Renaissance Reflected the Growing Place of African Americans in Society and Art
On February 28, 2014, Humanities Texas held a one-day teacher professional development workshop in Austin focusing on the history and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Professor Cary D. Wintz, Distinguished Professor of History at Texas Southern University, opened the workshop with the post-obit lecture titled "The Harlem Renaissance: What Was Information technology, and Why Does Information technology Matter?" In his remarks, Wintz addresses the origins and nature of the motion—a task, he says, that is far more complex than it may seem.
Wintz is a specialist in the Harlem Renaissance and in African American political thought. Wintz is an writer or editor of numerous books including Harlem Speaks; Blackness Culture and the Harlem Renaissance; African American Political Thought, 1890–1930; African Americans and the Presidency: The Route to the White Business firm; and The Harlem Renaissance in the West. He served every bit an editor of the Oxford University Press five-book Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present, and the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Routledge). He has as well written extensively on Texas history and is an author of 1 of the standard Texas history texts, Texas: The Lone Star Land. He is a native Houstonian and a graduate of Rice University and Kansas Land University.
What was the Harlem Renaissance and when did it begin?
This seemingly simple question reveals the complexities of the movement we know varyingly every bit the New Negro Renaissance, the New Negro Movement, the Negro Renaissance, the Jazz Historic period, or the Harlem Renaissance. To answer the question it is necessary to identify the movement within time and space, and then to define its nature. This chore is much more complex than information technology might seem.
Traditionally the Harlem Renaissance was viewed primarily every bit a literary movement centered in Harlem and growing out of the black migration and the emergence of Harlem as the premier black metropolis in the United States. Music and theater were mentioned briefly, more than equally background and local color, as providing inspiration for poetry and local color for fiction. Even so, there was no assay of the developments in these fields. Likewise, art was discussed mostly in terms of Aaron Douglas and his clan with Langston Hughes and other immature writers who produced Burn!! in 1926, simply in that location was little or no analysis of the piece of work of African American artists. And at that place was even less discussion or analysis of the work of women in the fields of art, music, and theater.
Fortunately, this narrow view has changed. The Harlem Renaissance is increasingly viewed through a broader lens that recognizes it as a national motility with connections to international developments in art and culture that places increasing emphasis on the non-literary aspects of the movement.
Time
First, to know when the Harlem Renaissance began, we must make up one's mind its origins. Understanding the origins depends on how we perceive the nature of the Renaissance. For those who view the Renaissance every bit primarily a literary movement, the Civic Club Dinner of March 21, 1924, signaled its emergence. This event did not occur in Harlem, but was held most one hundred blocks south in Manhattan at the Civic Gild on 12th Street off Fifth Avenue. Charles S. Johnson, the young editor of Opportunity, the National Urban League's monthly magazine, conceived the effect to honor writer Jessie Fauset on the occasion of the publication of her novel, There Is Confusion. Johnson planned a small dinner party with about twenty guests—a mix of white publishers, editors, and literary critics, black intellectuals, and young black writers. But, when he asked Alain Locke to preside over the event, Locke agreed just if the dinner honored African American writers in general rather than ane novelist.
And so the simple celebratory dinner morphed into a transformative event with over 1 hundred attendees. African Americans were represented past Westward. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others of the black intelligentsia, along with Fauset and a representative group of poets and authors. White guests predominately were publishers and critics; Carl Van Doren, editor of Century mag, spoke for this group calling upon the young writers in the audition to make their contribution to the "new literary age" emerging in America.i
The Civic Club dinner significantly accelerated the literary phase of the Harlem Renaissance. Frederick Allen, editor of Harper's, approached Countee Cullen, securing his poems for his magazine as shortly as the poet finished reading them. Every bit the dinner ended Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic, hung around talking to Cullen, Fauset, and several other immature writers, then offered Charles Due south. Johnson a unique opportunity: an entire effect of Survey Graphic devoted to the Harlem literary move. Under the editorship of Alain Locke the "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro" number of Survey Graphic hitting the newsstands March 1, 1925.2 It was an overnight sensation. Later on that twelvemonth Locke published a book-length version of the "Harlem" edition, expanded and re-titled The New Negro: An Estimation.3 In the anthology Locke laid downwards his vision of the artful and the parameters for the emerging Harlem Renaissance; he also included a collection of poetry, fiction, graphic arts, and critical essays on art, literature, and music.
For those who viewed the Harlem Renaissance in terms of musical theater and entertainment, the birth occurred three years earlier when Shuffle Along opened at the 63rd Street Musical Hall. Shuffle Forth was a musical play written by a pair of veteran Vaudeville acts—comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, and composers/singers Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Most of its bandage featured unknowns, but some, like Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, who had simply small roles in the production, were on their fashion to international fame. Eubie Blake recalled the significance of the production, when he pointed out that he and Sissle and Lyles and Miller accomplished something that the other slap-up African American performers—Bob Cole and J. Rosamund Johnson, Bert Williams and George Walker—had tried, just failed to reach. "We did information technology, that's the story," he exclaimed, "We put Negroes back on Broadway!"4
Poet Langston Hughes also saw Shuffle Along as a seminal event in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. Information technology introduced him to the creative world of New York, and information technology helped to redefine and energize music and nightlife in Harlem. In the process, information technology introduced white New Yorkers to blackness music, theater, and entertainment and helped generated the white fascination with Harlem and the African American arts that was so much a part of the Harlem Renaissance. For the young Hughes, just arrived in the city, the long-range impact of Shuffle Along was non on his mind. In 1921, it was all well-nigh the show, and, as he wrote in his autobiography, it was "a honey of a show:"
Swift, bright, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes. As well, look who were in it: The now famous choir director, Hall Johnson, and the composer, William Grant Still, were a office of the orchestra. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle wrote the music and played and acted in the show. Miller and Lyles were the comics. Florence Mills skyrocketed to fame in the 2d act. Trixie Smith sang "He May Exist Your Human being But He Comes to See Me Sometimes." And Caterina Jarboro, now a European prima donna, and the internationally celebrated Josephine Baker were only in the chorus. Everybody was in the audience—including me. People came to see it innumerable times. Information technology was always packed.5
Shuffle Along as well brought jazz to Broadway. Information technology combined jazz music with very creatively choreographed jazz dance to transform musical theater into something new, exciting, and daring. And the bear witness was a critical and fiscal success. It ran 474 performances on Broadway and spawned iii touring companies. Information technology was a hit show written, performed, and produced past blacks, and it generated a demand for more than. Within three years, nine other African American shows appeared on Broadway, and white writers and composers rushed to produce their versions of black musical comedies.
Music was also a prominent feature of African American culture during the Harlem Renaissance. The term "Jazz Age" was used by many who saw African American music, specially the blues and jazz, every bit the defining features of the Renaissance. Even so, both jazz and the blues were imports to Harlem. They emerged out of the African American experience effectually the turn of the century in southern towns and cities, like New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis. From these origins these musical forms spread across the land, north to Chicago before arriving in New York a few years before World War I.
Blues and black blues performers such as musician W. C. Handy and vocalist Ma Rainey were popular on the Vaudeville circuit in the late nineteenth century. The publication of W. C. Handy's "Memphis Dejection" in 1912 and the get-go recordings a few years later brought this genre into the mainstream of American pop civilization. Jazz reportedly originated amidst the musicians who played in the confined and brothels of the infamous Storyville district of New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have invented jazz at that place in 1902, but it is hundred-to-one that any 1 person holds that award.
According to James Weldon Johnson, jazz reached New York in 1905 at Proctor's Twenty-Third Street Theater. Johnson described the band there as "a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making dominant use of banjos, mandolins, guitars, saxophones, and drums in combination, and [it] was called the Memphis Students—a very skillful proper name, overlooking the fact that the performers were not students and were not from Memphis. There was also a violin, a couple of brass instruments, and a double-bass." Seven years later, composer and band leader James Reese Europe, one of the "Memphis Students," took his Clef Society Orchestra to Carnegie Hall. During World State of war I, while serving as an officeholder for a motorcar-gun company in the famed 369th U.Due south. Infantry Division, James Europe, swain officer Noble Sissel, and the regimental ring introduced the sounds of ragtime, jazz, and the blues to European audiences.
Post-obit the war, black music, especially the blues and jazz, became increasingly pop with both black and white audiences. Europe continued his career as a successful bandleader until his untimely death in 1919. Ma Rainey and other jazz artists and blues singers began to sign recording contracts, initially with African American record companies like Blackness Swan Records, just very quickly with Paramount, Columbia, and other mainstream recording outlets. In Harlem, one gild opened after another, each featuring jazz orchestras or blues singers. Noble Sissle, of class, was one of the team backside the production of Shuffle Along, which opened Broadway up to Chocolate Dandies and a series of other black musical comedies, featuring these new musical styles.
The visual arts, peculiarly painting, prints, and sculpture, emerged somewhat afterward in Harlem than did music, musical theater, and literature. One of the virtually notable visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, arrived in Harlem from Kansas Urban center in 1925. Subsequently that year his first pieces appeared in Opportunity, and ten Douglas pieces appeared equally "Ten Decorative Designs" illustrating Locke's The New Negro. Early the next twelvemonth W. E. B. Du Bois published Douglas'southward kickoff illustrations in The Crunch. Due to his personal association with Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and other African American writers, his collaboration with them in the publication of their literary magazine Fire!! and his role designing volume jackets and illustrating literary works, Douglas was the most high-profile artist clearly continued to the Harlem Renaissance in the mid- to tardily-1920s. And while these connections to the literary part of the Renaissance were notable, they were non typical of the experience of other African American artists of this period.
More significant in launching the art phase of the Harlem Renaissance were the exhibits of African American art in Harlem and the funding and exhibits that the Harmon Foundation provided. The early stirrings of the African American art movement in Harlem followed a 1919 exhibit on the work of Henry Ossawa Tanner at a midtown gallery in New York, and an exhibit of African American artists two years later at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library. Fifty-fifty more important to the nurturing and promotion of African American art were the activities of the Harmon Foundation. Beginning in 1926 the Foundation awarded greenbacks prizes for outstanding achievement by African Americans in eight fields, including fine arts. Additionally, from 1928 through 1933, the Harmon Foundation organized an annual showroom of African American art.
Place
Situating the Harlem Renaissance in space is almost as complex as defining its origins and time span. Certainly Harlem is central to the Harlem Renaissance, but it serves more equally an anchor for the movement than every bit its sole location. In reality, the Harlem Renaissance both drew from and spread its influence across the United States, the Caribbean, and the world. Just a handful of the writers, artists, musicians, and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance were native to Harlem or New York, and simply a relatively small number lived in Harlem throughout the Renaissance catamenia. And even so, Harlem impacted the art, music, and writing of nearly all of the participants in the Harlem Renaissance.
Harlem refers to that part of Manhattan Island north of Central Park and generally east of Eighth Avenue or St. Nicholas Artery. Originally established in the seventeenth century as a Dutch hamlet, information technology evolved over time. Following its annexation past the city in 1873, urban growth commenced. The resulting Harlem existent manor boom lasted about twenty years during which developers erected most of the physical structures that defined Harlem as tardily as the mid-twentieth century. They designed this new, urban Harlem primarily for the wealthy and the upper middle form; it independent broad avenues, a rail connection to the urban center on Eighth Artery, and consisted of expensive homes and luxurious flat buildings accompanied by commercial and retail structures, along with stately churches and synagogues, clubs, social organizations, and even the Harlem Combo Orchestra.
By 1905, Harlem'due south boom turned into a bust. Drastic white developers began to sell or hire to African Americans, often at profoundly discounted prices, while black real manor firms provided the customers. At this time, approximately sixty thousand blacks lived in New York, scattered through the five boroughs, including a small community in Harlem. The largest concentration inhabited the overcrowded and congested Tenderloin and San Juan Hill sections of the west side of Manhattan. When New York'south blackness population swelled in the twentieth century as newcomers from the South moved n and every bit redevelopment destroyed existing black neighborhoods, pressure for additional and hopefully better housing pushed blacks n upwards the west side of Manhattan into Harlem.
Harlem's transition, once information technology began, followed fairly traditional patterns. As before long as blacks started moving onto a cake, holding values dropped further equally whites began to get out. This process was peculiarly evident in the early 1920s. Both black and white realtors took advantage of declining property values in Harlem—the panic selling that resulted when blacks moved in. Addressing the demand for housing generated by the urban center'southward rapidly growing blackness population, they acquired, subdivided, and leased Harlem property to black tenants.
Year by year, the boundaries of blackness Harlem expanded, as blacks streamed into Harlem as quickly every bit they could notice affordable housing. Past 1910, they had become the majority group on the west side of Harlem northward of 130th Street; by 1914, the population of black Harlem was estimated to be l thousand. By 1930 black Harlem had expanded north ten blocks to 155th Street and south to 115th Street; information technology spread from the Harlem River to Amsterdam Avenue, and housed approximately 164,000 blacks. The cadre of this customs—divisional roughly by 126th Street on the south, 159th Street on the north, the Harlem River and Park Artery on the east, and Eighth Avenue on the w—was more than than 95 percent black.
By 1920, Harlem, by virtue of the sheer size of its black population, had emerged as the virtual capital of black America; its proper name evoked a magic that lured all classes of blacks from all sections of the land to its streets. Impoverished southern farmers and sharecroppers made their fashion northward, where they were joined in Harlem by black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. Although the old black social elites of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia were disdainful of Harlem's vulgar splendor, and while it housed no significant black university as did Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Nashville, Harlem still became the race's cultural center and a Mecca for its aspiring young. It housed the National Urban League, A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the black leadership of the NAACP. Marcus Garvey launched his ill-fated black nationalist movement amid its masses, and Harlem became the geographical focal point of African American literature, art, music, and theater. Its night clubs, music halls, and jazz joints became the centre of New York nightlife in the mid-1920s. Harlem, in short, was where the action was in black America during the decade following World War I.
Harlem and New York City besides contained the infrastructure to support and sustain the arts. In the early twentieth century, New York had replaced Boston every bit the centre of the book publishing manufacture. Furthermore, new publishing houses in the city, such as Alfred A. Knopf, Harper Brothers, and Harcourt Brace, were open to adding greater diversity to their volume lists by including works past African American writers. By the belatedly nineteenth century, New York City housed Tin Pan Alley, the middle of the music publishing manufacture. In the 1920s, when recordings and broadcasting emerged, New York was again in the forefront. Broadway was the epicenter of American theater, and New York was the center of the American fine art world. In short, in the early twentieth century no other American city possessed the businesses and institutions to support literature and the arts that New York did.
In spite of its physical presence, size, and its literary and arts infrastructure, the nature of Harlem and its relation to the Renaissance are very complex. The word "Harlem" evoked strong and conflicting images among African Americans during the beginning half of the twentieth century. Was it the Negro metropolis, black Manhattan, the political, cultural, and spiritual center of African America, a land of plenty, a urban center of refuge, or a blackness ghetto and emerging slum? For some, the epitome of Harlem was more personal. King Solomon Gillis, the main grapheme in Rudolph Fisher's "The City of Refuge," was one of these. Emerging out of the subway at 135th and Lennox Artery, Gillis was transfixed:
Make clean air, blue sky, brilliant sunlight. Gillis ready downwards his tan-cardboard extension-case and wiped his black, shining brow. So slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; upwards and downwards Lenox Avenue, up and down One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street; large, lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; black ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping most the sidewalks; here and in that location a white face up drifting forth, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. There was assuredly no doubt of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem.7
Gillis then noticed the mayhem in the street as trucks and autos crowded into the intersection at the command of the traffic cop—an African American traffic cop:
The Southern Negro's eyes opened broad; his mouth opened wider. . . . For there stood a handsome, brass-buttoned giant directing the heaviest traffic Gillis had ever seen; halting unnumbered tons of automobiles and trucks and wagons and pushcarts and street-cars; holding them at bay with one hand while he swept like tons peremptorily on with the other; ruling the wide crossing with supreme self-assurance; and he, too, was a Negro!
Withal most of the vehicles that leaped or crouched at his bidding carried white passengers. Ane of these overdrove premises a few feet and Gillis heard the officer's shrill whistle and gruff reproof, saw the driver's face up plough cherry and his car draw back like a threatened pup. It was beyond belief—impossible. Black might exist white, but it couldn't be that white!
"Washed died an' woke upwardly in Sky," thought King Solomon, watching, fascinated; and after a while, equally if the wonder of information technology were as well great to believe simply past seeing, "Cullud policemans!" he said, one-half aloud; so repeated over and over, with greater and greater conviction, "Even got cullud policemans…"8
Gillis was one of those who sought refuge in Harlem. He fled North Carolina later on shooting a white man. Now, in Harlem, the policeman was black. Not that this inverse his fate. At the end of the story, ane of these blackness policemen dragged Gillis away in handcuffs. The reality of Harlem often contradicted the myth.
For poet Langston Hughes, Harlem was also something of a refuge. Post-obit a mostly unhappy childhood living at i time or another with his mother or male parent, grandmother, or neighbors, Hughes convinced his stern and foreboding begetter to finance his education at Columbia University. He recalled his 1921 arrival:
"I went up the steps and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again. I registered at the Y. When college opened, I did not want to movement into the dormitory at Columbia. I really did not want to go the college at all. I didn't want to practise anything simply alive in Harlem, get a job and work there."9
Afterwards a less than happy yr at Columbia, Hughes did exactly that. He dropped out of school and moved into Harlem. Hughes, though, never lost sight that poverty, overcrowded and battered housing, and racial prejudice were part of the daily experience of almost Harlem residents.
For Hughes, likewise, the want to just "live in Harlem" was as much myth as reality. After dropping out of Columbia and moving to Harlem he actually spent lilliputian fourth dimension in that location. Until the late 1930s, he was much more of a company or transient in Harlem than a resident. While Hughes spent many weekends and vacations in Harlem during his years at Lincoln University, during the superlative of the Renaissance, betwixt 1923 and 1938 he was abroad from the urban center more than than he was there, more than a company than a full-time resident.
James Weldon Johnson saw a yet different Harlem. In his 1930 book, Blackness Manhattan, he described the black metropolis in near utopian terms as the race'due south great hope and its thou social experiment: "So here we have Harlem—not merely a colony or a community or a settlement . . . simply a blackness city, located in the eye of white Manhattan, and containing more Negroes to the foursquare mile than any other spot on globe. It strikes the uninformed observer as a phenomenon, a phenomenon directly out of the skies."10 When Johnson looked at Harlem he did not see an emerging slum or a ghetto, but a black neighborhood north of Central Park that was "one of the most beautiful and healthful" in the city. "It is not a fringe, information technology is not a slum, nor is it a 'quarter' consisting of dilapidated tenements. It is a section of new-law flat houses and handsome dwellings, with streets likewise paved, as well lighted, and as well kept as in any other function of the city."11
Without question Harlem was a rapidly growing blackness metropolis, but what kind of city was it becoming? Harlem historian Gilbert Osofsky argued, "the almost profound modify that Harlem experienced in the 1920'south was its emergence as a slum. Largely within the space of a unmarried decade Harlem was transformed from a potentially ideal community to a neighborhood with manifold social and economical problems chosen 'deplorable,' 'unspeakable,' 'incredible.'"12 As a upshot, most of Harlem's residents lived in poor housing, either in poverty or on the verge of poverty, in a neighborhood experiencing the typical results of poverty and bigotry: growing vice, crime, juvenile delinquency, and drug addiction.
In curt, the day-to-day realities that most Harlemites faced differed dramatically from the prototype of Harlem life presented by James Weldon Johnson. Harlem was beset with contradictions. While it reflected the self-conviction, militancy, and pride of the New Negro in his or her demand for equality, and it reflected the aspirations and creative genius of the talented young people of the Harlem Renaissance along with the economic aspirations of the black migrants seeking a amend life in the northward, ultimately Harlem failed to resolve its problems and to fulfill these dreams.
The 1935 Harlem Race Riot put to rest the conflicting images of Harlem. On March 19, 1935, a immature Puerto Rican boy was caught stealing a ten-cent pocketknife from the counter of a 135th Street five-and-dime store. Post-obit the arrest, rumors spread that law had browbeaten the youth to decease. A large crowd gathered, shouting "constabulary brutality" and "racial discrimination." A window was smashed, annexation began, and the riot spread throughout the night. The violence resulted in three blacks dead, ii hundred stores trashed and burned, and more than ii meg dollars worth of destroyed property. The Puerto Rican youth whose arrest precipitated the riot had been released the previous evening when the merchant chose not to press charges. Shocked by the uprising, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia established an interracial committee headed by E. Franklin Frazier, a professor of folklore at Howard University, to investigate the anarchism. They concluded the obvious: the riot resulted from a general frustration with racial discrimination and poverty.
What the committee failed to report was that the riot shattered once and for all James Weldon Johnson'due south image of Harlem as the African American urban utopia. In spite of the presence of artists and writers, nightclubs, music, and entertainment, Harlem was a slum, a black ghetto characterized by poverty and discrimination. Burned-out storefronts might be fertile ground for political activity, but non for fine art, literature, and culture. Harlem would come across new black writers in the years to come. Musicians, poets, and artists would continue to make their home there, just it never again served as the focal point of a creative movement with the national and international impact of the Harlem Renaissance.
Johnson did non personally witness the 1935 Riot. He had left the city in 1931, the twelvemonth after he published Black Manhattan, to accept the Spence Chair in Creative Literature at Fisk Academy in Nashville. He lived there until his death in 1938.
Renaissance
And so, what was the Harlem Renaissance? The simple answer is that the Harlem Renaissance (or the New Negro Movement, or whatsoever proper noun is preferred) was the most important event in twentieth-century African American intellectual and cultural life. While all-time known for its literature, information technology touched every aspect of African American literary and artistic inventiveness from the cease of Earth State of war I through the Great Depression. Literature, disquisitional writing, music, theater, musical theater, and the visual arts were transformed by this movement; information technology also afflicted politics, social evolution, and nigh every aspect of the African American experience from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s.
Just there was likewise something imperceptible near the Harlem Renaissance, something vague and difficult to define. The Harlem Renaissance, and then, was an African American literary and creative move anchored in Harlem, but drawing from, extending to, and influencing African American communities across the country and beyond. Every bit we have seen, information technology also had no precise beginning; nor did it have a precise ending. Rather, it emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American customs that followed World State of war I, blossomed in the 1920s, and then faded abroad in the mid-to-late 1930s and early 1940s.
Also the Harlem Renaissance has no single defined ideological or stylistic standard that unified its participants and defined the motion. Instead, most participants in the movement resisted black or white efforts to define or narrowly categorize their fine art. For example, in 1926, a group of writers, spearheaded by writer Wallace Thurman and including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and creative person Aaron Douglas, among others, produced their own literary magazine, Fire!! 1 purpose of this venture was the declaration of their intent to assume ownership of the literary Renaissance. In the process, they turned their backs on Alain Locke and W. Eastward. B. Du Bois and others who sought to channel blackness creativity into what they considered to be the proper aesthetic and political directions. Despite the efforts of Thurman and his immature colleagues, Burn!! fizzled out afterwards only one issue and the motion remained sick defined. In fact, this was its virtually distinguishing characteristic. There would exist no mutual literary style or political ideology associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Information technology was far more an identity than an ideology or a literary or creative schoolhouse. What united participants was their sense of taking part in a common endeavor and their delivery to giving artistic expression to the African American feel.
If there was a argument that defined the philosophy of the new literary movement information technology was Langston Hughes'south essay, "The Negro Creative person and the Racial Mount," published in The Nation, June 16, 1926:
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not their displeasure doesn't matter either. Nosotros will build our temples for tomorrow, potent as we know how, and we will stand on top of the mountain, complimentary within ourselves.thirteen
Like Fire!!, this essay was the movement'due south declaration of independence, both from the stereotypes that whites held nigh African Americans and the expectations that they had for their literary works, and from the expectations that black leaders and blackness critics had for blackness writers, and the expectations that they placed on their piece of work.
There was, not surprisingly, resistance to this independence, especially amid those concerned with the political costs that the realistic expressions of black life could engender—feeding white prejudice by exposing the less savory elements of the blackness customs. Du Bois responded to Hughes a few weeks later in a Chicago speech that was subsequently published in The Crisis equally "The Criteria of Negro Art" (October 1926): "Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I accept for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of blackness folk to love and bask. I do not intendance a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do intendance when propaganda is bars to one side while the other is stripped and silent."
The determination of black writers to follow their own artistic vision led to the artistic diversity that was the main characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance. This diversity is clearly axiomatic in the poesy of the period where subject matter, style, and tone ranged from the traditional to the more than inventive. Langston Hughes, for case, captured the life and language of the working class, and the rhythm and style of the blues in a number of his poems, none more and so than "The Weary Dejection." In contrast to Hughes's cribbing of the grade of black music, particularly jazz and the blues, and his utilize of the black vernacular, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen utilized more than traditional and classical forms for their poetry. McKay used sonnets for much of his protestation verse, while Cullen's poems relied both on classical literary allusions and symbols and standard poetic forms.
This diverseness and experimentation also characterized music. This was evidenced in the blues of Bessie Smith and the range of jazz from the early rhythms of Jelly Ringlet Morton to the instrumentation of Louis Armstrong or the sophisticated orchestration of Duke Ellington. In painting, the soft colors and pastels that Aaron Douglas used to create a veiled view for the African-inspired images in his paintings and murals dissimilarity sharply with Jacob Lawrence'due south apply of bright colors and sharply defined images.
Within this diversity, several themes emerged which set the character of the Harlem Renaissance. No black writer, musician, or artist expressed all of these themes, but each did address one or more in his or her work. The first of these themes was the effort to recapture the African American past—its rural southern roots, urban experience, and African heritage. Interest in the African past corresponded with the rise of Pan-Africanism in African American politics, which was at the center of Marcus Garvey'southward ideology and as well a business organisation of W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1920s.
Information technology also reflected the general fascination with ancient African history that followed the discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922. Poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes addressed their African heritage in their works, while artist Aaron Douglas used African motifs in his fine art. A number of musicians, from the classical composer William Grant Notwithstanding to jazz corking Louis Armstrong, introduced African inspired rhythms and themes in their compositions.
The exploration of blackness southern heritage was reflected in novels by Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as in Jacob Lawrence's art. Zora Neale Hurston used her experience as a folklorist every bit the basis for her extensive study of rural southern black life in her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Jacob Lawrence turned to African American history for much of his work including two of his multi-canvass series' of paintings, the Harriett Tubman serial and the ane on the Black Migration.
Harlem Renaissance writers and artists also explored life in Harlem and other urban centers. Both Hughes and McKay drew on Harlem images for their verse, and McKay used the ghetto as the setting for his first novel, Home to Harlem. Some black writers, including McKay and Hughes, as well as Rudolph Fisher and Wallace Thurman, were accused of overemphasizing crime, sexuality, and other less-savory aspects of ghetto life in club to feed the voyeuristic desires of white readers and publishers, in imitation of white novelist Carl Van Vechten'southward controversial Harlem novel, Nigger Heaven.
A third major theme addressed past the literature of the Harlem Renaissance was race. Well-nigh every novel and play, and most of the verse, explored race in America, especially the impact of race and racism on African Americans. In their simplest form these works protested racial injustice. Claude McKay's sonnet, "If We Must Die," was among the best of this genre. Langston Hughes also wrote protest pieces, as did almost every black writer at i fourth dimension or some other.
Amongst the visual artists, Lawrence's historical series emphasized the racial struggle that dominated African American history, while Romare Bearden's early illustrative piece of work often focused on racial politics. The struggle confronting lynching in the mid-1920s stimulated anti-lynching poetry, likewise every bit Walter White's carefully researched study of the subject, Rope and Faggot. In the early on 1930s, the Scottsboro incident stimulated considerable protestation writing, as well as a 1934 anthology, Negro, which addressed race in an international context. About of the literary efforts of the Harlem Renaissance avoided overt protest or propaganda, focusing instead on the psychological and social impact of race. Among the best of these studies were Nella Larsen'due south 2 novels, Quicksand in 1928 and, a twelvemonth later, Passing. Both explored characters of mixed racial heritage who struggled to define their racial identity in a world of prejudice and racism. Langston Hughes addressed like themes in his verse form "Cross," and in his 1931 play, Mulatto, as did Jessie Fauset in her 1929 novel, Plum Bun. That same year Wallace Thurman made color bigotry inside the urban black community the focus of his novel, The Blacker the Berry.
Finally, the Harlem Renaissance incorporated all aspects of African American culture in its creative work. This ranged from the employ of black music equally an inspiration for poetry or black folklore as an inspiration for novels and short stories. Best known for this was Langston Hughes who used the rhythms and styles of jazz and the dejection in much of his early poesy. James Weldon Johnson, who published two collections of black spirituals in 1927 and 1928, and Sterling Brown, who used the blues and southern work songs in many of the poems in his 1932 book of poetry, Southern Route, continued the practice that Hughes had initiated. Other writers exploited black religion as a literary source. Johnson made the black preacher and his sermons the ground for the poems in God'southward Trombones, while Hurston and Larsen used black religion and black preachers in their novels. Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), described the exploits of a southern black preacher, while in the concluding portion of Quicksand, Larsen's heroine was ensnared by religion and a southern black preacher.
Through all of these themes, Harlem Renaissance writers, musicians, and artists were determined to express the African American experience in all of its multifariousness and complexity as realistically as possible. This delivery to realism ranged from the ghetto realism that created such controversy when writers exposed negative aspects of African American life, to beautifully crafted and detailed portraits of black life in small towns such as in Hughes'southward novel, Not Without Laughter, or the witty and bitter depiction of Harlem'due south black literati in Wallace Thurman'due south Infants of the Spring.
The Harlem Renaissance appealed to and relied on a mixed audience—the African American middle form and white consumers of the arts. African American magazines such every bit The Crisis (the NAACP monthly journal) and Opportunity (the monthly publication of the Urban League) employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staff, published their verse and short stories, and promoted African American literature through articles, reviews, and annual literary prizes. They also printed illustrations by black artists and used black artists in the layout design of their periodicals. Besides, blacks attempted to produce their own literary and artistic venues. In addition to the brusk-lived Burn!!, Wallace Thurman spearheaded another unmarried-effect literary magazine, Harlem, in 1927, while poet Countee Cullen edited a "Negro Poets" issue of the avant-garde poetry magazine Palms in 1926, and brought out an album of African American verse, Caroling Dusk, in 1927.
As important equally these literary outlets were, they were not sufficient to support a literary move. Consequently, the Harlem Renaissance relied heavily on white-endemic enterprises for its creative works. Publishing houses, magazines, recording companies, theaters, and art galleries were primarily white-owned, and financial support through grants, prizes, and awards by and large involved white money. In fact, one of the major accomplishments of the Renaissance was to push open the door to mainstream periodicals, publishing houses, and funding sources. African American music too played to mixed audiences. Harlem's cabarets attracted both Harlem residents and white New Yorkers seeking out Harlem nightlife. The famous Cotton Club carried this to a baroque extreme by providing black entertainment for exclusively white audiences. Ultimately, the more successful black musicians and entertainers moved their performances downtown.
The relationship of the Harlem Renaissance to white venues and white audiences created controversy. While most African American critics strongly supported the movement, others like Benjamin Brawley and even W. E. B. Du Bois were sharply critical and accused Renaissance writers of reinforcing negative African American stereotypes. Langston Hughes's assertion that black artists intended to express themselves freely, no affair what the black public or white public thought, accurately reflected the attitude of most writers and artists.
Dull fade to black
The end of the Harlem Renaissance is as hard to define as its beginnings. It varies somewhat from 1 artistic field to another. In musical theater, the popularity of black musical reviews died out by the early 1930s, although there were occasional efforts, by and large unsuccessful, to revive the genre. Withal, black performers and musicians continued to work, although non so often in all blackness shows. Black music connected into the World War Ii era, although the popularity of blues singers waned somewhat, and jazz changed as the large band style became pop. Literature also inverse, and a new generation of black writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison emerged with piddling interest in or connection with the Harlem Renaissance. In art, a number of artists who had emerged in the 1930s connected to piece of work, but once more, with no connection to a broader African American movement. Also, a number of Harlem Renaissance literary figures went silent, left Harlem, or died. Some, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, continued to write and publish into the 1940s and across, although there was no longer any sense that they were connected to a literary movement. And Harlem lost some of its magic following the 1935 race riot. In whatsoever example, few, if any, people were talking nearly a Harlem Renaissance past 1940.
The Harlem Renaissance flourished in the late 1920s and early 1930s, just its antecedents and legacy spread many years before 1920 and after 1930. It had no universally recognized name, simply was known variously every bit the New Negro Movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, every bit well every bit the Harlem Renaissance. It had no clearly defined beginning or cease, just emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American customs that followed World War I, blossomed in the mid- to late-1920s, and then faded away in the mid-1930s.
What was the Harlem Renaissance and why was it important?
While at its core it was primarily a literary movement, the Harlem Renaissance touched all of the African American creative arts. While its participants were determined to truthfully represent the African American experience and believed in racial pride and equality, they shared no common political philosophy, social belief, artistic way, or artful principle. This was a motility of individuals costless of any overriding manifesto. While primal to African American artistic and intellectual life, by no means did it savor the full support of the black or white intelligentsia; information technology generated equally much hostility and criticism as information technology did support and praise. From the moment of its birth, its legitimacy was debated. Even so, by at least i measure, its success was clear: the Harlem Renaissance was the first fourth dimension that a considerable number of mainstream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously, and information technology was the first time that African American literature and the arts attracted pregnant attention from the nation at large.
1Carl Van Doren, "The Younger Generation of Negro Writers," Opportunity 2 (1924): 144–45. Van Doren's Civic Club Dinner accost was reprinted in Opportunity.
2 Survey Graphic, Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, 6 (March 1925).
3Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Atheneum, 1969).
4See Terry Waldo, "Eubie Blake," in Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Cary D. Wintz (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2007), 151–65.
5Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Colina and Wang, 1963), 223–24.
6James Weldon Johnson, Blackness Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 120–21.
viiRudolph Fisher, "The Metropolis of Refuge," in The New Negro, 57–8. The City of Refuge was first published in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1925.
8Ibid. 58–ix.
ixHughes, Big Bounding main, 81–2.
xJohnson, Blackness Manhattan, 3–4.
11Ibid, 146. Johnson likewise expresses this view of Harlem in "The Making of Harlem," Survey Graphic, 6 (March 1925), 635–39.
12Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930, (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 135.
thirteenLangston Hughes, "The Negro Creative person and the Racial Mountain, The Nation. June sixteen, 1926, 694.
Song of the Towers past Aaron Douglas for the mural serial Aspects of Negro Life, commissioned in 1934 by the WPA for the Harlem Branch of the New York City Public Library. Schomburg Center for Enquiry in Blackness Culture, Fine art and Artifacts Partition, New York Public Library.
Online Educational Resources: The Harlem Renaissance
Humanities Texas has assembled a list of online educational resources related to the Harlem Renaissance and its history, literature, and culture. These websites include primary source documents, lesson plans, photographs, and other interactive elements that volition enhance classroom instruction and student comprehension.
Portrait of Charles S. Johnson. Johnson was founder of Opportunity, the National Urban League's monthly magazine, and organizer of the Civic Club Dinner that marked the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance as a literary motility. U.S. Farm Security Assistants/Office of War Data Collection, Prints and Photographs Partition, Library of Congress. Photograph by Gordon Parks.
The cover of the "Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro" effect of Survey Graphic, featuring an analogy of lyric tenor and composer Roland Hayes past Winold Reiss, 1925. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Athenaeum and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library.
The cast of Shuffle Along, 1921.
Canvass music for "I'm Just Wild About Harry" from Shuffle Along, the outset Broadway musical written, produced, and performed past African Americans, by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Music Segmentation, Library of Congress. Copyright eolith, 1921 (155.3b).
Dejection composer and musician W. C. Handy (left) with bandleader and composer Duke Ellington (correct), ca. 1940s. Schomburg Center for Research in Blackness Civilization, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.
Sheet music for "Goodnight Angeline" past James Reese Europe, 1919. The photographs on the cover testify Europe with the 369th U.S. Infantry Division "Hell Fighters" Band. Performing Arts Encyclopedia, Library of Congress.
The Prodigal Son by Aaron Douglas in God'south Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse past James Weldon Johnson. New York: The Viking Press, 1927. Douglas's painting was inspired by Johnson'due south verse form of the same proper name. Courtesy of Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
The Seine past Henry Ossawa Tanner, c. 1902. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Tanner moved to Paris in 1891 and achieved international recognition for his work. Gift of the Avalon Foundation. The National Gallery of Fine art, Washington, DC.
Section of a map of New York City showing Central Park, Yorkville, and the southern part of Harlem, 1870. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, New York Public Library.
Directors of the Afro-American Investment and Building Company, Brooklyn, New York, organized September 1892. Photograph from The Negro in Business by Booker T. Washington. Boston: Hartel, Jenkins & Co., 1907. openlibrary.org
Within thirty seconds walk of the 135th Street Branch (New York Public Library), Harlem, 1919. Photograph by F. F. Hopper. Schomburg Heart for Research in Blackness Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.
In Black Manhattan (1930), James Weldon Johnson's history of African Americans in New York, 2 demographic maps of Harlem show its quick flourishing in the early decades of the twentieth century. Harry Ransom Eye.
From left to right: Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, Eastward. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher, and Hubert T. Delany, on the roof of 580 St. Nicholas Avenue, Harlem, on the occasion of a political party in Hughes' honour, 1924. Schomburg Heart for Inquiry in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Sectionalisation, New York Public Library.
Lenox Avenue in Harlem, ca. 1920s.
Policemen in Harlem, 1929. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Civilisation, Jean Blackwell Hutson Enquiry and Reference Division, New York Public Library.
Portrait of Langston Hughes as a immature man. Photo past James L. Allen. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Civilization, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.
Portrait of James Weldon Johnson, Dec three, 1932. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Partition, Library of Congress.
Report to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia by the interracial commission headed past East. Franklin Frazier assigned to investigate the March 19, 1935, riot in Harlem. Library of Congress.
Harlem Dandy by Miguel Covarrubias, 1927. Covarrubias, a Mexican painter, caricaturist, illustrator, ethnologist, and fine art historian, had a deep appreciation for the people of Harlem. His 1927 volume, Negro Drawings, reflected his interest in Harlem performers and people on the street. Harry Ransom Center.
Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston, ca. late 1930s. Hurston was an writer, anthropologist, and among the publishers of Fire!! Prints and Photographs Sectionalisation, Library of Congress.
The front and back covers of the first and only issue of Fire!!, published in 1926, with artwork past Aaron Douglas. Harry Ransom Middle.
Portrait of Westward. E. B. Du Bois, May 31, 1919. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
The Weary Blues past Langston Hughes, published in 1926, dust cover artwork by Miguel Covarrubias. Harry Bribe Center.
Portrait of Countee Cullen in Central Park, June twenty, 1941. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Dust cover for Passing past Nella Larsen, published in 1928. Harry Ransom Center.
Portrait of Jessie Redmon Fauset, n.d. Harmon Foundation Records, Manuscript Sectionalisation, Library of Congress.
W. E. B. Du Bois (back right) and staff in the Crisis magazine office, north.d. Schomburg Center for Enquiry in Blackness Civilization, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.
Advertizing for the Cotton Lodge featuring Cab Calloway and his Cotton Club Orchestra, 1925. Schomburg Centre for Research in Blackness Culture, Photographs and Prints Sectionalization, New York Public Library.
Portrait of author Richard Wright, June 23, 1939. Ralph Ellison served every bit best man at Wright'south wedding this same twelvemonth. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Drove, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Encompass of the October 1928 issue of The Negro American with photograph of Miss Erma Sweatt, sister of civil-rights activist Heman Sweatt. The Negro American was a Harlem Renaissance era magazine published in San Antonio, Texas, that declared itself to be "the only magazine in the Southward devoted to Negro life and civilization." This particular issue includes a review of Rudolph Fisher's novel The Walls of Jericho (page 13). Courtesy of Michael Fifty. Gillette.
Download the Full Issue of The Negro American
Yous can explore the total consequence of The Negro American (October 1928) described higher up past downloading a PDF version hither.
Source: https://www.humanitiestexas.org/news/articles/harlem-renaissance-what-was-it-and-why-does-it-matter
0 Response to "Renaissance Reflected the Growing Place of African Americans in Society and Art"
Post a Comment