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Here is an iMovie we created to introduce the Harlem Renaissance.

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The poem below entitled "The Negro Speaks of the Rivers" was written by Langston Hughes in 1920. Langston Hughes was a very popular poet throughout the Harlem Renaissance who wrote about racism and political issues in America. The poem begins by talking about rivers. This connection to rivers relates to the history of black people and how their history originated in Africa. These rivers represent Africa and the humanity they once saw. By later referencing human blood, Hughes is connecting the river to people, and how people take something innocent and beautiful (a person) and deprive them of humanity; representing people at war with the blood. The connection the he soul and the rivers represents the knowledge, awareness, humanity, and history he knows. After this, Hughes continues to allude back to his ancestry in Africa by referencing rivers there and makes reference to rivers in America as well. My the end, Hughes illustrates the idea that he is well informed and has knowledge of history and humanity. Overall, this poem shows the racism and background of black people in America which contributed to show black cultural during the Harlem Renaissance.

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.

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In the video below, we see and hear the amazing jazz music performed by the one and only, Louis Armstrong. During the Harlem Renaissance, jazz music was born and one of the most famous jazz music performers, was Louis Armstrong. He was a foundational performer in jazz and shifted the playing of music from big ensemble performances, to solo shows. Armstrong's influence traveled far beyond jazz music with his career spanning almost five decades. He was one of the first truly popular African American entertainers during the 1920's and he rarely would politicize his race. Louis's artistry and personality allowed him a high place in society, one of which was normally restricted to American Americans. As a musical performer myself, I love Louis Armstrong's work and what he did to shape the music in the 1920's.

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Louis Armstrong - Basin Street Blues - 1964

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The 1920's proved to be time where America thrived culturally and socially. While racism and discrimination was still extremely prevalent all over America, the Harlem Renaissance proved to be a time where African American culture, music, and art flourished causing a change in America's culture and society as a whole. Thus far, African American's were forced to conform to society and faced harsh mistreatment for expressing themselves. In the 1920's, the great abundance of African American's in the North from The Great Migration called for the black culture to flourish and grow tremendously. For the first time, African American's were becoming celebrities by both black and white people through music, literature, and art. Although not all renaissance artists became famous and wealthy, their pieces had a major impact on the upcoming and withstanding culture in America. Because of the Harlem Renaissance new music styles like jazz became popular. The new jazz culture influenced society in countless ways as it brought a lot of attention to racial issues in America. The new literature and artwork focused on expressing black culture and racial issues as well. The new call to attention of racial issues led to a great deal of controversy in America. Many white American's were upset that people were making an issue of race, especially during postwar where citizens wanted peace. Others appreciated the new art from the era and supported African American's and their fight for social reforms. Overall, the Harlem Renaissance proved to impact racial tensions and American culture through artwork, literature. and music.

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This website shows a unique request from an author of the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout his letter, he explains the importance of the continuation of reading and remembering works from the renaissance. When considering the impact of the Harlem Renaissance internationally, it can be determined that the time period can be looked back on as a foundation for African American's in a time where they were treated inferior to white people on an extreme level. As racial issues are still a standing issue in today's society all over the world, the Harlem Renaissance can be reflected on to learn about struggles minorities face and how they are no different than anyone else.

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The Harlem Renaissance has impacted the 21st century greatly. Without the Harlem Renaissance there would not have been such a drastic change in our literature and music. The Harlem Renaissance played a great role in the ending of racial discrimination later in history. This was the start of the development of African-American literature. The Harlem Renaissance movement ended in the late 1930's because of the Great Depression, but The Harlem Renaissance continues to be an inspiration to many. Although the racial discrimination was not lessened after this crucial movement, our community received a rhetorical background to build on. It paved the way for progress and development for the coming generations. It conveyed to our community and the world during that period that we were not inferior to White-Americans. The Harlem Renaissance helped create equality for all people later in history. The success of African-Americans today would not have been possible if not for The Harlem Renaissance.

The literary works during this period was primitive to all African-Americans, thus it is important to study those works which helped build the African-American community into what we are today. The determination that our community possessed during The Harlem Renaissance is commonly referred to as the backbone of our African-American community.

By reading African-American literature from this period, students can be informed of the unique culture of our community. We were treated as inferiors during that period. Therefore, people can discover the elements of hardwork, determination and our views regarding our ill-treatment. Our voice could be heard through our work which was not possible before this period. The works of literature produced by us during this period rival some of the greatest literary works of all time. We were able to open up our feelings through our work, thus providing our work a uniqueness. Due to this uniqueness, students should read our literary works to fully understand the condition of our community during The Harlem Renaissance. Students of the 21st century continue to read literature from The Harlem Renaissance because the literary works produced from our time period are unique and can never be reproduced. The culture that is embedded into our literary works is unparalleled. I even incorporated the fever of jazz that was sweeping the nation during The Harlem Renaissance into my various works of poetry. Thus, to experience an unprecedented amount of passion and culture, students must read works of literature produced during The Harlem Renaissance.

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The Harlem Renaissance has impacted the 21st century greatly. Without the Harlem Renaissance there would not have been such a drastic change in our literature and music. The Harlem Renaissance played a great role in the ending of racial discrimination later in history. This was the start of the development of African-American literature.

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This video gives a quick 3 minute overview of the Harlem Renaissance.

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The New Negro Movement- An artistic movement of subtle propaganda to uplift a race.

The Urban League Bulletin- African American news paper out of New York

The American Dream- An ideal state of success that involves owning a house, being able to provide for you family, and attaining certain material objects.

Folk Material- A type of music and art that was appreciated and encouraged during the Harlem Renaissance.

Ghetto- A poorly, densely populated city district occupied by minority ethnic groups linked together by economic hardship and social restrictions.

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In the 1920’s, there was a rise of cultural, social, and artistic style that took place in Harlem, New York.  This was known as the Harlem Renaissance, spanning the entirety of the 1920’s. It is known to be the rebirth of African American arts introducing new cultural and art expressions that spread across the United States. A large portion of the African American literary movement rose up from a generation that had memories of the loss and gains during Reconstruction after the Civil War. Much of the Harlem Renaissance had a part in the Great Migration in the early 20th century as many Negros moved to the North and away from the South. Harlem was the destination for migrants around the country. It attracted many people seeking work and had an educated class that made the area a center of culture. Harlem had originally been an exclusive suburb for the white middle and upper classes in the 19th century. Due to it’s affluent start, it led to the development of grand avenues, beautiful homes, and world-class amenities. Various forms of art broke out during this time which is primarily what the Harlem Renaissance is known for. Not only the painting and drawing aspect of it, but the fashion, literature, and music played an enormous role in shaping the years to come. Over all, the 1920’s Harlem Renaissance was a thriving part of American history that made American grow in multiple aspects.

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USHISTORY.ORG: The Harlem Renaissance

This website was very effective in giving a variety on information on the Harlem Renaissance. While other sites give one broad overview or great detail of one specific aspect of the era, this website includes information from all areas. By beginning with a summary, the reader is able to have an overall consensus about the renaissance. After the summary, the website inhibits information about The Great Migration, which was essentially the "base" for the renaissance to take place. This extra piece of information is not included in most other sites, but it vital to fully understand the era. The fact that The Great Migration was included added extra information that the helped the reader make connections to previous time periods in America. As the site continues, the information is broken up into sections about different writers, actors and musicians. Although the information is relatively brief, it includes information from many different aspects of the Harlem Renaissance. With the inclusion of a photo, the reader is able to see a primary source form the time, but the website is not very interactive and there is not enough pictures for the reader to have a visual of the time period. Overall, this website did a good job incorporating information from all aspects of the Harlem Renaissance and exemplified the cultural celebration of African Americans.

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The Cotton Club, located in the heart of Harlem, New York, was a club operated by the white gangster, Owney Madden. His club was opened in 1923 and its primary reason was for Madden to sell alcohol to a prohibition crowd. The club was closed many times, but eventually would reopen due to the fact that the owner had political connections. There was segregation with in, for only white patrons would be allowed in, minus the fact that the entertainers and staff were black. Music was a large part of the club as well and was orchestrated to bring to mind a jungle like atmosphere. Due to all these reasons and more, the Cotton Club was in high demand. I can definitely see how in the 1920's, a place like this would be popular for all it's entertainment, illegal sale of alcohol, and the music played.

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BIOGRAPHY.COM: Famous Harlem Renaissance People

Throughout this website, the primary focus is on the influential historical figures during the Harlem Renaissance. The website starts off with a video about Duke Ellington, an American jazz legend who came to fame during this time period. Following the video is a short paragraph briefly explaining the Harlem Renaissance and introducing a few important people. The website also includes a gallery of 16 pictures from the time period, which contributes to the full understanding of the renaissance.  Because the primary focus of this website is on the people themselves, the biography's of 27 different figures is given. After reading through a few of the biography's it can be determined that a quick synopsis is given, followed by a thorough evaluation of their childhood, career, and legacy. These biography's include photograph's of the person as well. Overall, this website proves to be very effective in sharing information on various historical figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

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HISTORY.COM: Harlem Renaissance

This website entails a brief overview of the Harlem Renaissance by explaining the purpose, listing influential figures, and the overall legacy of the movement. Although the explanation is short, the easy to read format includes enough information for the reader to have a better overall understanding of the Harlem Renaissance. Along with a written explanation, the website includes a quick three minute video that includes images from the time period. With the addition of this video, information can be learned in a variety of ways: reading, listening, and seeing. After reviewing this website, a reader will have an overall consensus about what the Harlem Renaissance was. They will be introduced to important people during this time period and learn about the aesthetics of this era.

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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.