What is a Salon?

A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to please or to educate".

The purpose of the SANKOFA Salon Series is to discuss significant and timely issues, literary topics, present musical performances and artistic displays in an intimate setting.

     

The Dark Tower was actually a salon on 136th Street in Harlem sponsored by Madame C.J. Walker’s daughter, A’Lelia Walker.  It was the height of Harlem's literary renaissance and in 1928-1929 she organized a literary salon in her townhouse at 108 West  136th Street. The salon was named after Countee Cullen's column in Opportunity. Its purpose was to provide a place for young African-American artists and writers to discuss and exhibit their works. The walls of the rooms had poems by Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen lettered on them.  Perhaps Cullen knew he was speaking for the others, too, when he wrote:

We shall not always plant while others reap

The golden increment of bursting fruit,

Not always countenance, abject and mute

That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;

Not everlastingly while others sleep

Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,

Not always bend to some more subtle brute;

We were not made eternally to weep.

The night whose sable breast relieves the stark

White stars is no less lovely being dark,

And there are buds that cannot bloom at all

In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,

And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

The first topic is Black, Poor and Red: Richard Wright in Chicago as remembered by Margaret Walker.