# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.
-Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"

In the 1920's, creative and intellectual life flourished within African American communities in the North and Midwest regions of the United States, but nowhere more so than in Harlem. The New York City neighborhood, encompassing only three square miles, teemed with black artists, intellectuals, writers, and musicians. Black-owned businesses, from newspapers, publishing houses, and music companies to nightclubs, cabarets, and theaters, helped fuel the neighborhood's thriving scene. Some of the era's most important literary and artistic figures migrated to or passed through "the Negro capital of the world," helping to define a period in which African American artists reclaimed their identity and racial pride in defiance of widespread prejudice and discrimination.

The origins of the Harlem Renaissance lie in the Great Migration of the early 20th century, when hundreds of thousands of black people migrated from the South into dense urban areas that offered relatively more economic opportunities and cultural capital. It was, in the words of editor, journalist, and critic Alain Locke, "a spiritual coming of age" for African American artists and thinkers, who seized upon their "first chances for group expression and self-determination." Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Georgia Douglas Johnson explored the beauty and pain of black life and sought to define themselves and their community outside of white stereotypes.

Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance reflected a diversity of forms and subjects. Some poets, such as Claude McKay, used culturally European forms-the sonnet was one--melded with a radical message of resistance, as in "If We Must Die." Others, including James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, brought specifically black cultural creations into their work, infusing their poems with the rhythms of ragtime, jazz, and blues.

The collection that follows offers a sampling of poetry published during this period, along with essays by and about Harlem Renaissance writers and audio recordings and discussions of their work. You can also browse all of our Harlem Renaissance poets here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Harlem Renaissance | Poetry Foundation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An introduction tracing the groundbreaking work of African Americans in this pivotal cultural and artistic movement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On this Page:

1. Overview

2. Selected Works

3. Activity: Respond and Relate

4. Activity: Of and For African Americans

5. Activity: African Art, Modern Life, and a Changing World

6. Activity: Music, Art, and Collaboration

7. Additional Resources

How do visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance explore black identity and political empowerment? How does visual art of the Harlem Renaissance relate to current-day events and issues? How do migration and displacement influence cultural production?
"I believe that the [African American's] advantages and opportunities are greater in Harlem than in any other place in the country, and that Harlem will become the intellectual, the cultural and the financial center for Negroes of the United States and will exert a vital influence upon all Negro peoples." -James Weldon Johnson, "Harlem: The Culture Capital," 1925

The Harlem Renaissance was a period of rich cross-disciplinary artistic and cultural activity among African Americans between the end of World War I (1917) and the onset of the Great Depression and lead up to World War II (the 1930s). Artists associated with the movement asserted pride in black life and identity, a rising consciousness of inequality and discrimination, and interest in the rapidly changing modern world-many experiencing a freedom of expression through the arts for the first time.

While the Harlem Renaissance may be best known for its literary and performing arts-pioneering figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Ma Rainey may be familiar-sculptors, painters, and printmakers were key contributors to the first modern Afrocentric cultural movement and formed a black avant-garde in the visual arts.

Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) is known as the "father of African American art." He defined a modern visual language that represented black Americans in a new light. Douglas began his artistic career as a landscape painter but was influenced by modern art movements such as cubism, in which subjects appear fragmented and fractured, and by the graphic arts, which typically use bold colors and stylized forms. He and other artists also looked toward West Africa for inspiration, making personal connections to the stylized masks and sculpture from Benin, Congo, and Senegal, which they viewed as a link to their African heritage. They also turned to the art of antiquity, such as Egyptian sculptural reliefs, of popular interest due to the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb. Printmakers James Lesesne Wells (1902-1993) and Hale Woodruff (1900-1980) also explored a streamlined approach that drew from African and European artistic influences.

Sculptor Richmond Barthé (1901-1989) worked in a realistic style, representing his subjects in a nuanced and sympathetic light in which black Americans had seldom been depicted before. Painter Archibald John Motley Jr. (1891-1981) began his career during the 1920s as one of the first African American graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the early part of his career, he created intimate and direct portraits, such as Portrait of My Grandmother of 1922.

James Van Der Zee (1886-1983), a photographer, became the unofficial chronicler of African American life in Harlem. Whether through formal, posed family photographs in his studio or through photo essays of Harlem's cabarets, restaurants, barbershops, and church services, his large body of work documents a growing, diverse, and thriving community.

The formation of new African American creative communities was engendered in part by the Great Migration-the largest resettlement of Americans in the history of the continental United States, mainly from rural Southern regions to more populous urban centers in the North. Pursuit of jobs, better education, and housing-as well as escape from Jim Crow laws and a life constrained by institutionalized racism-drove black Americans to relocate.

The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 deflated the artistic energy of the period as many people became unemployed and focused on meeting basic needs. Yet the Harlem Renaissance planted artistic seeds that would germinate for decades. Many of the visual artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance came to participate in the Federal Art Project (1935-1943), an employment program for artists sponsored by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. Further, a key legacy of the Harlem Renaissance was the creation of the Harlem Community Art Center (HCAC) in 1937, part of a cross-country network of arts centers. The HCAC offered hands-on art making led by professional artists and maintained a printmaking workshop. The HCAC was critical in providing black artists continued support and training that helped sustain the next generation of artists to emerge after the war. In subsequent decades, the Harlem Renaissance inspired new waves of artists and laid critical groundwork for the civil rights movement and the Black Arts Movement.

As a final note, women artists were also part of the Harlem Renaissance and participated especially as singers, actors, dancers, and writers. Less well-known are the women visual artists of the period. Gaining access to the visual arts scene was more difficult than entry into the performing arts, as the practice of painting and sculpture in particular were not considered gender-appropriate or "feminine." Two sculptors, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) and Augusta Savage (1892-1962), the latter an activist, artist, and director of the HCAC, made their mark during the period, but their work has been largely overlooked and is only coming into full assessment by art historians today.

Looking at the image set, you will see that artists explored different aspects of African American life and identity during the first part of the twentieth century.

Have students evaluate the images to discover what some of the connecting ideas among them may be. Students can start by examining elements of art including colors, forms, lines, textures, and shapes. Then they can move on to exploring what subjects are pictured (e.g., slavery, beauty, family, music) or what statement they believe the artist may be making.

Ask small groups of students working together to arrange the works according to three or four connecting ideas.

"We younger negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too." -Langston Hughes, published in the Nation, 1925

Mainstream publications of the 1920s circulated racially stereotyped images and ideas that rankled the black intelligentsia and writers of the time. In response, the artists in this module and figures such as philosopher Alain Locke and activist W. E. B. Du Bois introduced complex and nuanced concepts of black individuality through publications such as The Crisis, Opportunity: The Journal of Negro Life, Messenger, and Fire!

These three images represent individualized portraits of African Americans, which were infrequent in popular culture and art prior to the Harlem Renaissance. Study each image and notice the details that make the works of art specific portrayals of individuals.

Make comparisons. Pair the Richmond Barthé sculpture and Werner Drewes woodcut. Discuss what they have in common and how they are different. Start with basic information, such as the fact that the works are in different mediums, that one is a boy and the other a woman, and then try to go deeper, looking at how each artist chose to represent his subject.

Next compare the Drewes woodcut with the painting by Archibald John Motley Jr. Repeat the exercise detailed above.

Why does Langston Hughes, in the quote above, claim the right for African Americans to be beautiful "and ugly too"? How are standards of attractiveness determined?

In France, the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro opened in Paris in 1878. Its ethnographic displays introduced both artists and the general public to objects from Africa, the Americas, and Asia. World's fairs of the period, which took place in Europe and the United States, similarly offered expositions of cultures from around the world together with industrial and scientific exhibits and demonstrations.

In the United States, galleries and museums had been showing African works since about 1914, mostly as artifacts for ethnographic study rather than works of art. In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented the first exhibition of African sculpture and artifacts as art in a modern art museum. The exhibition was called African Negro Art and showed approximately 600 works of African sculpture, textiles, masks, and other objects.

Aaron Douglas and Pablo Picasso created avant-garde works of art about 25 years apart. They came from different cultural perspectives, yet both took inspiration from African art. Douglas and fellow visual artists Hale Woodruff and Archibald John Motley Jr. lived in Paris for periods of time to paint and study European art, whose influences they absorbed in their work.

Read short biographies of Douglas and Picasso on a trusted source.

Look carefully at the works of art and respond to the following questions:

How does each artist use line, shape, form, and color?

How are the artists' approaches similar or different?

Consider the cultural context of the works of each artist and how it might have influenced his practice. What were the biographical/personal, political, social, economic, artistic, and geographic factors that may have influenced the artist?

Develop lists of these factors for the Douglas and Picasso objects.

Artists during the Harlem Renaissance often worked collaboratively. Visual artists inspired one another and absorbed the influence of poets, writers, musicians, dancers, and actors. They captured the people, their aspirations, and the scenes of the time.

Some artists made personal connections to the stylized masks and sculpture from Benin, Congo, and Senegal, which they viewed as links to their African heritage.

Gospel, jazz, and blues music, developed by artists of the African diaspora, was a central feature of the Harlem Renaissance. Aaron Douglas often depicted musical instruments and people dancing in his art. An example includes his illustration in God's Trombones on the page facing the verse "The Prodigal Son."

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), author of God's Trombones, wrote poems, editorials, and books that explored the shifts in racial attitudes, black empowerment, and civil rights building during the first part of the 20th century. His work brought him into contact with prominent figures of the period, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and President Woodrow Wilson. Among his diverse accomplishments, Johnson also wrote the lyrics for the black spiritual song "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" in 1900 for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birthday.

In the preface to God's Trombones, Johnson talks about the "old-time preacher" within the black community: a model of leadership, promoter of literacy, beacon of hope during dark times, and a uniter of diverse people of African and Caribbean descent who were brought to America and enslaved.
For Johnson, the trombones of the book's title and Douglas's illustrations had specific symbolism, relating to a sermon he heard delivered by a charismatic preacher:
"...He [the preacher] strode the pulpit up and down in what was actually a very rhythmic dance and brought into play the full gamut of his wonderful voice, a voice-what shall I say? Not of an organ or a trumpet, but rather of a trombone, the instrument possessing above all others the power to express the wide and varied range of emotions encompassed by the human voice-and with greater amplitude." -James Weldon Johnson, preface, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, 1927
Choose one of the following sermons from Johnson's God's Trombones: "The Creation," "The Prodigal Son," or "Noah Built the Ark." Distribute copies and have students read the verse and write down the poem's subject, its narrator or protagonist(s), and its tone. Does the language seem formal or informal? Vivid or subdued? Ask students to note any unfamiliar words. Ask students to identify parallel elements in Johnson's text and Douglas's illustrations.

Africana Age: African and African Diasporan Transformations in the 20th Century, Maps, New York Public Library

Africana Age: African and African Diasporan Transformations in the 20th Century, The New Negro Renaissance, New York Public Library

Harlem Renaissance: A Resource Guide, Library of Congress

The Harlem Renaissance, Online Educational Resources, Humanities Texas

Jim Crow Laws, Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historical Park, National Park Service

Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, offering a brief history of its ethnographic/colonial collections
National Museum of African American History and Culture National Museum of African Art
One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series, Museum of Modern Art

" On 'The Creation' and God's Trombones," Modern American Poetry

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library

" With Powerful Murals, Hale Woodruff Paved the Way For African-American Artists ", NPR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Harlem Renaissance | National Gallery of Art

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How do visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance explore black identity and political empowerment? How does visual art of the Harlem Renaissance relate to current-day events and issues? How do migration and displacement influence cultural production?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Against the Odds: The Artists of the Harlem Renaissance

# data[].attributes.body
Add a short audio or video reflection (1–2 minutes)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
I'm Just Wild About Harry (From "Shuffle Along")

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

Teacher's Guide

To help your students analyze these primary sources, get a graphic organizer and guides: Analysis Tool and Guides

A tremendous explosion of creativity rocked the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, and it took the name of the New York City neighborhood of Harlem.

Historical Background

The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a period of great cultural activity and innovation among African American artists and writers, one that saw new artists and landmark works appear in the fields of literature, dance, art, and music. The participants were all fiercely individualistic talents, and not all of them saw themselves as being part of a movement. But in time writers such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes; painters like Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden; and musicians and composers such as Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith became widely known as members of the Harlem Renaissance.

Much of the foundation of the Harlem Renaissance was laid by earlier generations of African American educators, students, and intellectuals. In the decades following the Civil War, many racial barriers to education were removed, and African Americans took advantage of the new educational opportunities in great numbers. Dozens of African American colleges and universities were founded, and African American professors and other intellectuals took increasingly public roles. By the early 1900s, intellectual leaders like W.E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson were writing, lecturing, and being published in journals such as Crisis and The Messenger.

At the same time, African Americans were moving in huge numbers from the South to northern industrial cities, like New York, where they could find work and escape some of the institutionalized discrimination and mistreatment caused by the South's Jim Crow laws. Innovative young African American writers, painters, and musicians began gathering in a number of neighborhoods in Manhattan, including Harlem and Greenwich Village, working together and developing new ideas, and in the years after World War I they gained national attention.

Some of the most prominent works created during the Harlem Renaissance were in the field of literature. Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes produced novels, poetry, short stories and memoirs.

Hurston produced important work in a number of fields. An anthropologist and folklorist, she studied with the eminent anthropologist Franz Boaz at Columbia University, and used the music and stories that she collected as a folklorist to inform her novels, plays, and other books, including Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God. She also performed music based on her folkloric research, and has left a number of recordings along with her manuscripts.

Langston Hughes, best known as a poet, also wrote plays, a novel, short stories, and an autobiography. Many of his poems were set to music by African American composers, and he collaborated with Zora Neale Hurston on a play, Mule Bone. Another artist who achieved great things in a number of fields was the multitalented Paul Robeson. An honor student and All-American athlete while at Rutgers University, Robeson went on to graduate from Columbia University Law School, and soon after became a famed concert singer, recording artist, stage and film actor. He was an impassionedadvocate of political causes, and his performance tours and activism took him around the world.

Harlem was a center for musical and theatrical performance as well as literary work, as musicians drawn by the neighborhood's nightlife collaborated with writers, artists, and each other to create original works. Some of this work drew on musical forms that had grown from the African American experience-gospel, jazz, and blues. Other African American musicians worked in classical forms. Bessie Smith was a legendary blues singer, Marian Anderson broke ground as a classical contralto, and Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington took jazz to new levels of innovation.

Eubie Blake was a prolific composer of the Harlem Renaissance, and was one of the creators of the musical revue Shuffle Along. This show was written and produced by African Americans, opened in New York in 1921 to great success, ran for one year in New York, and then toured for an additional two years. The visual arts also were part of the Harlem Renaissance. Among the best-known artists of the period were Aaron Douglas, Laura Wheeler Waring, Edward Harleston, and the painter and collage artist Jacob Lawrence.

Suggestions for Teachers

Ask students to examine the newspaper pages. How do they convey connections between the African American community in New York City-the principal setting of the Harlem Renaissance-and African Americans in other areas? What is the importance of these connections?

Multiple drafts of Langston Hughes' poem "The Ballad of Booker T" offer opportunities to explore not only the writing process, but also the poet's thinking process. Compare two drafts and consider the changes that Hughes made; compare an early draft to the final copy. How did the changes he made shape the effect of the poem? What do the changes and his other notations reveal about his thinking and writing processes? Students can apply what they learn about revisions to their own work: ask them to write a descriptive paragraph or a short poem and then revise it over several days, dating each version.

Read "The Whites Invade Harlem" and consider what point Levi Huber is making. After students read the entire document, direct them to focus on a single paragraph and analyze the techniques the writer uses to make his point. Why might he have taken that approach? Students may apply the techniques to their own writing about a current artistic or cultural phenomenon. Students may study the photographs taken by Carl Van Vechten and analyze his style and artistic choices. What qualities or characteristics of each subject was he emphasizing? How did he use poses, backgrounds, props and focus to create the overall impression? Students might search the Library of Congress digital collections to find photographs by other photographers of the people Van Vechten photographed, and compare the choices those photographers made with the choices Van Vechten made. Students might also select a few people in the school and experiment with portrait photography. They should be prepared to discuss the choices they made in setting up and taking the photographs.

Ask students to examine the documents related to Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Eubie Blake. Have students look for connections with African American culture in the years preceding the twentieth century. Ask students to consider subject matter and writing/musical style. What is the significance of these connections? Have students find more information about the music of the artists portrayed in photographs-Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Marian Anderson. How does their work compare to music composed or performed by African Americans in earlier eras?

Additional Resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Harlem Renaissance | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Literary Icons You NEED to Know From the Harlem Renaissance (feat. Princess Weekes) | It's Lit