# data[].attributes.headline
Video Lesson on Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance

# data[].attributes.subject
Video Lesson on Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance

# data[].attributes.body
This video teaches the audience about Langston Hughes, an important literary figure whom was a poet and playwright. This is an 11-minute lesson that offers a comprehensive and easy-to-understand view of the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Literature 215

# data[].attributes.body
The Apollo theater, though originally a white only theater, became an important outlet for African-American culture and music.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Apollo Theater | History, Performers, & Facts | Britannica

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Apollo Theater, theater established in 1913 at 253 West 125th Street in the Harlem district of New York City. It has been a significant venue for African American popular music. The theater was closed in 1978 but was later renovated and reopened to the public in 1985.

# data[].attributes.headline
Short History Brief of the Harlem Renaissance

# data[].attributes.subject
Short History Brief of the Harlem Renaissance

# data[].attributes.body
This is a short video that describes the Harlem Renaissance starting from its roots in Harlem, New York, and documenting its culture and the impact it had on society, including some of the people who were involved.

# data[].attributes.body
This video on the Harlem Renaissance highlights blacks newly founded culture. Black play's including the play "Shuffle Along", became popular not only among blacks but among whites as well. This expansion of culture during this time period was the blacks attempt at gaining equality and clear civil rights among all people.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
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.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Harlem Renaissance - Definition, Artists & How It Started | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
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.

# data[].attributes.body
The Cotton Club was a nightclub created by the first African-American heavy weight boxer, Jack Johnson and it promoted many African-American musicians and performers and led them to fame.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Table of Contents

This article was most recently revised and updated by

Cotton Club, legendary nightspot in the Harlem district of New York City that for years featured prominent Black entertainers who performed for white audiences. The club served as the springboard to fame for Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and many others.

Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight boxing champion, opened the Club Deluxe, a 400-seat nightclub at the corner of 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue, in 1920. In 1922 the club was taken over by Owen ("Owney") Madden, a well-known Manhattan underworld figure. Madden rechristened the establishment the Cotton Club, limited the audience to white patrons, entirely reworked the interior, and turned the club into the most popular cabaret in Harlem. The new 700-seat club offered stimulating surroundings for its nightly revues by a renowned chorus line. Weekly radio broadcasts spread the fame of the club and its musicians to a national audience.

Among the many seminal figures of jazz and blues who performed at the Cotton Club, bandleader Duke Ellington was perhaps the most closely associated with the venue. His orchestra was hired as the house band in 1927, and it was said that the primitive-style decor of the club inspired the "jungle style" of his bands of the era. "Mood Indigo," "Black and Tan Fantasy," "Creole Love Call," and "Rockin' in Rhythm" were among the Ellington classics first performed by the band during its Cotton Club years. Cab Calloway and his orchestra took over as house band in 1931; they too had a long and successful run at the club. Other prominent entertainers, including Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Bill ("Bojangles") Robinson, and the Nicholas Brothers also contributed greatly to the club's success.

The Cotton Club's best years were from 1922 to 1935. Following the Harlem riots of 1935, the establishment moved to West 48th Street, but the club never regained its earlier success and was closed in 1940. Since then the Cotton Club name has been appropriated by nightclubs around the world, including a re-creation of the original club in Harlem that opened in 1978. Films such as Francis Ford Coppola's fictional The Cotton Club (1984) and Ken Burns's documentary Jazz (2001) brought the story to new audiences.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Patricia Bauer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cotton Club | Description, History, & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Cotton Club, legendary nightspot in the Harlem district of New York City that for years featured prominent Black entertainers who performed for white audiences. The club served as the springboard to fame for Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and many others.

# data[].attributes.headline
Short Video of Music/Images of the Harlem Renaissance

# data[].attributes.subject
Short Video of Music/Images of the Harlem Renaissance

# data[].attributes.body
Jazz music and African American musicians and singers were prominent during the Harlem Renaissance. African Americans formed bands and played their music in jazz clubs and this broadened the acceptance of jazz and black people as a whole. This video also contains images and pieces of art that display the culture of the time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Harlem Renaissance music, images and text

# data[].attributes.body
Included many paintings that would accurately portrait the average black persons life in the 1920's to 1930's. Through visual art including paintings and drawings blacks were able to illustrate their life and the racial inequality they received

# data[].attributes.body
A timeline that shows the major events of the Harlem Renaissance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
LibGuides V2: August Wilson / The Playwright: Harlem Renaissance Timeline

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This Resource page is designed to support an Interdisciplinary Course on the playwright August Wilson. The course is entitled

# data[].attributes.body
Art and photography played a major role during the Harlem Renaissance. It was time when African Americans came out and filled their life with creativity and it was a way for them to connect with their own culture. It was a way for them to take pride in their race and culture along with the idea that it was the time for African Americans to take their rightful place in society and contribute to culture in meaningful ways.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Visual Art During the Harlem Renaissance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.

# data[].attributes.body
The "Awakening" is an illustration created by Winold Reiss during the Harlem Renaissance. This illustration is meant to portray what Africans life was like during the 1900's time period. The art shows a taller more dark figure shunning a smaller black figure possibly meant to symbolize how blacks were pushed downward in society during the time period.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
*African Phantasy: Awakening*, a Winold Reiss illustration from the 1925 anthology *The New Negro: An Interpretation*, edited by Alain Locke.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
African Phantasy: Awakening, a Winold Reiss illustration from the 1925 anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, edited by Alain Locke.

# data[].attributes.body
The Harlem renaissance was a period of time from the 1920's to the 1930's where there was a large increase in African american culture, especially the arts involving literary, visual, musical, and theatrical arts. It mainly took place in Harlem, New York, but it did take place in other cities and states outside the area.