Harlem Renaissance Influence Today Harlem Renaissance Influence in Art
On February 28, 2014, Humanities Texas held a one-24-hour interval teacher professional evolution workshop in Austin focusing on the history and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Professor Cary D. Wintz, Distinguished Professor of History at Texas Southern Academy, opened the workshop with the following lecture titled "The Harlem Renaissance: What Was It, and Why Does It Matter?" In his remarks, Wintz addresses the origins and nature of the movement—a task, he says, that is far more complex than it may seem.
Wintz is a specialist in the Harlem Renaissance and in African American political thought. Wintz is an author or editor of numerous books including Harlem Speaks; Black Civilisation and the Harlem Renaissance; African American Political Thought, 1890–1930; African Americans and the Presidency: The Route to the White House; and The Harlem Renaissance in the West. He served as an editor of the Oxford Academy Press five-volume Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present, and the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Routledge). He has besides written extensively on Texas history and is an writer of one of the standard Texas history texts, Texas: The Lone Star State. He is a native Houstonian and a graduate of Rice University and Kansas State University.
What was the Harlem Renaissance and when did it begin?
This seemingly uncomplicated question reveals the complexities of the motility we know varyingly as the New Negro Renaissance, the New Negro Motion, the Negro Renaissance, the Jazz Age, or the Harlem Renaissance. To answer the question information technology is necessary to place the motility inside time and space, and then to define its nature. This job is much more than circuitous than it might seem.
Traditionally the Harlem Renaissance was viewed primarily every bit a literary movement centered in Harlem and growing out of the black migration and the emergence of Harlem as the premier black urban center in the Us. Music and theater were mentioned briefly, more every bit background and local colour, equally providing inspiration for poesy and local colour for fiction. However, in that location was no analysis of the developments in these fields. Too, art was discussed mostly in terms of Aaron Douglas and his association with Langston Hughes and other young writers who produced Burn down!! in 1926, only at that place was trivial or no analysis of the work of African American artists. And there was even less discussion or analysis of the work of women in the fields of art, music, and theater.
Fortunately, this narrow view has changed. The Harlem Renaissance is increasingly viewed through a broader lens that recognizes it as a national movement with connections to international developments in fine art and culture that places increasing emphasis on the non-literary aspects of the movement.
Time
Starting time, to know when the Harlem Renaissance began, nosotros must determine its origins. Agreement the origins depends on how we perceive the nature of the Renaissance. For those who view the Renaissance equally primarily a literary motility, the Civic Gild Dinner of March 21, 1924, signaled its emergence. This event did not occur in Harlem, but was held almost i hundred blocks south in Manhattan at the Civic Gild on Twelfth Street off 5th Avenue. Charles S. Johnson, the young editor of Opportunity, the National Urban League's monthly magazine, conceived the event to laurels writer Jessie Fauset on the occasion of the publication of her novel, In that location Is Confusion. Johnson planned a small-scale dinner party with almost twenty guests—a mix of white publishers, editors, and literary critics, black intellectuals, and young black writers. Only, when he asked Alain Locke to preside over the event, Locke agreed but if the dinner honored African American writers in general rather than one novelist.
So the simple celebratory dinner morphed into a transformative event with over i hundred attendees. African Americans were represented past West. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others of the black intelligentsia, along with Fauset and a representative group of poets and authors. White guests predominately were publishers and critics; Carl Van Doren, editor of Century magazine, spoke for this group calling upon the young writers in the audience to make their contribution to the "new literary historic period" emerging in America.i
The Civic Club dinner significantly accelerated the literary phase of the Harlem Renaissance. Frederick Allen, editor of Harper's, approached Countee Cullen, securing his poems for his magazine equally soon as the poet finished reading them. Every bit the dinner ended Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic, hung around talking to Cullen, Fauset, and several other young writers, and so offered Charles S. Johnson a unique opportunity: an unabridged consequence of Survey Graphic devoted to the Harlem literary movement. Nether the editorship of Alain Locke the "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro" number of Survey Graphic hit the newsstands March ane, 1925.2 It was an overnight awareness. Later that year Locke published a book-length version of the "Harlem" edition, expanded and re-titled The New Negro: An Estimation.3 In the album Locke laid down his vision of the aesthetic and the parameters for the emerging Harlem Renaissance; he also included a drove of verse, fiction, graphic arts, and critical essays on art, literature, and music.
For those who viewed the Harlem Renaissance in terms of musical theater and amusement, the birth occurred 3 years before when Shuffle Along opened at the 63rd Street Musical Hall. Shuffle Along was a musical play written past a pair of veteran Vaudeville acts—comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, and composers/singers Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Most of its cast featured unknowns, simply some, similar Josephine Bakery and Paul Robeson, who had only minor roles in the production, were on their way to international fame. Eubie Blake recalled the significance of the production, when he pointed out that he and Sissle and Lyles and Miller achieved something that the other swell African American performers—Bob Cole and J. Rosamund Johnson, Bert Williams and George Walker—had tried, but failed to achieve. "We did it, that's the story," he exclaimed, "We put Negroes back on Broadway!"4
Poet Langston Hughes besides saw Shuffle Along as a seminal event in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. Information technology introduced him to the creative globe of New York, and it helped to redefine and energize music and nightlife in Harlem. In the procedure, it introduced white New Yorkers to blackness music, theater, and amusement and helped generated the white fascination with Harlem and the African American arts that was so much a role of the Harlem Renaissance. For the young Hughes, but arrived in the city, the long-range impact of Shuffle Along was not on his mind. In 1921, it was all almost the show, and, as he wrote in his autobiography, it was "a beloved of a evidence:"
Swift, vivid, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes. Besides, wait who were in information technology: The now famous choir director, Hall Johnson, and the composer, William Grant Notwithstanding, were a part of the orchestra. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle wrote the music and played and acted in the show. Miller and Lyles were the comics. Florence Mills skyrocketed to fame in the second human activity. Trixie Smith sang "He May Exist Your Man Merely He Comes to Come across Me Sometimes." And Caterina Jarboro, now a European prima donna, and the internationally celebrated Josephine Baker were merely in the chorus. Everybody was in the audience—including me. People came to run into it innumerable times. It was always packed.5
Shuffle Along also brought jazz to Broadway. It combined jazz music with very creatively choreographed jazz dance to transform musical theater into something new, exciting, and daring. And the show was a critical and financial success. It ran 474 performances on Broadway and spawned 3 touring companies. Information technology was a hit show written, performed, and produced by blacks, and it generated a demand for more than. Inside iii years, 9 other African American shows appeared on Broadway, and white writers and composers rushed to produce their versions of black musical comedies.
Music was also a prominent feature of African American culture during the Harlem Renaissance. The term "Jazz Historic period" was used past many who saw African American music, especially the blues and jazz, as the defining features of the Renaissance. However, both jazz and the blues were imports to Harlem. They emerged out of the African American experience around the plow of the century in southern towns and cities, like New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis. From these origins these musical forms spread beyond the country, north to Chicago earlier arriving in New York a few years before Globe War I.
Blues and black blues performers such as musician W. C. Handy and vocalist Ma Rainey were popular on the Vaudeville excursion in the tardily nineteenth century. The publication of W. C. Handy's "Memphis Blues" in 1912 and the start recordings a few years after brought this genre into the mainstream of American popular culture. Jazz reportedly originated amid the musicians who played in the bars and brothels of the infamous Storyville district of New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have invented jazz there in 1902, but information technology is hundred-to-one that whatever 1 person holds that accolade.
Co-ordinate to James Weldon Johnson, jazz reached New York in 1905 at Proctor'south 20-Third Street Theater. Johnson described the band in that location as "a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making dominant utilise of banjos, mandolins, guitars, saxophones, and drums in combination, and [information technology] was called the Memphis Students—a very good proper noun, overlooking the fact that the performers were not students and were non from Memphis. In that location was also a violin, a couple of brass instruments, and a double-bass." 7 years later, composer and ring leader James Reese Europe, one of the "Memphis Students," took his Clef Club Orchestra to Carnegie Hall. During Globe War I, while serving as an officer for a motorcar-gun company in the famed 369th U.Southward. Infantry Division, James Europe, fellow officer Noble Sissel, and the regimental band introduced the sounds of ragtime, jazz, and the blues to European audiences.
Following the war, black music, especially the blues and jazz, became increasingly popular with both black and white audiences. Europe continued his career as a successful bandleader until his untimely death in 1919. Ma Rainey and other jazz artists and blues singers began to sign recording contracts, initially with African American record companies like Black Swan Records, simply very quickly with Paramount, Columbia, and other mainstream recording outlets. In Harlem, one society opened later on another, each featuring jazz orchestras or blues singers. Noble Sissle, of course, was i of the team behind the production of Shuffle Along, which opened Broadway upwards to Chocolate Dandies and a series of other black musical comedies, featuring these new musical styles.
The visual arts, specially painting, prints, and sculpture, emerged somewhat later in Harlem than did music, musical theater, and literature. One of the most notable visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, arrived in Harlem from Kansas City in 1925. Subsequently that twelvemonth his first pieces appeared in Opportunity, and ten Douglas pieces appeared as "X Decorative Designs" illustrating Locke's The New Negro. Early the adjacent year W. E. B. Du Bois published Douglas's first illustrations in The Crisis. Due to his personal association with Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and other African American writers, his collaboration with them in the publication of their literary magazine Fire!! and his role designing volume jackets and illustrating literary works, Douglas was the most high-profile creative person clearly connected to the Harlem Renaissance in the mid- to late-1920s. And while these connections to the literary part of the Renaissance were notable, they were not typical of the experience of other African American artists of this period.
More than significant in launching the fine art phase of the Harlem Renaissance were the exhibits of African American art in Harlem and the funding and exhibits that the Harmon Foundation provided. The early stirrings of the African American art movement in Harlem followed a 1919 exhibit on the work of Henry Ossawa Tanner at a midtown gallery in New York, and an exhibit of African American artists two years later at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library. Fifty-fifty more of import to the nurturing and promotion of African American art were the activities of the Harmon Foundation. Beginning in 1926 the Foundation awarded greenbacks prizes for outstanding achievement by African Americans in eight fields, including fine arts. Additionally, from 1928 through 1933, the Harmon Foundation organized an annual exhibit of African American art.
Place
Situating the Harlem Renaissance in space is almost as complex as defining its origins and time span. Certainly Harlem is fundamental to the Harlem Renaissance, merely it serves more as an ballast for the movement than as its sole location. In reality, the Harlem Renaissance both drew from and spread its influence across the United States, the Caribbean, and the earth. Only a handful of the writers, artists, musicians, and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance were native to Harlem or New York, and simply a relatively minor number lived in Harlem throughout the Renaissance flow. And even so, Harlem impacted the art, music, and writing of virtually all of the participants in the Harlem Renaissance.
Harlem refers to that part of Manhattan Island north of Central Park and more often than not east of 8th Avenue or St. Nicholas Avenue. Originally established in the seventeenth century as a Dutch hamlet, it evolved over fourth dimension. Following its looting by the city in 1873, urban growth commenced. The resulting Harlem real estate nail lasted about xx years during which developers erected about of the concrete structures that divers Harlem as belatedly as the mid-twentieth century. They designed this new, urban Harlem primarily for the wealthy and the upper middle course; it contained broad avenues, a rail connection to the metropolis on Eighth Avenue, and consisted of expensive homes and luxurious apartment buildings accompanied by commercial and retail structures, along with stately churches and synagogues, clubs, social organizations, and even the Harlem Combo Orchestra.
Past 1905, Harlem's smash turned into a bust. Desperate white developers began to sell or rent to African Americans, often at greatly discounted prices, while blackness real estate firms provided the customers. At this time, approximately threescore g blacks lived in New York, scattered through the five boroughs, including a pocket-size community in Harlem. The largest concentration inhabited the overcrowded and congested Tenderloin and San Juan Hill sections of the west side of Manhattan. When New York'due south black population swelled in the twentieth century as newcomers from the South moved northward and as redevelopment destroyed existing black neighborhoods, pressure for additional and hopefully better housing pushed blacks northward upward the west side of Manhattan into Harlem.
Harlem's transition, in one case it began, followed fairly traditional patterns. As soon as blacks started moving onto a block, property values dropped further as whites began to go out. This process was peculiarly evident in the early 1920s. Both blackness and white realtors took reward of failing property values in Harlem—the panic selling that resulted when blacks moved in. Addressing the demand for housing generated past the metropolis's rapidly growing black population, they caused, subdivided, and leased Harlem property to black tenants.
Year past year, the boundaries of black Harlem expanded, as blacks streamed into Harlem as quickly as they could find affordable housing. Past 1910, they had get the majority group on the west side of Harlem north of 130th Street; by 1914, the population of black Harlem was estimated to exist fifty thousand. By 1930 black Harlem had expanded due north ten blocks to 155th Street and south to 115th Street; information technology spread from the Harlem River to Amsterdam Avenue, and housed approximately 164,000 blacks. The core of this community—bounded roughly by 126th Street on the south, 159th Street on the north, the Harlem River and Park Avenue on the due east, and 8th Avenue on the w—was more than 95 percentage blackness.
By 1920, Harlem, by virtue of the sheer size of its blackness population, had emerged as the virtual capital of black America; its name evoked a magic that lured all classes of blacks from all sections of the land to its streets. Impoverished southern farmers and sharecroppers made their way northward, where they were joined in Harlem by black intellectuals such equally Westward. East. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. Although the old black social elites of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia were disdainful of Harlem's vulgar splendor, and while it housed no significant black academy as did Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Nashville, Harlem nonetheless became the race'southward cultural center and a Mecca for its aspiring immature. Information technology housed the National Urban League, A. Philip Randolph'due south Brotherhood of Sleeping Motorcar Porters, and the black leadership of the NAACP. Marcus Garvey launched his ill-blighted blackness nationalist motion among its masses, and Harlem became the geographical focal signal of African American literature, art, music, and theater. Its night clubs, music halls, and jazz joints became the center of New York nightlife in the mid-1920s. Harlem, in short, was where the action was in black America during the decade following World War I.
Harlem and New York City as well contained the infrastructure to support and sustain the arts. In the early twentieth century, New York had replaced Boston every bit the center of the book publishing industry. Furthermore, new publishing houses in the city, such as Alfred A. Knopf, Harper Brothers, and Harcourt Caryatid, were open up to calculation greater diversity to their book lists by including works by African American writers. Past the late nineteenth century, New York City housed Tin Pan Alley, the center of the music publishing industry. In the 1920s, when recordings and dissemination emerged, New York was again in the forefront. Broadway was the epicenter of American theater, and New York was the center of the American fine art world. In curt, in the early twentieth century no other American city possessed the businesses and institutions to back up literature and the arts that New York did.
In spite of its physical presence, size, and its literary and arts infrastructure, the nature of Harlem and its relation to the Renaissance are very circuitous. The word "Harlem" evoked strong and conflicting images among African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Was information technology the Negro metropolis, blackness Manhattan, the political, cultural, and spiritual middle of African America, a land of enough, a city of refuge, or a black ghetto and emerging slum? For some, the paradigm of Harlem was more personal. Rex Solomon Gillis, the main character in Rudolph Fisher's "The City of Refuge," was i of these. Emerging out of the subway at 135th and Lennox Avenue, Gillis was transfixed:
Clean air, blue sky, bright sunlight. Gillis fix down his tan-cardboard extension-case and wiped his black, shining brow. Then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; upward and downwardly Lenox Avenue, upwards and down 1 Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street; big, lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; black ones, brown ones, yellowish ones; men standing idle on the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping about the sidewalks; here and there a white face drifting along, merely Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. There was convincingly no incertitude of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem.7
Gillis then noticed the commotion in the street every bit trucks and autos crowded into the intersection at the command of the traffic cop—an African American traffic cop:
The Southern Negro'southward optics opened wide; his mouth opened wider. . . . For at that place stood a handsome, brass-buttoned giant directing the heaviest traffic Gillis had ever seen; halting unnumbered tons of automobiles and trucks and wagons and pushcarts and street-cars; holding them at bay with one paw while he swept similar tons peremptorily on with the other; ruling the wide crossing with supreme self-assurance; and he, as well, was a Negro!
Yet nearly of the vehicles that leaped or crouched at his bidding carried white passengers. I of these overdrove bounds a few feet and Gillis heard the officeholder's shrill whistle and gruff reproof, saw the commuter's face turn carmine and his automobile draw back like a threatened pup. It was across belief—impossible. Black might be white, simply it couldn't be that white!
"Done died an' woke up in Heaven," thought King Solomon, watching, fascinated; and after a while, every bit if the wonder of information technology were too great to believe simply by seeing, "Cullud policemans!" he said, one-half aloud; so repeated over and over, with greater and greater confidence, "Fifty-fifty got cullud policemans…"eight
Gillis was ane of those who sought refuge in Harlem. He fled North Carolina afterwards shooting a white man. Now, in Harlem, the policeman was black. Not that this inverse his fate. At the terminate of the story, 1 of these black policemen dragged Gillis away in handcuffs. The reality of Harlem often contradicted the myth.
For poet Langston Hughes, Harlem was too something of a refuge. Post-obit a mostly unhappy childhood living at one time or another with his female parent or male parent, grandmother, or neighbors, Hughes convinced his stern and foreboding father to finance his instruction at Columbia University. He recalled his 1921 arrival:
"I went up the steps and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy over again. I registered at the Y. When higher opened, I did not want to motility into the dormitory at Columbia. I actually did not desire to become the higher at all. I didn't desire to do anything but live in Harlem, get a job and work in that location."nine
After a less than happy twelvemonth at Columbia, Hughes did exactly that. He dropped out of school and moved into Harlem. Hughes, though, never lost sight that poverty, overcrowded and battered housing, and racial prejudice were part of the daily experience of most Harlem residents.
For Hughes, likewise, the desire to just "live in Harlem" was as much myth as reality. After dropping out of Columbia and moving to Harlem he actually spent little time there. Until the late 1930s, he was much more than of a visitor or transient in Harlem than a resident. While Hughes spent many weekends and vacations in Harlem during his years at Lincoln Academy, during the acme of the Renaissance, between 1923 and 1938 he was away from the metropolis more than he was there, more a visitor than a full-time resident.
James Weldon Johnson saw a still dissimilar Harlem. In his 1930 volume, Blackness Manhattan, he described the black urban center in near utopian terms as the race's smashing promise and its grand social experiment: "And then here nosotros take Harlem—non merely a colony or a community or a settlement . . . but a black urban center, located in the heart of white Manhattan, and containing more Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on earth. It strikes the uninformed observer equally a miracle, a phenomenon straight out of the skies."ten When Johnson looked at Harlem he did not run into an emerging slum or a ghetto, just a blackness neighborhood north of Central Park that was "one of the most beautiful and healthful" in the city. "Information technology is not a fringe, it is not a slum, nor is it a 'quarter' consisting of battered tenements. Information technology is a section of new-law apartment houses and handsome dwellings, with streets as well paved, besides lighted, and every bit well kept as in any other part of the metropolis."eleven
Without question Harlem was a speedily growing black metropolis, but what kind of urban center was it becoming? Harlem historian Gilbert Osofsky argued, "the almost profound change that Harlem experienced in the 1920'due south was its emergence as a slum. Largely within the space of a unmarried decade Harlem was transformed from a potentially platonic community to a neighborhood with manifold social and economic problems chosen 'deplorable,' 'unspeakable,' 'incredible.'"12 As a issue, nigh of Harlem's residents lived in poor housing, either in poverty or on the verge of poverty, in a neighborhood experiencing the typical results of poverty and discrimination: growing vice, crime, juvenile delinquency, and drug addiction.
In short, the twenty-four hours-to-twenty-four hour period realities that most Harlemites faced differed dramatically from the image of Harlem life presented by James Weldon Johnson. Harlem was beset with contradictions. While information technology reflected the cocky-conviction, militancy, and pride of the New Negro in his or her need for equality, and it reflected the aspirations and creative genius of the talented immature people of the Harlem Renaissance along with the economic aspirations of the black migrants seeking a better life in the north, ultimately Harlem failed to resolve its problems and to fulfill these dreams.
The 1935 Harlem Race Anarchism put to rest the conflicting images of Harlem. On March 19, 1935, a young Puerto Rican male child was caught stealing a ten-cent knife from the counter of a 135th Street five-and-dime shop. Following the arrest, rumors spread that police force had beaten the youth to decease. A large oversupply gathered, shouting "constabulary brutality" and "racial discrimination." A window was smashed, looting began, and the anarchism spread throughout the night. The violence resulted in three blacks expressionless, two hundred stores trashed and burned, and more than than 2 million dollars worth of destroyed property. The Puerto Rican youth whose arrest precipitated the riot had been released the previous evening when the merchant chose not to press charges. Shocked past the uprising, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia established an interracial committee headed past Due east. Franklin Frazier, a professor of sociology at Howard University, to investigate the riot. They concluded the obvious: the riot resulted from a general frustration with racial discrimination and poverty.
What the committee failed to report was that the riot shattered one time and for all James Weldon Johnson's image of Harlem as the African American urban utopia. In spite of the presence of artists and writers, nightclubs, music, and entertainment, Harlem was a slum, a black ghetto characterized by poverty and discrimination. Burned-out storefronts might be fertile ground for political action, only non for art, literature, and civilisation. Harlem would see new black writers in the years to come. Musicians, poets, and artists would continue to make their dwelling there, but it never again served as the focal point of a artistic motility with the national and international impact of the Harlem Renaissance.
Johnson did not personally witness the 1935 Riot. He had left the city in 1931, the twelvemonth afterward he published Black Manhattan, to take the Spence Chair in Creative Literature at Fisk University in Nashville. He lived there until his death in 1938.
Renaissance
Then, what was the Harlem Renaissance? The simple answer is that the Harlem Renaissance (or the New Negro Motion, or whatever name is preferred) was the virtually important consequence in twentieth-century African American intellectual and cultural life. While best known for its literature, it touched every aspect of African American literary and artistic creativity from the end of World War I through the Great Depression. Literature, critical writing, music, theater, musical theater, and the visual arts were transformed by this move; it also afflicted politics, social development, and almost every aspect of the African American experience from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s.
But there was likewise something ephemeral about the Harlem Renaissance, something vague and hard to define. The Harlem Renaissance, then, was an African American literary and artistic motility anchored in Harlem, but cartoon from, extending to, and influencing African American communities beyond the country and beyond. Equally we take seen, it also had no precise beginning; nor did information technology take a precise ending. Rather, it emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American community that followed World War I, blossomed in the 1920s, and so faded away in the mid-to-late 1930s and early 1940s.
Besides the Harlem Renaissance has no unmarried divers ideological or stylistic standard that unified its participants and defined the move. Instead, well-nigh participants in the movement resisted black or white efforts to define or narrowly categorize their fine art. For example, in 1926, a group of writers, spearheaded by writer Wallace Thurman and including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and artist Aaron Douglas, among others, produced their own literary magazine, Fire!! Ane purpose of this venture was the annunciation of their intent to assume buying of the literary Renaissance. In the process, they turned their backs on Alain Locke and W. Due east. B. Du Bois and others who sought to aqueduct black creativity into what they considered to be the proper aesthetic and political directions. Despite the efforts of Thurman and his young colleagues, Fire!! fizzled out afterwards but ane issue and the movement remained ill defined. In fact, this was its almost distinguishing feature. There would exist no mutual literary style or political credo associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It was far more than an identity than an ideology or a literary or artistic schoolhouse. What united participants was their sense of taking office in a common endeavor and their commitment to giving artistic expression to the African American experience.
If in that location was a statement that defined the philosophy of the new literary move information technology was Langston Hughes'southward essay, "The Negro Creative person and the Racial Mountain," published in The Nation, June 16, 1926:
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fearfulness or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are cute. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not their displeasure doesn't affair either. We will build our temples for tomorrow, strong as nosotros know how, and we will stand up on superlative of the mountain, free within ourselves.13
Like Fire!!, this essay was the motion's declaration of independence, both from the stereotypes that whites held nigh African Americans and the expectations that they had for their literary works, and from the expectations that blackness leaders and black critics had for black writers, and the expectations that they placed on their work.
There was, not surprisingly, resistance to this independence, especially among those concerned with the political costs that the realistic expressions of blackness life could engender—feeding white prejudice by exposing the less savory elements of the black customs. Du Bois responded to Hughes a few weeks afterward in a Chicago speech that was subsequently published in The Crisis as "The Criteria of Negro Fine art" (October 1926): "Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever fine art I take for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and savour. I do not care a damn for whatever fine art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent."
The determination of black writers to follow their own artistic vision led to the artistic diverseness that was the main characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance. This variety is clearly evident in the poetry of the period where subject field matter, style, and tone ranged from the traditional to the more inventive. Langston Hughes, for case, captured the life and linguistic communication of the working course, and the rhythm and style of the blues in a number of his poems, none more than and then than "The Weary Blues." In dissimilarity to Hughes'due south appropriation of the grade of black music, particularly jazz and the blues, and his use of the black vernacular, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen utilized more than traditional and classical forms for their poetry. McKay used sonnets for much of his protestation verse, while Cullen'due south poems relied both on classical literary allusions and symbols and standard poetic forms.
This diverseness and experimentation likewise characterized music. This was evidenced in the blues of Bessie Smith and the range of jazz from the early rhythms of Jelly Roll Morton to the instrumentation of Louis Armstrong or the sophisticated orchestration of Knuckles Ellington. In painting, the soft colors and pastels that Aaron Douglas used to create a veiled view for the African-inspired images in his paintings and murals contrast sharply with Jacob Lawrence'south use of vivid colors and sharply defined images.
Inside this diversity, several themes emerged which fix the character of the Harlem Renaissance. No black writer, musician, or artist expressed all of these themes, but each did accost i or more in his or her work. The start of these themes was the endeavor to recapture the African American past—its rural southern roots, urban experience, and African heritage. Interest in the African past corresponded with the rise of Pan-Africanism in African American politics, which was at the center of Marcus Garvey'southward credo and too a concern of W. Due east. B. Du Bois in the 1920s.
It likewise reflected the full general fascination with ancient African history that followed the discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922. Poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes addressed their African heritage in their works, while artist Aaron Douglas used African motifs in his fine art. A number of musicians, from the classical composer William Grant Still to jazz bully Louis Armstrong, introduced African inspired rhythms and themes in their compositions.
The exploration of black southern heritage was reflected in novels past Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as in Jacob Lawrence's art. Zora Neale Hurston used her experience as a folklorist equally the footing for her extensive study of rural southern black life in her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Jacob Lawrence turned to African American history for much of his work including two of his multi-canvas series' of paintings, the Harriett Tubman series and the one on the Black Migration.
Harlem Renaissance writers and artists too explored life in Harlem and other urban centers. Both Hughes and McKay drew on Harlem images for their poetry, and McKay used the ghetto equally the setting for his first novel, Home to Harlem. Some blackness writers, including McKay and Hughes, as well as Rudolph Fisher and Wallace Thurman, were accused of overemphasizing crime, sexuality, and other less-savory aspects of ghetto life in order to feed the voyeuristic desires of white readers and publishers, in imitation of white novelist Carl Van Vechten's controversial Harlem novel, Nigger Heaven.
A third major theme addressed past the literature of the Harlem Renaissance was race. Virtually every novel and play, and nearly of the poetry, explored race in America, especially the impact of race and racism on African Americans. In their simplest form these works protested racial injustice. Claude McKay's sonnet, "If Nosotros Must Die," was amid the best of this genre. Langston Hughes also wrote protest pieces, as did almost every blackness writer at one time or another.
Amidst the visual artists, Lawrence's historical serial emphasized the racial struggle that dominated African American history, while Romare Bearden'due south early illustrative work oft focused on racial politics. The struggle against lynching in the mid-1920s stimulated anti-lynching verse, as well as Walter White'southward carefully researched study of the subject, Rope and Faggot. In the early 1930s, the Scottsboro incident stimulated considerable protest writing, as well as a 1934 anthology, Negro, which addressed race in an international context. About of the literary efforts of the Harlem Renaissance avoided overt protest or propaganda, focusing instead on the psychological and social affect of race. Among the all-time of these studies were Nella Larsen's ii novels, Quicksand in 1928 and, a twelvemonth after, Passing. Both explored characters of mixed racial heritage who struggled to define their racial identity in a world of prejudice and racism. Langston Hughes addressed similar themes in his verse form "Cross," and in his 1931 play, Mulatto, as did Jessie Fauset in her 1929 novel, Plum Bun. That same year Wallace Thurman made color bigotry within the urban blackness customs the focus of his novel, The Blacker the Berry.
Finally, the Harlem Renaissance incorporated all aspects of African American civilization in its creative work. This ranged from the utilise of black music every bit an inspiration for poetry or black folklore as an inspiration for novels and short stories. Best known for this was Langston Hughes who used the rhythms and styles of jazz and the blues in much of his early poesy. James Weldon Johnson, who published ii collections of blackness spirituals in 1927 and 1928, and Sterling Dark-brown, who used the blues and southern work songs in many of the poems in his 1932 volume of poetry, Southern Route, continued the practice that Hughes had initiated. Other writers exploited black religion every bit a literary source. Johnson made the black preacher and his sermons the basis for the poems in God's Trombones, while Hurston and Larsen used black religion and black preachers in their novels. Hurston'south first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), described the exploits of a southern blackness preacher, while in the last portion of Quicksand, Larsen's heroine was ensnared past religion and a southern blackness preacher.
Through all of these themes, Harlem Renaissance writers, musicians, and artists were adamant to express the African American experience in all of its diverseness and complexity as realistically as possible. This delivery to realism ranged from the ghetto realism that created such controversy when writers exposed negative aspects of African American life, to beautifully crafted and detailed portraits of black life in small towns such equally in Hughes'due south novel, Not Without Laughter, or the witty and biting depiction of Harlem's black literati in Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring.
The Harlem Renaissance appealed to and relied on a mixed audience—the African American center class and white consumers of the arts. African American magazines such every bit The Crunch (the NAACP monthly journal) and Opportunity (the monthly publication of the Urban League) employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staff, published their poesy and short stories, and promoted African American literature through manufactures, reviews, and almanac literary prizes. They besides printed illustrations by black artists and used blackness artists in the layout design of their periodicals. Too, blacks attempted to produce their own literary and artistic venues. In addition to the short-lived Fire!!, Wallace Thurman spearheaded another single-event literary magazine, Harlem, in 1927, while poet Countee Cullen edited a "Negro Poets" issue of the avant-garde poetry magazine Palms in 1926, and brought out an anthology of African American verse, Caroling Sunset, in 1927.
As important as these literary outlets were, they were not sufficient to support a literary motion. Consequently, the Harlem Renaissance relied heavily on white-endemic enterprises for its creative works. Publishing houses, magazines, recording companies, theaters, and art galleries were primarily white-owned, and fiscal support through grants, prizes, and awards more often than not involved white money. In fact, 1 of the major accomplishments of the Renaissance was to push open the door to mainstream periodicals, publishing houses, and funding sources. African American music also played to mixed audiences. Harlem's cabarets attracted both Harlem residents and white New Yorkers seeking out Harlem nightlife. The famous Cotton Club carried this to a bizarre extreme by providing black entertainment for exclusively white audiences. Ultimately, the more successful blackness musicians and entertainers moved their performances downtown.
The relationship of the Harlem Renaissance to white venues and white audiences created controversy. While almost African American critics strongly supported the movement, others like Benjamin Brawley and even West. E. B. Du Bois were sharply critical and accused Renaissance writers of reinforcing negative African American stereotypes. Langston Hughes'south assertion that black artists intended to limited themselves freely, no matter what the blackness public or white public thought, accurately reflected the attitude of most writers and artists.
Slow fade to black
The end of the Harlem Renaissance is every bit difficult to ascertain as its beginnings. It varies somewhat from one artistic field to another. In musical theater, the popularity of black musical reviews died out by the early 1930s, although there were occasional efforts, mostly unsuccessful, to revive the genre. Nonetheless, black performers and musicians connected to work, although not and so ofttimes in all black shows. Black music connected into the World War Ii era, although the popularity of blues singers waned somewhat, and jazz changed as the large ring mode became pop. Literature also changed, and a new generation of black writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison emerged with lilliputian interest in or connection with the Harlem Renaissance. In art, a number of artists who had emerged in the 1930s continued to piece of work, just again, with no connexion to a broader African American move. Also, a number of Harlem Renaissance literary figures went silent, left Harlem, or died. Some, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, connected to write and publish into the 1940s and across, although there was no longer whatever sense that they were connected to a literary movement. And Harlem lost some of its magic post-obit the 1935 race riot. In whatsoever case, few, if whatsoever, people were talking about a Harlem Renaissance by 1940.
The Harlem Renaissance flourished in the late 1920s and early on 1930s, merely its antecedents and legacy spread many years before 1920 and later on 1930. It had no universally recognized name, only was known variously as the New Negro Movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, likewise every bit the Harlem Renaissance. It had no clearly defined commencement or end, just emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American community that followed World War I, blossomed in the mid- to late-1920s, and and so faded away in the mid-1930s.
What was the Harlem Renaissance and why was it important?
While at its core information technology was primarily a literary motion, the Harlem Renaissance touched all of the African American creative arts. While its participants were determined to truthfully represent the African American experience and believed in racial pride and equality, they shared no mutual political philosophy, social belief, creative style, or aesthetic principle. This was a move of individuals free of any overriding manifesto. While central to African American artistic and intellectual life, by no means did information technology enjoy the full back up of the blackness or white intelligentsia; it generated as much hostility and criticism as information technology did back up and praise. From the moment of its birth, its legitimacy was debated. Nevertheless, by at least one measure, its success was clear: the Harlem Renaissance was the start fourth dimension that a considerable number of mainstream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously, and it was the first fourth dimension that African American literature and the arts attracted significant attending from the nation at large.
1Carl Van Doren, "The Younger Generation of Negro Writers," Opportunity two (1924): 144–45. Van Doren'due south Civic Club Dinner accost was reprinted in Opportunity.
2 Survey Graphic, Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, 6 (March 1925).
3Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Estimation (New York: Atheneum, 1969).
4Meet Terry Waldo, "Eubie Blake," in Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Cary D. Wintz (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2007), 151–65.
5Langston Hughes, The Large Sea (New York: Colina and Wang, 1963), 223–24.
6James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 120–21.
viiRudolph Fisher, "The City of Refuge," in The New Negro, 57–viii. The City of Refuge was outset published in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1925.
viiiIbid. 58–9.
ixHughes, Big Sea, 81–2.
xJohnson, Black Manhattan, 3–four.
11Ibid, 146. Johnson also expresses this view of Harlem in "The Making of Harlem," Survey Graphic, 6 (March 1925), 635–39.
12Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930, (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 135.
13Langston Hughes, "The Negro Creative person and the Racial Mountain, The Nation. June 16, 1926, 694.
Song of the Towers by Aaron Douglas for the landscape series Aspects of Negro Life, commissioned in 1934 by the WPA for the Harlem Branch of the New York City Public Library. Schomburg Center for Inquiry in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, New York Public Library.
Online Educational Resources: The Harlem Renaissance
Humanities Texas has assembled a list of online educational resources related to the Harlem Renaissance and its history, literature, and civilization. These websites include primary source documents, lesson plans, photographs, and other interactive elements that will enhance classroom instruction and pupil comprehension.
Portrait of Charles Due south. Johnson. Johnson was founder of Opportunity, the National Urban League'south monthly magazine, and organizer of the Civic Club Dinner that marked the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance as a literary movement. U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Data Drove, Prints and Photographs Sectionalization, Library of Congress. Photograph past Gordon Parks.
The cover of the "Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro" issue of Survey Graphic, featuring an illustration of lyric tenor and composer Roland Hayes by Winold Reiss, 1925. Schomburg Center for Inquiry in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Sectionalization, The New York Public Library.
The cast of Shuffle Along, 1921.
Canvass music for "I'm Just Wild Nigh Harry" from Shuffle Along, the get-go Broadway musical written, produced, and performed by African Americans, by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Music Segmentation, Library of Congress. Copyright eolith, 1921 (155.3b).
Blues composer and musician W. C. Handy (left) with bandleader and composer Duke Ellington (correct), ca. 1940s. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Civilisation, Photographs and Prints Partition, New York Public Library.
Sail music for "Goodnight Angeline" by James Reese Europe, 1919. The photographs on the cover evidence Europe with the 369th U.S. Infantry Division "Hell Fighters" Ring. Performing Arts Encyclopedia, Library of Congress.
The Prodigal Son by Aaron Douglas in God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse by James Weldon Johnson. New York: The Viking Press, 1927. Douglas's painting was inspired by Johnson'southward verse form of the aforementioned proper name. Courtesy of Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
The Seine past Henry Ossawa Tanner, c. 1902. Built-in in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Tanner moved to Paris in 1891 and achieved international recognition for his work. Gift of the Avalon Foundation. The National Gallery of Fine art, Washington, DC.
Section of a map of New York Urban center showing Primal Park, Yorkville, and the southern role of Harlem, 1870. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, New York Public Library.
Directors of the Afro-American Investment and Building Visitor, Brooklyn, New York, organized September 1892. Photo from The Negro in Business organization past Booker T. Washington. Boston: Hartel, Jenkins & Co., 1907. openlibrary.org
Within 30 seconds walk of the 135th Street Co-operative (New York Public Library), Harlem, 1919. Photograph by F. F. Hopper. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Sectionalisation, New York Public Library.
In Black Manhattan (1930), James Weldon Johnson'due south history of African Americans in New York, two demographic maps of Harlem show its quick flourishing in the early decades of the twentieth century. Harry Ransom Center.
From left to correct: Langston Hughes, Charles Southward. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher, and Hubert T. Delany, on the roof of 580 St. Nicholas Artery, Harlem, on the occasion of a political party in Hughes' honor, 1924. Schomburg Centre for Inquiry in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Partition, New York Public Library.
Lenox Avenue in Harlem, ca. 1920s.
Policemen in Harlem, 1929. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Civilization, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, New York Public Library.
Portrait of Langston Hughes as a fellow. Photo by James L. Allen. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Civilization, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.
Portrait of James Weldon Johnson, Dec 3, 1932. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Drove, Prints and Photographs Segmentation, Library of Congress.
Report to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia by the interracial committee headed by E. Franklin Frazier assigned to investigate the March 19, 1935, riot in Harlem. Library of Congress.
Harlem Dandy by Miguel Covarrubias, 1927. Covarrubias, a Mexican painter, caricaturist, illustrator, ethnologist, and art historian, had a deep appreciation for the people of Harlem. His 1927 book, Negro Drawings, reflected his interest in Harlem performers and people on the street. Harry Ransom Center.
Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston, ca. late 1930s. Hurston was an author, anthropologist, and among the publishers of Burn!! Prints and Photographs Partitioning, Library of Congress.
The front and dorsum covers of the first and only consequence of Fire!!, published in 1926, with artwork by Aaron Douglas. Harry Ransom Center.
Portrait of W. E. B. Du Bois, May 31, 1919. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, published in 1926, dust cover artwork by Miguel Covarrubias. Harry Ransom Center.
Portrait of Countee Cullen in Cardinal Park, June 20, 1941. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Grit cover for Passing by Nella Larsen, published in 1928. Harry Bribe Centre.
Portrait of Jessie Redmon Fauset, n.d. Harmon Foundation Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
Due west. E. B. Du Bois (back right) and staff in the Crisis magazine function, n.d. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Partitioning, New York Public Library.
Advertizing for the Cotton Club featuring Cab Calloway and his Cotton fiber Social club Orchestra, 1925. Schomburg Center for Enquiry in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.
Portrait of writer Richard Wright, June 23, 1939. Ralph Ellison served every bit best man at Wright's wedding this same year. Photo past Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Cover of the October 1928 issue of The Negro American with photograph of Miss Erma Sweatt, sis of civil-rights activist Heman Sweatt. The Negro American was a Harlem Renaissance era magazine published in San Antonio, Texas, that declared itself to be "the only magazine in the South devoted to Negro life and civilization." This particular outcome includes a review of Rudolph Fisher's novel The Walls of Jericho (page 13). Courtesy of Michael L. Gillette.
Download the Full Issue of The Negro American
You can explore the full upshot of The Negro American (October 1928) described above past downloading a PDF version here.
Source: https://www.humanitiestexas.org/news/articles/harlem-renaissance-what-was-it-and-why-does-it-matter
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