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I would like for you to look up a major representative of the Harlem Renaissance. Either one found in the image above or find someone discussed in any of the information available on this Padlet. Please post your person's name along with a brief description of what they did, their importance to the Harlem Renaissance, and five facts about them that you found interesting. If you can find a quote, piece of art, poem, excerpt of writing, or song from this person post it on the Padlet as well.

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A Silent Documentary from 1936

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A Study of Negro Artists (1936) - Silent Documentary

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An important film for those interested in art history and African American history, this silent film from the 1930s covers some important visual artists during the Harlem Renaissance. It starts with an appropriately arty montage of many African American artists made their living during the day, mostly working blue collar jobs, while working on their art in their off hours.

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Can explore for others...

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Love poems, Blues poems - from The Harlem Renaissance:

Langston Hughes verses composed between 1924 and 1930:

. . .
"Subway Face"
.

That I have been looking

For you all my life

Does not matter to you.

You do not know.

.

You never knew.

Nor did I.

Now you take the Harlem train uptown;

I take a local down.

(1924)

. . .
"Poem (2)" (To F. S.)
.

I loved my friend.

He went away from me.

There's nothing more to say.

The poem ends,

Soft as it began -

I loved my friend.

(1925)

. . .
"Better"
.

Better in the quiet night

To sit and cry alone

Than rest my head on another's shoulder

After you have gone.

.

Better, in the brilliant day,

Filled with sun and noise,

To listen to no song at all

Than hear another voice.

. . .
"Poem (4)" (To the Black Beloved)
.

Ah,

My black one,

Thou art not beautiful

Yet thou hast

A loveliness

Surpassing beauty.

.

Oh,

My black one,

Thou art not good

Yet thou hast

A purity

Surpassing goodness.

.

Ah,

My black one,

Thou art not luminous

Yet an altar of jewels,

An altar of shimmering jewels,

Would pale in the light

Of thy darkness,

Pale in the light

Of thy nightness.

. . .
"The Ring"
.

Love is the master of the ring

And life a circus tent.

What is this silly song you sing?

Love is the master of the ring.

.

I am afraid!

Afraid of Love

And of Love's bitter whip!

Afraid,

Afraid of Love

And Love's sharp, stinging whip.

.

What is this silly song you sing?

Love is the master of the ring.

(1926)

. . .
"Ma Man"
.

When ma man looks at me

He knocks me off ma feet.

When ma man looks at me

He knocks me off ma feet.

He's got those 'lectric-shockin' eyes an'

De way he shocks me sho is sweet.

.

He kin play a banjo.

Lordy, he kin plunk, plunk, plunk.

He kin play a banjo.

I mean plunk, plunk...plunk, plunk.

He plays good when he's sober

An' better, better, better when he's drunk.

.

Eagle-rockin',

Daddy, eagle-rock with me.

Eagle rockin',

Come an' eagle-rock with me.

Honey baby,

Eagle-rockish as I kin be!

. . .
"Lament over Love"
.

I hope my child'll

Never love a man.

I say I hope my child'll

Never love a man.

Love can hurt you

Mo'n anything else can.

.

I'm goin' down to the river

An' I ain't goin' there to swim;

Down to the river,

Ain't goin' there to swim.

My true love's left me

And I'm goin' there to think about him.

.

Love is like whiskey,

Love is like red, red wine.

Love is like whiskey,

Like sweet red wine.

If you want to be happy

You got to love all the time.

.

I'm goin' up in a tower

Tall as a tree is tall,

Up in a tower

Tall as a tree is tall.

Gonna think about my man -

And let my fool-self fall.

(1926)

. . .
"Dressed Up"
.

I had ma clothes cleaned

Just like new.

I put 'em on but

I still feels blue.

.

I bought a new hat,

Sho is fine,

But I wish I had back that

Old gal o' mine.

.

I got new shoes -

They don't hurt ma feet,

But I ain't got nobody

For to call me sweet.

. . .
"To a Little Lover-Lass, Dead"
.

She

Who searched for lovers

In the night

Has gone the quiet way

Into the still,

Dark land of death

Beyond the rim of day.

.

Now like a little lonely waif

She walks

An endless street

And gives her kiss to nothingness.

Would God his lips were sweet!

. . .
"Harlem Night Song"
.

Come,

Let us roam the night together

Singing.

.

I love you.

Across

The Harlem roof-tops

Moon is shining.

Night sky is blue.

Stars are great drops

Of golden dew.

.

Down the street

A band is playing.

.

I love you.

.

Come,

Let us roam the night together

Singing.

. . .
"Passing Love"
.

Because you are to me a song

I must not sing you over-long.

.

Because you are to me a prayer

I cannot say you everywhere.

.

Because you are to me a rose -

You will not stay when summer goes.

(1927)

. . .
"Desire"
.

Desire to us

Was like a double death,

Swift dying

Of our mingled breath,

Evaporation

Of an unknown strange perfume

Between us quickly

In a naked

Room.

. . .
"Dreamer"
.

I take my dreams

And make of them a bronze vase,

And a wide round fountain

With a beautiful statue in its centre,

And a song with a broken heart,

And I ask you:

Do you understand my dreams?

Sometimes you say you do

And sometimes you say you don't.

Either way

It doesn't matter.

I continue to dream.

(1927)

. . .
"Lover's Return"
.

My old time daddy

Came back home last night.

His face was pale and

His eyes didn't look just right.

.

He says, "Mary, I'm

Comin' home to you -

So sick and lonesome

I don't know what to do."

.
Oh, men treats women Just like a pair o' shoes - You kicks 'em round and Does 'em like you choose.
.

I looked at my daddy -

Lawd! and I wanted to cry.

He looked so thin -

Lawd! that I wanted to cry.

But the devil told me:
Damn a lover Come home to die!
(1928)

. . .
"Hurt"
.

Who cares

About the hurt in your heart?

.

Make a song like this

for a jazz band to play:

Nobody cares.

Nobody cares.

Make a song like that

From your lips.

Nobody cares.

. . .
"Spring for Lovers"
.

Desire weaves its fantasy of dreams,

And all the world becomes a garden close

In which we wander, you and I together,

Believing in the symbol of the rose,

Believing only in the heart's bright flower -

Forgetting - flowers wither in an hour.

(1930)

. . .
"Rent-Party Shout: For a Lady Dancer"
.

Whip it to a jelly!

Too bad Jim!

Mamie's got ma man -

An' I can't find him.

Shake that thing! O!

Shake it slow!

That man I love is

Mean an' low.

Pistol an' razor!

Razor an' gun!

If I sees man man he'd

Better run -

For I'll shoot him in de shoulder,

Else I'll cut him down,

Cause I knows I can find him

When he's in de ground -

Then can't no other women

Have him layin' round.

So play it, Mr. Nappy!

Yo' music's fine!

I'm gonna kill that

Man o' mine!

(1930)

. . . . .

In the manner of all great poets Langston Hughes (February 1st, 1902 - 1967) wrote love poems (and love-blues poems), using the voices and perspectives of both Man and Woman. In addition to such art, Hughes' homosexuality, real though undisclosed during his lifetime, probably was responsible for the subtle and highly-original poet's voice he employed for three of the poems included here: Subway Face, Poem (2), and Desire. Hughes was among a wealth of black migrants born in The South or the Mid-West who gravitated toward Harlem in New York City from about 1920 onward. Along with Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman and many others, Hughes became part of The Harlem Renaissance, that great-gorgeous fresh-flowering of Black-American culture.

. . . . .

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Love poems, Blues poems - from The Harlem Renaissance

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Love poems, Blues poems - from The Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes verses composed between 1924 and 1930: . . . "Subway Face" . That I have been looking For you all my life Does not matter to you. You do not know. . You never knew. Nor did I.

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For your listening pleasure...

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Duke Ellington - It don't mean a thing (1943)

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The sweet smell of liquor, cigarettes, perfume, and sweat tells you this is going to be a great night! Everyone is having a great time and so are you!
This is the Cotton Club
Jazz: A Tale of Freedom?

If the Roaring Twenties in America is a story of individuals, freedom, fashion, and music, the peak is Harlem Renaissance Music.

The Harlem Renaissance isn't a simple story to be told, you must experience it--the best way is by understanding the music. Harlem is a story of two cities divided by jazz, race, and class.

"Jazz is a good barometer of freedom. In its beginnings, the United States spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which,eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country."
-Duke Ellington
Writers like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston wrote crowning achievements in literature, visual artists created memorable and moving artwork.

While the Harlem Renaissance will always be known for the blossoming of literary and visual arts from the early 1920s until the mid-1930s, the literature and art doesn't reflect the entire story.

Jazz: The People's Music

Thanks in large part to the Great Migration, Harlem became a Mecca for African American poets, novelists, artists, musicians, and business people.

By 1925, 70% of Harlem was black owned and businesses flourished. The huge influx of new citizens into Harlem created crowded streets and rents that were often twice as much as white owned sections of New York City.
"Jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul--the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile." -Langston Hughes
Often there were two families living under one roof; sometimes lodgers switched single beds, one working the day shift and the other the night shift just to make rent.

Harlem was bustling with new people!

Many of these people were scholastically uneducated and illiterate, but enjoying music doesn't take an education that's why Jazz is the people's music.

Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s: Rent Parties

With astronomical rent prices, renters had to come up with creative solutions to pay their landlords every month.

With Jazz's popularity and the large number of talented musicians, rent parties were frequent.

A family would hire a jazz musician and admission for all comers would be charged at the door or by "passing the hat" around.

The walls would bulge with the number of people and the volume of Jazz being played.

Cutting contests were held as one pianist would battle another to find out who was better, this type of contest has merged into the freestyle rap battle.

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, jazz set the table for much of the musical experimentation that would come in the later decades.

Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s: Speakeasies

America was dry, or at least that was the rumor.

But that didn't slow down America's liquor consumption, the gangsters and bootleggers made sure of that.

The owner of the Cotton Club, Owen (Owney) Madden was a very feared and powerful gangster and bootlegger.

The Cotton Club catered to an all white audience.

For good reason, much has been made of the social ramifications of black entertainers catering to a white audience. This separation of the races points out many of the deeper social aspects of American culture, and is the foreshadowing of many more years of racial inequality in the decades to come.

Throughout Harlem there were many famous speakeasies that housed jazz, famous musicians, and celebrities during the 1920s.

Billie Holiday was famous for playing at Pod's and Jerry's Log Cabin, or Louis Armstrong playing at The Savoy Ballroom with it's huge dance floor and famous "Cat's Corner" where all the best dancers shook their thang.

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The sweet smell of liquor, cigarettes, perfume, and sweat tells you this is going to be a great night! Everyone is having a great time and so are you! This is the Cotton Club If the Roaring Twenties in America is a story of individuals, freedom, fashion, and music, the peak is Harlem Renaissance Music.

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A taste of some art

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Robin Urton creates dimensional paintings on glass and plexiglass, surreal and visionary in nature.

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Major Representative of the Harlem Renaissance

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Major Representative of the Harlem Renaissance

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Those who you should know...

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The need for jobs in the North lead to an opportunity for African Americans in the South to improve their lives and redefine who they were.

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Black History Facts | Untold Black History | BlackHistory.com

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Black History Facts for Black History Month and all year. Click to learn about the inventions, contributions, and achievements of famous African Ameri

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courtesy of History.com

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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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This page is going to cover some of the major parts of the Harlem Renaissance. This was an important time in US history and shook the fabric of American culture.

Please feel free to add any related materials on this page you'd like.