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Writings of the Harlem Renaissance – Background (Recommended reading)

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Writings of the Harlem Renaissance – Background (Recommended reading)

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Provides topics, themes, and other common elements of writings from this period

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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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Writer Claude McKay – "To One Coming North"

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Writer Claude McKay – "To One Coming North"

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From CommonLit: Claude McKay (1889-1948) was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was also an influential figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural, social, and artistic movement that took place in Harlem, New York. In this poem from his book Harlem Shadows, a speaker describes coming north.

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To One Coming North by Claude McKay | Poetry Foundation

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At first you'll joy to see the playful snow,

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Make sure to listen to the lyrics!

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Writer Langston Hughes "The Negro Speaks of the River"

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Writer Langston Hughes "The Negro Speaks of the River"

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Only read the background and poem.

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A poet, novelist, fiction writer, and playwright, Langston Hughes is known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties and was important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Harlem - What happens to a dread deferred? // Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?

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This sculpture was commissioned for the 1939 Worlds Fair. Read about the sculpture using this link: https://www.1939nyworldsfair.com/worlds_fair/wf_tour/zone-2/the-harp.htm

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Look through some of his work here: https://www.google.com/search?q=james+van+der+see&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwirlPnGlM71AhVwk4kEHbK9AyUQ_AUoAXoECAIQAw&cshid=1643156971788278&biw=1279&bih=589&dpr=2&safe=active&ssui=on

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born Lenox, MA 1886-died Washington, DC 1983

Also known as

James Van Der Zee

James Van DerZee

James Augustus VanDerZee

James Augustus Joseph VanDerZee

Born

Lenox, Massachusetts, United States

Died

Washington, District of Columbia, United States

Active in

New York, New York, United States

Biography

VanDerZee began photographing as a teenager after having won an eight-dollar camera as a premium for selling pink and yellow silk sachets. Beginning in 1916 he worked out of a commercial Harlem studio he opened on 135th street. During the 1920s and 1930s, he produced hundreds of photographs recording Harlem's growing middle class. Its residents entrusted the visual documentation of their weddings, funerals, celebrities, and social life to his carefully composed images. VanDerZee knew the neighborhood and its inhabitants, and shared their dreams and aspirations for self-determination and racial pride.

Gwen Everett African American Masters: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C. and New York: Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003)

More Information

James VanDerZee is one of the country's most distinctive portrait photographers. From his first experiments with a small box camera around the age of fourteen, his interest continued as he photographed friends and family in Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia for pleasure and occasional commissions. Settling in New York City around 1909, he secured a job as a "darkroom man" for a photographer's small department store concession. In 1916, he chose photography over a less lucrative career as a musician and opened his first studio on West 135th Street.

During the next forty years, VanDerZee chronicled the people and celebrations of Harlem-from schoolchildren, church groups, and wedding couples, to the parades organized by black nationalist Marcus Garvey and the funeral for singer Florence Mills. The exhibition, Harlem on My Mind, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, brought his work to the attention of the art world, to which he had paid little notice. Ironically, he had retired that year because of a declining market for his particular form of portraiture and the advent of cheaper, easier-to-use cameras. Three years before his death, however, VanDerZee resumed photography.

Evening Attire [SAAM, 1994.57.3] epitomizes VanDerZee's considered approach to studio portraiture. The young woman is carefully placed between two tables, against a painted background. The details of her dress, the illusionistic backdrop, tiled floor, and patterned tablecloth create an abundance of texture and tone. Her gaze seems dreamy, an effect enhanced by the softly focused edges of the image.

VanDerZee strove to capture the personality, character, and intrinsic beauty of his sitters. His photographs are not simply documents, but celebrations of Harlem lives that included some degree of affluence and an appreciation of small luxuries-a beaded dress, a fur stole, an attentively decorated home. Here was an opportunity for African Americans to see themselves as the center of a universe, as white Americans could in mainstream society. For VanDerZee, this was reflected in the careful framing of a world of elegance, refinement, and a beauty sometimes elusive in the world outside his studio.

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan African-American Art: 19th and 20th-Century Selections (brochure. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art)

African American Masters: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum

African American Masters focuses on black artists whose efforts in the twentieth century demonstrate their command of mainstream traditions as well as the open assertion and exploration of their dual heritage. Many-like Sargent Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, James Porter, and William H. Johnson-responded in the 1930s and 1940s to Alain Locke's call for an art of the "New Negro" and explored the social and narrative aspects of African or African American sources. Others-Henry Ossawa Tanner, Beauford Delaney, and Norman Lewis-embraced broader themes or the modernist challenges of form and color. Contemporary artists-from Betye Saar and Mel Edwards to Renée Stout and Whitfield Lovell-have mined sources as varied as the autobiographical and the international. Horace Pippin and Purvis Young, as self-taught artists, tapped the spiritual and social underpinnings of their communities. Portraits and documentary images have dominated the subject matter of modern black photographers. James VanDerZee and Roland Freeman epitomize those photographers who have chosen the people and environment of their own neighborhoods as their subjects. Others, foremost among them Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks, have sought out communities or traditions of the larger African American society.

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VanDerZee began photographing as a teenager after having won an eight-dollar camera as a premium for selling pink and yellow silk sachets. Beginning in 1916 he worked out of a commercial Harlem studio he opened on 135th street.

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Black people who migrated during the second phase of the Great Migration were met with housing discrimination, as localities had started to implement restrictive covenants and redlining, which created segregated neighborhoods, but also served as a foundation for the existing racial disparities in wealth in the United States.

Records in this topic cover migratory information and trends captured by various branches and agencies of the government, including employment and housing. There are also records reflecting cultural and social aspects of the lives of those who participated and were impacted by the Great Migration.
Search the Catalog for Records relating to the Great Migration (1910-1970)
Resources

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Boys outside of the Stateway Gardens Housing Project on the South Side of Chicago, May, 1973 (NAID 556163) The Great Migration was one of the largest movements of people in United States history. Approximately six million Black people moved from the American South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states roughly from the 1910s until the 1970s.

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The early 20th century witnessed the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to the Northeast, Midwest, and West. One of the main causes for this mass migration was the continuing racial violence, including lynching and racial massacres that targeted Southern Black people, as well as the return of the Ku Klux Klan (a white supremacist terrorist organization that first appeared shortly after the Civil War) around 1920. This period was part of what Rayford W. Logan termed the "nadir" of African American history that began with the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877. During this period, the political and legal gains won by African Americans during Reconstruction were dismantled, particularly by denying African Americans their voting rights and legalizing racial segregation, most notably in the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which made racial segregation legal until 1954. In addition to those suffering these political and legal injustices, thousands of African Americans were hanged, burned to death, shot to death, tortured, mutilated, and castrated by white mobs who almost never were prosecuted for their crimes. One of the leaders in the fight against lynching was Ida B. Wells-Barnett, author of The Red Record.

The Red Summer was a pattern of white-on-black violence that occurred in 1919 throughout the United States. The post World War I period was marked by a spike in racial violence, much of it directed toward African American veterans returning from Europe, where they were often treated much better there than by white Americans, despite their brave service to the country. The bloodiest incident occurred in Elaine, Arkansas, where it is estimated that over 100 African Americans were killed. The racial violence of the Red Summer erupted in many other Southern locations as well as in the North, most notably in Chicago. The presence of racial hostility in the North was partly a reaction of Northern whites to the large influx of African Americans into Northern cities during the Great Migration, though this hostility did not prevent large numbers of African Americans from heading North.
Search the Catalog for Records relating to Racial Violence
Resources

Featured Records

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The early 20th century witnessed the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to the Northeast, Midwest, and West. One of the main causes for this mass migration was the continuing racial violence, including lynching and racial massacres that targeted Southern Black people, as well as the return of the Ku Klux Klan (a white supremacist terrorist organization that first appeared shortly after the Civil War) around 1920.

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After the United States Civil War, state governments that had been part of the Confederacy tried to limit the voting rights of Black citizens and prevent contact between Black and white citizens in public places.

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Connections Between "The New Negro" and the Harlem Renaissance 

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Connections Between "The New Negro" and the Harlem Renaissance 

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Excerpt: " By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, Harlem was well on its way to becoming what Johnson called “the greatest Negro city in the world,” attracting key intellectual leaders and artists such as Du Bois and Johnson, not to mention thousands of migrants from the South and Midwest whose talents and aspirations would fuel in the 1920s the second great renaissance of African American culture...

The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an anthology edited by Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. The “New Negro,” Locke announced, differed from the “Old Negro” in assertiveness and self-confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional “white” aesthetic standards, to eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favour and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few, until well into the Great Depression of the 1930s."

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During the first two decades of the 20th century, rampant racial injustices, led by weekly reports of grisly lynchings, gave strong impetus to protest writing. From the editor's desk of the Colored American Magazine, Pauline E. Hopkins wrote novels, short stories, editorials, and social commentary in the early 1900s that attempted to revive the fervour of the antislavery era. The founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 in New York City put Du Bois in charge of its organ, The Crisis, which, as its editor from 1910 to 1934, he fashioned into the most widely read African American magazine of its time. In 1912 future NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson, poet, diplomat, and journalist, published anonymously The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a psychological novel that employed the theme of passing for white to explore the double consciousness of its protagonist with a dispassionate objectivity unattempted in African American fiction up to that time. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, Harlem was well on its way to becoming what Johnson called "the greatest Negro city in the world," attracting key intellectual leaders and artists such as Du Bois and Johnson, not to mention thousands of migrants from the South and Midwest whose talents and aspirations would fuel in the 1920s the second great renaissance of African American culture.

The phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance represented the flowering in literature and art of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, epitomized in The New Negro (1925), an anthology edited by Alain Locke that featured the early work of some of the most gifted Harlem Renaissance writers, including the poets Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay and the novelists Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. The "New Negro," Locke announced, differed from the "Old Negro" in assertiveness and self-confidence, which led New Negro writers to question traditional "white" aesthetic standards, to eschew parochialism and propaganda, and to cultivate personal self-expression, racial pride, and literary experimentation. Spurred by an unprecedented receptivity to Black writing on the part of major American magazines, book publishers, and white patrons, the literary vanguard of the Harlem Renaissance enjoyed critical favour and financial rewards that lasted, at least for a few, until well into the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Between the Covers Rare Books, Merchantville, NJ

McKay is generally regarded as the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His best poetry, including sonnets ranging from the militant "If We Must Die" (1919) to the brooding self-portrait "Outcast," was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), which some critics have called the first great literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Admiring McKay as well as Dunbar, Hughes exchanged McKay's formalism for the free verse of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. Hughes also found ways to write in an African American street vernacular that registers a much wider and deeper spectrum of mood than Dunbar was able to represent in his poetry. Hughes earned his greatest praise for his experimental jazz and blues poetry in The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). While McKay and Hughes embraced the rank and file of Black America and proudly identified themselves as Black poets, Cullen sought success through writing in traditional forms and employing a lyricism informed by the work of John Keats. His lingering ambivalence about racial identification as a man or a poet is movingly evoked in his most famous poem, "Heritage" (1925). In contrast, James Weldon Johnson embraced the African American oral tradition in God's Trombones (1927), his verse tribute to the folk sermon tradition of Southern Blacks.

Novelists

McKay and Hughes made names for themselves in prose as well. McKay's novel Home to Harlem (1928) garnered a substantial readership, especially among those curious about the more lurid side of Harlem's nightlife. A lasting achievement in autobiography was Hughes's The Big Sea (1940), which contains the most insightful and unsentimental first-person account of the Harlem Renaissance ever published. Yet the most notable narratives produced by the Harlem Renaissance came from Toomer (himself an accomplished poet), Fisher, Wallace Thurman, Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Toomer's Cane (1923), an avant-garde collection of sketches, fiction, poetry, and drama, set a standard for experimentalism that few practitioners of any one of these genres could match for the rest of the decade. Like T.S. Eliot's modernist classic The Waste Land (1922), Cane, although deliberately fragmented, was designed to achieve a unified effect through its impressionistic use of language and its recurrent attention to questions of African American identity. Fisher's The Walls of Jericho (1928) won critical applause because of the novel's balanced satire of class and colour prejudice among Black New Yorkers. In 1932 Fisher brought out The Conjure Man Dies, often referred to as the first African American detective novel. Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929) exposes colour prejudice among African Americans and is among the first African American novels to broach the topic of homosexuality. The struggles and frustrations Larsen revealed in the Black female protagonists of her novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) likely register the problems their creator faced as a sophisticated New Negro woman trying to find her own way in the supposedly liberated racial and sexual atmosphere of the 1920s. Like Toomer, Larsen fell silent after the Harlem Renaissance. Of the major fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance, only Florida native Hurston, whose early short stories appeared in the late 1920s but who did not publish a novel until after the Harlem Renaissance had ended, published a masterwork that guaranteed her permanent reputation among African American novelists. In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston embodied the sustaining ethos of a vibrant working-class Southern Black community in a woman whose sassy tongue and heroic reclamation of herself make Janie Crawford the greatest single literary character created by the New Negro generation.

Although the most memorable literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance was in narrative prose and poetry, the movement also inspired dramatists such as Willis Richardson, whose The Chip Woman's Fortune (produced 1923) was the first nonmusical play by an African American to be produced on Broadway. African American editors such as Charles S. Johnson, whose monthly Opportunity was launched in 1923 under the auspices of the National Urban League, and the respected Caribbean-born short-story writer Eric Walrond, who published young Black writers in Negro World, the organ of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, provided significant visibility for New Negro writers. Anthologies, particularly of poetry, abounded during the Harlem Renaissance, enhancing the literary reputations of both the writers represented in them and their editors. The editors included James Weldon Johnson ( The Book of American Negro Poetry [1922] and The Book of American Negro Spirituals [1925, 1926]), Charles S. Johnson ( Ebony and Topaz [1927]), and Cullen ( Caroling Dusk [1927]), to mention only a handful of the most noteworthy.

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African American literature - The rise of the New Negro

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African American literature - African American literature - The rise of the New Negro: During the first two decades of the 20th century, rampant racial injustices, led by weekly reports of grisly lynchings, gave strong impetus to protest writing. From the editor's desk of the Colored American Magazine, Pauline E.

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Writer Zora Neale Hurston "How it Feels to Be a Colored Me"

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Writer Zora Neale Hurston "How it Feels to Be a Colored Me"

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And in Manhattan...

While Douglas was teaching in Kansas City, the literary, cultural, political and artistic ferment of what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance began picking up steam in Manhattan.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's magazine, The Crisis, then a monthly edited by W.E.B. DuBois, was in its second decade and headquartered in the New York Evening Post's building at 20 Vesey Street downtown. The National Urban League began publishing the monthly magazine Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life in 1923, and it became the emblematic periodical of the artistic, musical and literary culture then centered uptown in the formerly Dutch, Jewish and Italian neighborhood of Harlem.

But it wasn't until the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic magazine landed in Douglas's Kansas City mailbox that his future - and his impact on American culture - was charted. The special issue, guest-edited by Alain Locke, was dedicated to "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro." With that mailborne lightning bolt, Douglas would resolve to venture to Harlem (it is unclear whether this was an intended permanent stop or simply a waypoint on a planned migration to Paris), where he would strike up an acquaintance which would evolve into a fellowship and mentorship with the German artist Winold Reiss, who had illustrated the cover subject, of the composer Roland Hayes, that adorned that Survey Graphic issue.

Once in Harlem, Douglas fit in almost immediately. In a matter of months, he was contributing important artwork to The Crisis and Opportunity, including cover designs, and quickly making a name for himself as a preeminent artist with a unique style informed by cubism, art deco, and African idioms. Paris would wait. He would soon earn a commission to illustrate Alain Locke's anthology, "The New Negro" (1926), followed by James Weldon Johnson's poetic "God's Trombones, Seven Negro Sermons in Verse" (1927).

With all of these first-order contributions to the visual arts of the Harlem Renaissance, it's perhaps easiest to think, well, that's quite enough. But while Douglas was indeed the leading artist of the movement, he was also one of its foremost philosophers. In a letter to Langston Hughes dated Dec. 21, 1925, Douglas argues for a robust embrace of authentically black culture: "Your problem, Langston, my problem, no our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. Not white art painted black ... Let's bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter, through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough, neglected. Then let's sing it, dance it, write it, paint it. Let's do the impossible. Let's create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy, Spiritually earthy. Dynamic."

This March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic magazine, with a cover illustration by the artist Winold Reiss, would mark an inflection point in Douglas's life.

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While Douglas was teaching in Kansas City, the literary, cultural, political and artistic ferment of what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance began picking up steam in Manhattan. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's magazine, The Crisis, then a monthly edited by W.E.B.

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Look carefully at the painting. What appears on the left? The right? What about the central figure? What about the other people? What are they doing?

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Painter Aaron Douglas – "Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction"

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Painter Aaron Douglas – "Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction"

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Click on the image to get a closer look (read the caption for prompt)
Click link for some more information: https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/social-realism/sources/676

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History of the Harlem Renaissance -Article

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History of the Harlem Renaissance -Article

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The Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in 1926 was The Place and Lindy Hop was The Dance!

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 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.

The Great Migration

The Great Migration began because of a "push" and a "pull." Disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws led many African Americans to hope for a new life up north. Hate groups and hate crimes cast alarm among African American families of the Deep South. The promise of owning land had not materialized. Most blacks toiled as sharecroppers trapped in an endless cycle of debt. In the 1890s, a boll weevil blight damaged the cotton crop throughout the region, increasing the despair. All these factors served to push African Americans to seek better lives. The booming northern economy forged the pull. Industrial jobs were numerous, and factory owners looked near and far for sources of cheap labor.

Unfortunately, northerners did not welcome African Americans with open arms. While the legal systems of the northern states were not as obstructionist toward African American rights, the prejudice among the populace was as acrimonious. White laborers complained that African Americans were flooding the employment market and lowering wages. Most new migrants found themselves segregated by practice in run down urban slums. The largest of these was Harlem. Writers, actors, artists, and musicians glorified African American traditions, and at the same time created new ones.

Writers and Actors

The most prolific writer of the Harlem Renaissance was Langston Hughes. Hughes cast off the influences of white poets and wrote with the rhythmic meter of blues and jazz. Claude McKay urged African Americans to stand up for their rights in his powerful verses. Jean Toomer wrote plays and short stories, as well as poems, to capture the spirit of his times. Book publishers soon took notice and patronized many of these talents. Zora Neale Hurston was noticed quickly with her moving novel, Paul Robeson electrified audiences with his memorable stage performances. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Music met prose in the form of musical comedy. The 1921 production of Shuffle Along is sometimes credited with initiating the movement. Actor

Musicians

No aspect of the Harlem Renaissance shaped America and the entire world as much as jazz. Jazz flouted many musical conventions with its syncopated rhythms and improvised instrumental solos. Thousands of city dwellers flocked night after night to see the same performers. Improvisation meant that no two performances would ever be the same. Harlem's Cotton Club boasted the talents of Duke Ellington. Singers such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday popularized blues and jazz vocals. Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong drew huge audiences as white Americans as well as African Americans caught jazz fever.

The continuing hardships faced by African Americans in the Deep South and the urban North were severe. It took the environment of the new American city to bring in close proximity some of the greatest minds of the day. Harlem brought notice to great works that might otherwise have been lost or never produced. The results were phenomenal. The artists of the Harlem Renaissance undoubtedly transformed African American culture. But the impact on all American culture was equally strong. For the first time, white America could not look away.

Harlem, 1900 to 1940, an African American Community
The Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library has prepared an outstanding online exhibit on the Harlem Renaissance. This site includes (mostly) illustrated brief essays on community, sports and business topics as well as activism and the arts. Don't miss the detailed timeline and the searchable database.

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Panel #1: During World War I there was a great migration north by southern African Americans.

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Artist Jacob Lawrence – The Migration of the Negro Series

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Artist Jacob Lawrence – The Migration of the Negro Series

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Click on the image to get a closer look.

For more info about the series, click here: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2015/onewayticket/panel/1/culture/

To view the entire series with their captions, click here: https://lawrencemigration.phillipscollection.org/the-migration-series/panels/1/during-world-war-i-there-was-a-great-migration-north-by-southern-african-americans