attributed to early depictions of African slaves.” But it was also speculated that Max Reinhardt “himself a victim of racism, identified with the persevering character of the Harlequin.” 

Salzburg Global made assurances of its “institutional respect for equality, diversity and inclusivity,” and the need to reach out to the community of Fellows who felt alienated or hurt by the Venetian Salon images. A promise was made to contextualize the Harlequin figure, and to engage in continued “dialogue” and “debate,” which at another institution might sound like a dodge, but was in fact, the same solution that the Seminar’s founding fathers had considered foundational to healing a damaged world back in that distant summer of 1947.