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Harlem was established in 1658 by Peter Stuyvestant, and it was named after the city Haarlem in the Netherlands. Harlem, New York covers 3.871 square miles of land in the northern section of New York City's Manhattan borough.

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Hughes wrote this poem from the perspective of an African American man. It is unknown whether this man is either slave/free/oppressed, but it doesn't matter as the poem is meant to reach and relate to many different people in different situations. The man says that he can also "sing America." Another words, he has every right to feel proud and patriotic for his country, even though he is African American and treated as lower class.  However, the man is not particularly upset, as he knows that "tomorrow" he will rise to join everyone else at the table, and no one would dare send him back to "the kitchens." The man is very confident in this as he goes on to say that everyone at the table will see how beautiful he is, and therefore feel ashamed for their discrimination. He views himself as a valuable part of the country and will remain that way.  He is optimistic and knows that one day he will be accepted into their culture as one of their own.

-D.P.

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What's your favorite art piece or poem this week and why?

Elizabeth Price
7d
What's your favorite art piece or poem this week and why?
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Anonymous 4d
my favorite poem was "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" because it had African history and American history brought together in a meaningful poem which was really cool to read. -LB

tabithak 24h
My favorite poem was "Art vs. Trade" I really liked this poem because it had nice rhyme and it flowed nicely. Also, I liked the personification it used especially in this line, "Poor Art with struggling gasp..."


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James Weldon Johnson was born on June 17, 1871, in Jacksonville, Florida. As a child, Johnson had no sense of limitations in a world that so deeply cared about limiting and separating African Americans. Johnson attended Atlanta Universtiy, and soon after graduation he was hired to fill the position of a principal at an elementary school. During his time at the school, Johnson managed to create his own newspaper. Not long after this, in 1900, James and his brother, John wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing", which would later become the national anthem for the NAACP. As a man who was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to diplomatic positions in other countries, Johnson was a very respected and influential within the African American community. On top of being a schoolteacher, songwriter, and Civil Rights activist, Johnson's list of credentials includes being a lawyer, politician, and a writer. He was married to Grace Nail Johnson from 1910-1938. He died at the age of 67, in a car accident in Wiscasset, Maine, on June 26, 1938. Over 2,000 people attended his funeral.

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Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901, in New Orleans, Louisiana. He lived in a very poor area and had a very challenging childhood. While at the Colored Waif's Home for Boys, Armstrong learned to play the trumpet and found a new passion for music. While preforming many different odd jobs around town, he became known as a very talented blues musician. In 1918 he joined the very popular, Kid Ory's band. Then in 1922, he was invited to join King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in Chicago. In 1925, after being in an assortment of other bands, Armstrong started making recordings with his own band, named the Hot Five, later the Hot Seven. He made many recordings and worked with many other popular musicians and actors of his time. Armstrong was the first African-American entertainer to host a nationally sponsored radio show. His popularity grew over the years and he was even known overseas. Like all musicians he was eventually outdated. Armstrong died in his sleep on July 6, 1971, at his home in Queens, New York.

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Example of the Zoot suit

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Tom and Jerry, 13 Episode - The Zoot Cat (1944)

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The short three-minute fragment from series is a 1944 American one-reel animated cartoon and is the 13th Tom and Jerry short. It was produced in Technicolor and released to theatres on February 26, 1944 by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. The cartoon features a great deal of 1940's slang, a parody of the popular (but controversial) zoot suit, and some outdated features of 1930s popular culture.

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Common in the 1940s

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Cabell "Cab" Calloway III (December 25, 1907 – November 18, 1994) was an American jazz singer and bandleader. He was strongly associated with the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City, where he was a regular performer.

Calloway was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the United States' most popular big bands from the start of the 1930s to the late 1940s. Calloway's band featured performers including trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Adolphus "Doc" Cheatham, saxophonists Ben Webster and Leon "Chu" Berry, New Orleans guitarist Danny Barker, and bassist Milt Hinton. Calloway continued to perform until his death in 1994 at the age of 86.

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Aaron Douglas was an African-American painter and graphic artist who played a leading role in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Also, he is sometimes referred to as "the father of black American art." Douglas was born in Topeka, Kansas, on May 26, 1899. Both of his parents were highly creative as individuals. Aaron Douglas, Sr., was a baker of specialty breads, and his wife, Elizabeth, was a passionate amateur landscape and genre painter. In school, Douglas had an eagerness for knowledge and new horizons. After graduating from Topeka High School in 1917, Douglas attended the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. There, he pursued his passion for creating art, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1922. Around that time, he shared his interest with the students of Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri. He taught there for two years, before deciding to move to New York City. At the time, New York's Harlem neighborhood had a thriving arts scene. His first major commission, to illustrate Alain LeRoy Locke's book, The New Negro, This prompted requests for graphics from other Harlem Renaissance writers. In 1944, he founded the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville Tennessee. Aaron Douglas died on February 3, 1979.

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The first three and a half minutes he talks about Zora Neale Hurston's, so if you just want to hear abut the book start at 3:30.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kF0U8kIMp4&t=217s

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Countee Cullen was born on May 30th, 1903 and died on January 9th, 1946 from high blood pressure. He was raised by his grandmother and began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. He attended New York University and graduated from Harvard with a master's degree. He married Yolanda Du Bois but they soon divorced. Fun Fact: His favorite poet was John Keats.

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"I, Too" by Langston Hughes is an allusion to Walt Whitman's poem "I Hear America Singing." Hughes choses to base his poem off of Whitman's because Hughes is trying to say that even though he is mistreated due to his color, he is still an American like Whitman and will eventually have the same rights.

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My favorite poem this week is “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes because it talks about freedom and slavery in the form of rivers. The narrator in the poem takes the reader on a journey from freedom(which the Euphrates and Congo Rivers represent) to slavery (which the Nile and Mississippi Rivers represent). Finally, the last stop that Hughes takes us to is the freedom of the black race.

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The Mutiny on the Amistad, Hale Aspacio Woodruff, 1939

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The Mutiny on the Amistad, Hale Aspacio Woodruff, 1939

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The Building of Savery Library, Hale Aspacio Woodruff, 1942

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The Building of Savery Library, Hale Aspacio Woodruff, 1942

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WATCH ME

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Great Migration

The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem was meant to be an upper-class white neighborhood in the 1880s, but rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and desperate landlords seeking to fill them.

In the early 1900s, a few middle-class Black families from another neighborhood known as Black Bohemia moved to Harlem, and other Black families followed. Some white residents initially fought to keep African Americans out of the area, but failing that many whites eventually fled.

How Did the Harlem Renaissance Start?

Outside factors led to a population boom: From 1910 to 1920, African American populations migrated in large numbers from the South to the North, with prominent figures like W.E.B. Du Bois leading what became known as the Great Migration.

In 1915 and 1916, natural disasters in the south put Black workers and sharecroppers out of work. Additionally, during and after World War I, immigration to the United States fell, and northern recruiters headed south to entice Black workers to their companies.

By 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the South had moved north, and Harlem was one of the most popular destinations for these families.

Langston Hughes

This considerable population shift resulted in a Black Pride movement with leaders like Du Bois working to ensure that Black Americans got the credit they deserved for cultural areas of life. Two of the earliest breakthroughs were in poetry, with Claude McKay's collection Harlem Shadows in 1922 and Jean Toomer's Cane in 1923. Civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man in 1912, followed b y God's Trombones in 1927, left their mark on the world of fiction.

Novelist and du Bois protege Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1924 novel There Is Confusion explored the idea of Black Americans finding a cultural identity in a white-dominated Manhattan. Fauset was the literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis and developed a magazine for Black children with Du Bois.

Sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, who was integral in shaping the Harlem literary scene, used the debut party for There Is Confusion to organize resources to create Opportunity, the National Urban League magazine he founded and edited, a success that bolstered writers like Langston Hughes.

Hughes was at that party along with other promising Black writers and editors, as well as powerful white New York publishing figures. Soon many writers found their work appearing in mainstream magazines like Harper's.

Zora Neale Hurston

Anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston courted controversy through her involvement with a publication called FIRE!!

Helmed by white author and Harlem writers' patron Carl Van Vechten and filled with works from prolific Black writers including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Aaron Douglas, the magazine exoticized the lives of Harlem residents. Van Vechten's previous fiction stirred up interest among whites to visit Harlem and take advantage of the culture and nightlife there.

Though Van Vechten's work was condemned by older luminaries like DuBois, it was embraced by Hurston, Hughes and others.

Countee Cullen

Poetry, too, flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. Countee Cullen was 15 when he moved into the Harlem home of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the pastor of Harlem's largest congregation, in 1918.

The neighborhood and its culture informed his poetry, and as a college student at New York University, he obtained prizes in a number of poetry contests before going on to Harvard's master's program and publishing his first volume of poetry: Color. He followed it up with Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown Girl and went on to write plays as well as children's books.

Cullen received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry and married Nina Yolande, the daughter of W.E.B. DuBois. Their wedding was a major social event in Harlem. Cullen's reviews for Opportunity magazine, which ran under the column "Dark Tower," focused on works from the African-American literati and covered some of the biggest names of the age.

Harlem Renaissance Musicians

The music that percolated in and then boomed out of Harlem in the 1920s was jazz, often played at speakeasies offering illegal liquor. Jazz became a great draw for not only Harlem residents but outside white audiences also.

Some of the most celebrated names in American music regularly performed in Harlem- Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, often accompanied by elaborate floor shows. Tap dancers like John Bubbles and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson were also popular.

Cotton Club

With the groundbreaking new music came vibrant nightlife. The Savoy opened in 1927, an integrated ballroom with two bandstands that featured continuous jazz and dancing well past midnight, sometimes in the form of battling bands helmed by Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford and King Oliver.

While it was fashionable to frequent Harlem nightlife, entrepreneurs realized that some white people wanted to experience Black culture without having to socialize with African Americans and created clubs to cater to them.

The most successful of these was the Cotton Club, which featured frequent performances by Ellington and Calloway. Some in the community derided the existence of such clubs, while others believed they were a sign that Black culture was moving toward greater acceptance.

Paul Robeson

The cultural boom in Harlem gave Black actors opportunities for stage work that had previously been withheld. Traditionally, if Black actors appeared onstage, it was in a minstrel show musical and rarely in a serious drama with non-stereotypical roles.

At the center of this stage revolution was the versatile Paul Robeson, an actor, singer, writer, activist and more. Robeson first moved to Harlem in 1919 while studying law at Columbia University and continually maintained a social presence in the area, where he was considered an inspirational but approachable figure.

Robeson believed that arts and culture were the best paths forward for Black Americans to overcome racism and make advances in a white-dominated culture.

Josephine Baker

Black musical revues were staples in Harlem, and by the mid-1920s had moved south to Broadway, expanding into the white world. One of the earliest of these was Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's Shuffle Along, which launched the career of Josephine Baker.

White patron Van Vechten helped bring a more serious lack of stage work to Broadway, though largely the work of white authors. It wasn't until 1929 that a Black-authored play about Black lives, Wallace Thurman and William Rapp's Harlem, played Broadway.

Playwright Willis Richardson offered more serious opportunities for Black actors with several one-act plays written in the 1920s, as well as articles in Opportunity magazine outlining his goals. Stock companies like the Krigwa Players and the Harlem Experimental Theater also gave Black actors serious roles.

Aaron Douglas

The visual arts were never welcoming to Black artists, with art schools, galleries and museums shutting them out. Sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, a protégé of Auguste Rodin, explored African American themes in her work and influenced Du Bois to champion Black visual artists.

The most celebrated Harlem Renaissance artist is Aaron Douglas, often called "the Father of Black American Art," who adapted African techniques to realize paintings and murals, as well as book illustrations.

Sculptor Augusta Savage's 1923 bust of Du Bois garnered considerable attention. She followed that up with small, clay portraits of everyday African Americans, and would later be pivotal to enlisting black artists into the Federal Art Project, a division of the Work Progress Administration (WPA).

James VanDerZee 's photography captured Harlem's daily life, as well as commissioned portraits in his studio that he worked to fill with optimism and separate philosophically from the horrors of the past.

Marcus Garvey

Black nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism movement Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica but moved to Harlem in 1916 and began publishing the influential newspaper Negro World in 1918. His shipping company, Black Star Line, established trade between Africans in America, the Caribbean, South and Central America, Canada and Africa.

Garvey is perhaps best known for founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association, or UNIA, which advocated for "separate but equal" status for persons of African ancestry with the goal of establishing Black states around the world. Garvey was famously at odds with W.E.B. DuBois, who called him "the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America." His outspoken views also made him a target of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

Harlem Renaissance Ends

The end of Harlem's creative boom began with the stock market crash of 1929 and The Great Depression. It wavered until Prohibition ended in 1933, which meant white patrons no longer sought out illegal alcohol in uptown clubs.

By 1935, many pivotal Harlem residents had moved on to seek work. They were replaced by the continuous flow of refugees from the South, many requiring public assistance.

The Harlem Race Riot of 1935 broke out following the arrest of a young shoplifter, resulting in three dead, hundreds injured and millions of dollars in property damage. The riot was a death knell for the Harlem Renaissance.

Why Was the Harlem Renaissance Important?

The Harlem Renaissance was a golden age for African American artists, writers and musicians. It gave these artists pride in and control over how the Black experience was represented in American culture and set the stage for the civil rights movement.

Sources

Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance. Laban Carrick Hill.
The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930. Steven Watson.
The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary For The Era. Bruce Kellner, Editor.

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Harlem Renaissance - Definition, Artists & How It Started | HISTORY

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The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in NYC as a black cultural mecca in the early 20th century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture.

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I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
-Langston Hughes

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 Watch me: Langston Hughes reads "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

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 Watch me: Langston Hughes reads "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

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Langston Hughes reads The Negro Speaks of Rivers

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Watch me: Mini Biography, Langston Hughes 

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Watch me: Mini Biography, Langston Hughes 

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Langston Hughes: Leading Voice of the Harlem Renaissance | Biography

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International performer and fashion setter, 1927

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The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you—

Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it’s that simple?

I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.

I went to school there, then Durham, then here

to this college on the hill above Harlem.

I am the only colored student in my class.

The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,

through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,

Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,

the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator

up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me

at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what

I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you.

hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.

(I hear New York, too.) Me—who?

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.

I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

I like a pipe for a Christmas present,

or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.

I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like

the same things other folks like who are other races.

So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.

But it will be

a part of you, instructor.

You are white—

yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.

That’s American.

Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.

Nor do I often want to be a part of you.

But we are, that’s true!

As I learn from you,

I guess you learn from me—

although you’re older—and white—

and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

-Langston Hughes

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Watch Me:  My Theme for English B recitation

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Watch Me:  My Theme for English B recitation

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The Octoroon Girl,  Archibald Motley, 1925 

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The Octoroon Girl,  Archibald Motley, 1925 

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Archibald John Motley Jr. (1891-1981) was a bold and highly original modernist and one of the great visual chroniclers of twentieth-century American life. He first came to prominence in the 1920s during the early days of the Harlem Renaissance-the cultural flowering of African American art, music, and literature that extended beyond the New York neighborhood of its name to other cities, notably Chicago, where Motley spent most of his life.

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What do you notice about the style of Motley's art?  How would you describe his style? What are some of the themes in his art? Do you enjoy any of his works in particular or not? Explain.

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I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

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This poem is a reference (allusion) to another poem by an earlier American poet. Which poet? Which poem? Why would Hughes choose to nod back to this poet and poem?

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Lift ev’ry voice and sing,

Till earth and heaven ring,

Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;

Let our rejoicing rise

High as the list’ning skies,

Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,

Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,

Bitter the chast’ning rod,

Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;

Yet with a steady beat,

Have not our weary feet

Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,

We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,

Till now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,

God of our silent tears,

Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;

Thou who has by Thy might,

Led us into the light,

Keep us forever in the path, we pray.

Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,

Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;

Shadowed beneath Thy hand,

May we forever stand.

True to our God,

True to our native land.
-James Weldon Johnson

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Acapella version of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing"  

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Acapella version of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing"  

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WATCH ME

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James Weldon Johnson's "Life Ev'ry Voice and Sing"

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James Weldon Johnson's "Life Ev'ry Voice and Sing"

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history and significance of this poem...

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Lift Every Voice and Sing | The Poem and Song | Black History | PBS

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Lift Every Voice and Sing | The Poem and Song | Black History | PBS

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"Lift Every Voice and Sing" was performed for the first time as a poem by 500 school children on February 12, 1900 in Jacksonville, FL. It was set to music and adopted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as its official song.

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From Slavery Through Reconstruction, Aaron Douglas, 1934

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From Slavery Through Reconstruction, Aaron Douglas, 1934

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Art vs. Trade

BY JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

Trade, Trade versus Art,

Brain, Brain versus Heart;

Oh, the earthiness of these hard-hearted times,

When clinking dollars, and jingling dimes,

Drown all the finer music of the soul.

Life as an Octopus with but this creed,

That all the world was made to serve his greed;

Trade has spread out his mighty myriad claw,

And drawn into his foul polluted maw,

The brightest and the best,

Well nigh,

Has he drained dry,

The sacred fount of Truth;

And if, forsooth,

He has left yet some struggling streams from it to go,

He has contaminated so their flow,

That Truth, scarce is it true.

Poor Art with struggling gasp,

Lies strangled, dying in his mighty grasp;

He locks his grimy fingers ’bout her snowy throat so tender.

Is there no power to rescue her, protect, defend her?

Shall Art be left to perish?

Shall all the images her shrines cherish

Be left to this iconoclast, to vulgar Trade?

Oh, that mankind had less of Brain and more of Heart,

Oh, that the world had less of Trade and more of Art;

Then would there be less grinding down the poor,

Then would men learn to love each other more;

For Trade stalks like a giant through the land,

Bearing aloft the rich in his high hand,

While down beneath his mighty ponderous tread,

He crushes those who cry for daily bread.

James Weldon Johnson

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This lovely flower fell to seed;
Work gently sun and rain;
She held it as her dying creed
That she would grow again.
Countee Cullen

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What's your favorite art piece or poem this week and why?

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What's your favorite art piece or poem this week and why?