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It was time for a cultural celebration. African Americans had endured centuries of slavery and the struggle for abolition. The end of bondage had not brought the promised land. But many had envisioned. Instead, white supremacy was quickly, legally, and violently restored to the New South. Where ninety percent of African Americans lived. Starting in about 1890, African Americans migrated to the North in great numbers. This Great Migration eventually relocated hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. Many discovered they had shared common experiences in their past histories. And their uncertain present circumstances. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, the recently dispossessed ignited an explosion of cultural pride. Indeed, African American culture was reborn in the Harlem Renaissance.

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1)Railroad Industry: faster, more practical means of transporting goods, lowered production costs, created national markets, served as a model for big business, stimulated other industries
2) UNIA: Universal Negro Improvement Association
3) Scapegoat: someone punished for the errors of others
4) The promise land: the north. more opportunities for blacks and was supposed to have less segregation
5) reconstruction: the period after the Civil War in the United States when the southern states were reorganized and reintegrated into the Union
6) Disenfranchise: deprive of voting rights
7) The Chicago Defender: was an African American newspaper
8) Cotton Curtain: the divide between the north and the south.
9) Ghetto: a poor densely populated city district occupied by a minority ethnic group linked together by economic hardship and social restrictions
10) Lynching: torturing and killing a person by beating and usually in front of a crowd of people.

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The Harlem Renaissance and The Affect on Todays Culture.

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The Harlem Renaissance and The Affect on Todays Culture.

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Much like today, being an artist can mean that you might have to travel and branch out to a much bigger stage and audience. During this time period it could have been inspirational, and a very big deal for African Americans. It was big because of the booming success Harlem, New York had to offer for young artists.

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The birth of the Harlem Renaissance; originally called "The Negro Movement", started to flourish in the 1920s and 1930s. This was the first time African Americans were able to use group expression and their determination through art. It was a time period when African Americans were prideful of their natural talents and because of heated racial tension job opportunities were scarce. Troubled minds can create the best art. Blacks were enduring awful treatment under "Jim Crow" laws here in America as their ancestors even further back in the day were forced on board ships as slaves. There is no surprise that they have influenced the culture of art, literature, and philosophy forever. All the things they've seen and they wish they could say while enslaved, even hearing the stories of their ancestors, so many ideas and thoughts had to have been running through their minds. The Harlem renaissance gave them a voice. During the 1920s many blacks migrated north for better opportunity and in search of a platform.

Much like today, being a artist means sometimes you have to travel to branch out to a bigger stage and audience. Another similarity of then and now is how important it was for artists to be around other artists. During this time period it must of been a very inspirational and an influential time for African Americans because of the booming successes Harlem, New York had to offer. When you see one of your own make it to higher heights it encourages you to want better for yourself as well. Some of the major contributors of this movement were poet Langston Hughes philosopher Alain Leroy Locke, blues singer Bessie Smith, singer Cab Calloway, painter William H. Johnson, and many more. Being a performer myself I know that it is essential for artists to look up to a role model in your field of interest. When I think of the things that inspire my work other than my own personal passion for dancing and songwriting, I think of my experiences growing up, family, role models like Mick Jenkins, J.Cole, and Anderson Paak, and for dance Ian Eastwood and James Brown.

Family really can influence your choices in what you want for your career; to do better in honor of your loved ones. Last year I had a huge opportunity to work with a man named Russell Webster, founder and CEO of Forever Young Entertainment. I met him at a concert hosted by the#ShouldCouldDreamMovement. An administrator escorted me to the back of the stage and introduced us. We talked about my experience in the entertainment world, things like the number of acts I've done. He gave me his business card and said he was interested in working with me and setting up a meeting, but there was two problems. I wasn't a solo performer anymore, actually I recently joined a rap group called 44th Street with my best friend (brother like figure) and he wasn't interested, and my family didn't support the idea of my signing because I was too young. When your family isn't on board sometimes it can create conflicts in starting your career but I wasn't ready yet anyway. The thing is with all these different opportunities and choices I have to make as time goes on, at the end of the day my goal is to make sure my family is taken care of. I want to make it for them, they deserve better. So that is what drives me everyday, the fact that my mother is getting older, my grandmother who is 74, and even great grandmother who is 95 are still in my life, I owe it to them to be successful.

I'm sure that when a lot of these different artists and activist were getting started they had to sacrifice and had their families in mind. The ancestors and important people passing away due to violent unfair treatment is what motivates their work. Pain and suffrage drives you, and that is why it creates the best work of art because frustrations and emotions can alter into passionate master pieces. I lost my uncle last year to lung cancer, after I went through the swing of emotions I had to figure out a way to make use of my feelings. Coincidentally, I had a showcase coming up weeks after called the Soring Seahawks student showcase. My whole family was grieving from his lost and his mother who is my great grandmother was having the hardest time moving on. So that year I decided to do a choreography in dedication to her and my uncle. It was the first time she had ever seen me perform. I believe that was one of my best performances because it meant so much to me to have her there. The Harlem Renaissance shows the talent and intellect that one race held, and how they had passion when creating their work. This time period in US History continues to influence me as well as echoing its influence on today's fashion, music, writing, dance, and art.

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The Harlem Renaissance & The Affect On Today's Culture

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The birth of the Harlem Renaissance; originally called "The Negro Movement", started to flourish in the 1920s and 1930s. This was the first time African Americans were able to use group expression and their determination through art. It was a time period when African Americans were prideful of their natural talents and because of heated racial...

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"After You've Gone" by Henry Creamer and J. Turner Layton

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"After You've Gone" by Henry Creamer and J. Turner Layton

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Henry Creamer was a popular African American song lyricist that co-wrote many popular songs in the years from 1900 to 1929, often collaborating with Turner Layton, with whom he also appeared in vaudeville. Their first big hit was After You've Gone, written in 1918 and was first made popular by Sophie Tucker who had a penchant for black written material. In 1921, they wrote Strut Miss Lizzie which was introduced by Van and Schenck in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921. The following year they wrote Way Down Yonder in New Orleans, which was introduced by the duo in Spice of 1922. It has proven to be a very popular number over the years. It was recorded by Bix Beiderbecke in 1927 and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced to it on film in 1939. In 1926, Creamer teamed with James P. Johnson to write If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight). It was first featured in Irvin C. Miller's Brownskin Models by George Randol and Andy Razaf. In 1930, it was introduced to the white popular music market by Ruth Etting and soon after became a top seller. In that same year Louis Armstrong, and McKinney's Cotton Pickers also recorded it. Due to its success, James P. Johnson gained admittance to ASCAP.

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"Ballad of Booker T." by Langston Hughes

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"Ballad of Booker T." by Langston Hughes

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Langston Hughes is an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, columnist, and one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry.  In the 1940s, the poet was a major author who worked in many different literary forms, from poems and short stories to newspaper columns, essays, and songs. He was also a prominent public figure who produced commentaries on culture and race relations in the United States–one publisher later called him “the unchallenged spokesman of the American Negro.”

His first published poem appeared in the magazine in 1921. Langston Hughes wrote this poem honoring Booker T. Washington in 1941. Hughes' poetry and other writings often described the lives and culture of working-class African Americans or themes that concerned that segment of the population. In this poem, the narrator tries to reconcile the reputation of Booker T. Washington as collaborator with white racists with the time period and place.

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This photo was taken between 1938 and 1948 and represents the spread of African American culture during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. The photo below is a portrait of Louis Armstrong, an American trumpeter, composer, singer and occasional actor who was one of the most influential figures in jazz. Following the Great Migration, many African Americans found comfort in the arts. They expressed themselves through music, drama, and visual art and were very successful in doing so. Other musical artists of the time period include Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ray Charles. This photo captures the passion instilled within these musical artists of the time and how dependent they were on music in order to thrive during the Harlem Renaissance.

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Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Literature 215

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This website is presented very helpful because of how its setup. When you first click on the page there is different tabs with helpful descriptions. The tabs are of different people or groups that were involved in this time. This website gives a description of the years the person lived, what they did, and also a picture.

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During the early 20th century, African-American poets, musicians, actors, artists and intellectuals moved to Harlem in New York City and brought new ideas that shifted the culture forever. Discover famous people of the Harlem Renaissance at Biography.com.

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The Democratic whites denied African Americans their exercise of civil and political rights by terrorizing black communities with lynch mobs and other forms of vigilante violence as well as by instituting a convict labor system that forced many thousands of African Americans back into unpaid labor in mines, on plantations, and on public works projects such as roads and levees. Convict laborers were typically subject to brutal forms of corporal punishment, overwork, and disease from unsanitary conditions. Death rates were extraordinarily high. While a small number of blacks were able to acquire land shortly after the Civil War, most were exploited as sharecroppers. As life in the South became increasingly difficult, African Americans began to migrate north in great numbers.

Most of the African-American literary movement arose from a generation that had memories of the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Sometimes their parents or grandparents had been slaves. Their ancestors had sometimes benefited by paternal investment in cultural capital, including better-than-average education. Many in the Harlem Renaissance were part of the early 20th century out of the South into the Negro neighborhoods of the North and Midwest. African Americans sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the South. Others were people of African descent from racially stratified communities in the Caribbeanwho came to the United States hoping for a better life. Uniting most of them was their convergence in Harlem

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This website exhibits in great detail how the Harlem Renaissance was a expansion of African American culture, providing a detailed background of the Great Migration as well as information regarding the many regulations put in place to assure African American civil rights. Not only does it address the role of African Americans in the North , the website also covers black heritage and culture prior to its development during the period of the Harlem Renaissance. There are multiple pages covering concepts such as African American poetry and fiction works, drama, and visual art. The reader is provided a very detailed description of these topics with several examples of specific African American works as well. There are several images along the sides of the pages that help the reader get a better idea of what the text addresses and allows them to see genuine photos of famous African Americans and their creations. The site is well organized which allows the reader to obtain the best possible understanding of the material it presents. Overall, I found this website to be very helpful as it presented plenty of information about the topic in a very organized setting that was easy to navigate.

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Harlem Renaissance, a blossoming (c. 1918-37) of African American culture, particularly in the creative arts, and the most influential movement in African American literary history. Embracing literary, musical, theatrical, and visual arts, participants sought to reconceptualize "the Negro" apart from the white stereotypes that had influenced Black peoples' relationship to their heritage and to each other. They also sought to break free of Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about aspects of their lives that might, as seen by whites, reinforce racist beliefs. Never dominated by a particular school of thought but rather characterized by intense debate, the movement laid the groundwork for all later African American literature and had an enormous impact on subsequent Black literature and consciousness worldwide. While the renaissance was not confined to the Harlem district of New York City, Harlem attracted a remarkable concentration of intellect and talent and served as the symbolic capital of this cultural awakening.
(Read W.E.B. Du Bois' 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)

The background

The Harlem Renaissance was a phase of a larger New Negro movement that had emerged in the early 20th century and in some ways ushered in the civil rights movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The social foundations of this movement included the Great Migration of African Americans from rural to urban spaces and from South to North; dramatically rising levels of literacy; the creation of national organizations dedicated to pressing African American civil rights, "uplifting" the race, and opening socioeconomic opportunities; and developing race pride, including pan-African sensibilities and programs. Black exiles and expatriates from the Caribbean and Africa crossed paths in metropoles such as New York City and Paris after World War I and had an invigorating influence on each other that gave the broader "Negro renaissance" (as it was then known) a profoundly important international cast.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")
The Harlem Renaissance is unusual among literary and artistic movements for its close relationship to civil rights and reform organizations. Crucial to the movement were magazines such as The Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Opportunity, published by the National Urban League; and The Messenger, a socialist journal eventually connected with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a Black labour union. Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, also played a role, but few of the major authors or artists identified with Garvey's "Back to Africa" movement, even if they contributed to the paper.

The renaissance had many sources in Black culture, primarily of the United States and the Caribbean, and manifested itself well beyond Harlem. As its symbolic capital, Harlem was a catalyst for artistic experimentation and a highly popular nightlife destination. Its location in the communications capital of North America helped give the "New Negroes" visibility and opportunities for publication not evident elsewhere. Located just north of Central Park, Harlem was a formerly white residential district that by the early 1920s was becoming virtually a Black city within the borough of Manhattan. Other boroughs of New York City were also home to people now identified with the renaissance, but they often crossed paths in Harlem or went to special events at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Black intellectuals from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other cities (where they had their own intellectual circles, theatres, and reading groups) also met in Harlem or settled there. New York City had an extraordinarily diverse and decentred Black social world in which no one group could monopolize cultural authority. As a result, it was a particularly fertile place for cultural experimentation.

While the renaissance built on earlier traditions of African American culture, it was profoundly affected by trends-such as primitivism-in European and white American artistic circles. Modernist primitivism was inspired partly by Freudian psychology, but it tended to extol "primitive" peoples as enjoying a more direct relationship to the natural world and to elemental human desires than "overcivilized" whites. The keys to artistic revolution and authentic expression, some intellectuals felt, would be found in the cultures of "primitive races," and preeminent among these, in the stereotypical thinking of the day, were the cultures of sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants. Early in the 20th century, European avant-garde artists had drawn inspiration from African masks as they broke from realistic representational styles toward abstraction in painting and sculpture. The prestige of such experiments caused African American intellectuals to look on their African heritage with new eyes and in many cases with a desire to reconnect with a heritage long despised or misunderstood by both whites and Blacks.

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Harlem Renaissance | Definition, Artists, Writers, Poems, Literature, & Facts

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Harlem Renaissance, a blossoming (c. 1918-37) of African American culture, particularly in the creative arts, and the most influential movement in African American literary history. Learn more about the Harlem Renaissance, including its noteworthy works and artists, in this article.

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This website is helpful for it's organization and creativity to help readers understand the topic. The different subtitles help the reader find the certain information they are looking for. There are also helpful videos on the side of the page that support the subtitle. At the top of the page there is a summary that gives the reader an idea of what each section is about.

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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.