Don T Do That Again Black and White Aesthetic
On Feb 28, 2014, Humanities Texas held a one-twenty-four hours teacher professional evolution 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 It, and Why Does Information technology Thing?" In his remarks, Wintz addresses the origins and nature of the motion—a task, he says, that is far more circuitous than it may seem.
Wintz is a specialist in the Harlem Renaissance and in African American political thought. Wintz is an author or editor of numerous books including Harlem Speaks; Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance; African American Political Thought, 1890–1930; African Americans and the Presidency: The Road to the White Firm; and The Harlem Renaissance in the Due west. He served as an editor of the Oxford University Printing five-volume Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Nowadays, and the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Routledge). He has also written extensively on Texas history and is an author of 1 of the standard Texas history texts, Texas: The Alone Star State. He is a native Houstonian and a graduate of Rice Academy and Kansas State University.
What was the Harlem Renaissance and when did it brainstorm?
This seemingly simple question reveals the complexities of the movement we know varyingly as 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 place the movement inside time and space, and and then to define its nature. This task is much more circuitous than it might seem.
Traditionally the Harlem Renaissance was viewed primarily as a literary motion 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 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. Also, art was discussed by and large in terms of Aaron Douglas and his association with Langston Hughes and other young writers who produced Fire!! in 1926, merely at that place was little or no assay of the work of African American artists. And there 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 movement with connections to international developments in art and civilization that places increasing emphasis on the not-literary aspects of the movement.
Time
Starting time, to know when the Harlem Renaissance began, nosotros must determine its origins. Agreement the origins depends on how we perceive the nature of the Renaissance. For those who view the Renaissance as primarily a literary movement, the Civic Order Dinner of March 21, 1924, signaled its emergence. This event did not occur in Harlem, but was held almost one hundred blocks southward in Manhattan at the Civic Club on 12th Street off Fifth Avenue. Charles S. Johnson, the immature editor of Opportunity, the National Urban League's monthly magazine, conceived the outcome to honour writer Jessie Fauset on the occasion of the publication of her novel, At that place Is Confusion. Johnson planned a small dinner political 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 one novelist.
So the simple celebratory dinner morphed into a transformative consequence with over one hundred attendees. African Americans were represented past W. 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 magazine, spoke for this group calling upon the immature writers in the audition to make their contribution to the "new literary historic period" emerging in America.i
The Civic Social club dinner significantly accelerated the literary phase of the Harlem Renaissance. Frederick Allen, editor of Harper'south, approached Countee Cullen, securing his poems for his mag as soon equally the poet finished reading them. As the dinner ended Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic, hung around talking to Cullen, Fauset, and several other young writers, and so offered Charles Southward. Johnson a unique opportunity: an entire issue of Survey Graphic devoted to the Harlem literary movement. Nether the editorship of Alain Locke the "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro" number of Survey Graphic hit the newsstands March 1, 1925.2 It was an overnight awareness. Later that year Locke published a volume-length version of the "Harlem" edition, expanded and re-titled The New Negro: An Interpretation.3 In the album Locke laid down his vision of the artful and the parameters for the emerging Harlem Renaissance; he also included a drove of poesy, 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 nativity occurred three years earlier when Shuffle Along opened at the 63rd Street Musical Hall. Shuffle Along 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, similar Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, who had but small roles in the product, were on their mode 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 cracking African American performers—Bob Cole and J. Rosamund Johnson, Bert Williams and George Walker—had tried, simply failed to achieve. "We did it, that's the story," he exclaimed, "Nosotros put Negroes dorsum on Broadway!"4
Poet Langston Hughes also saw Shuffle Forth as a seminal upshot in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. It introduced him to the creative world of New York, and it helped to redefine and energize music and nightlife in Harlem. In the process, it 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 and then much a office of the Harlem Renaissance. For the young Hughes, just arrived in the metropolis, the long-range bear upon of Shuffle Forth was not on his mind. In 1921, it was all about the show, and, equally he wrote in his autobiography, it was "a honey of a bear witness:"
Swift, vivid, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes. Also, look who were in it: The now famous choir director, Hall Johnson, and the composer, William Grant However, were a part of the orchestra. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle wrote the music and played and acted in the prove. Miller and Lyles were the comics. Florence Mills skyrocketed to fame in the 2d act. Trixie Smith sang "He May Be Your Man Simply He Comes to Encounter Me Sometimes." And Caterina Jarboro, at present a European prima donna, and the internationally celebrated Josephine Baker were merely in the chorus. Everybody was in the audience—including me. People came to come across it innumerable times. It was always packed.5
Shuffle Forth as well brought jazz to Broadway. It combined jazz music with very creatively choreographed jazz trip the light fantastic to transform musical theater into something new, heady, and daring. And the show was a critical and financial success. Information technology ran 474 performances on Broadway and spawned three touring companies. It was a hit show written, performed, and produced past blacks, and it generated a demand for more. 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 civilisation during the Harlem Renaissance. The term "Jazz Historic period" was used by many who saw African American music, particularly the blues and jazz, every bit the defining features of the Renaissance. However, both jazz and the dejection 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 country, north to Chicago before arriving in New York a few years before World State of war I.
Blues and blackness dejection performers such equally musician W. C. Handy and vocaliser Ma Rainey were popular on the Vaudeville excursion in the late nineteenth century. The publication of Westward. C. Handy's "Memphis Blues" in 1912 and the outset recordings a few years later brought this genre into the mainstream of American pop culture. Jazz reportedly originated among the musicians who played in the confined and brothels of the infamous Storyville district of New Orleans. Jelly Whorl Morton claimed to have invented jazz there in 1902, just it is doubtful that any one person holds that honour.
According to James Weldon Johnson, jazz reached New York in 1905 at Proctor'south 20-Third Street Theater. Johnson described the band in that location as "a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making dominant utilise of banjos, mandolins, guitars, saxophones, and drums in combination, and [it] was called the Memphis Students—a very skilful proper name, overlooking the fact that the performers were non students and were not from Memphis. There was also a violin, a couple of brass instruments, and a double-bass." 7 years subsequently, composer and ring leader James Reese Europe, 1 of the "Memphis Students," took his Clef Club Orchestra to Carnegie Hall. During Earth War I, while serving as an officeholder for a machine-gun company in the famed 369th U.S. Infantry Division, James Europe, fellow officer Noble Sissel, and the regimental band introduced the sounds of ragtime, jazz, and the blues to European audiences.
Following the war, blackness music, peculiarly the blues and jazz, became increasingly popular 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 dejection singers began to sign recording contracts, initially with African American record companies like Black Swan Records, but very quickly with Paramount, Columbia, and other mainstream recording outlets. In Harlem, one lodge opened after another, each featuring jazz orchestras or dejection singers. Noble Sissle, of course, was one of the team behind the product of Shuffle Forth, which opened Broadway upward to Chocolate Dandies and a series of other blackness musical comedies, featuring these new musical styles.
The visual arts, specially painting, prints, and sculpture, emerged somewhat later in Harlem than did music, musical theater, and literature. One of the near notable visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, arrived in Harlem from Kansas City in 1925. Afterwards that twelvemonth his starting time pieces appeared in Opportunity, and ten Douglas pieces appeared as "Ten Decorative Designs" illustrating Locke's The New Negro. Early the next year W. E. B. Du Bois published Douglas's outset illustrations in The Crisis. Due to his personal clan 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 book jackets and illustrating literary works, Douglas was the most high-contour artist clearly connected to the Harlem Renaissance in the mid- to late-1920s. And while these connections to the literary role of the Renaissance were notable, they were not 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 piece of work of Henry Ossawa Tanner at a midtown gallery in New York, and an showroom of African American artists 2 years later at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library. Even more important to the nurturing and promotion of African American fine art were the activities of the Harmon Foundation. Beginning in 1926 the Foundation awarded cash prizes for outstanding achievement by African Americans in eight fields, including fine arts. Additionally, from 1928 through 1933, the Harmon Foundation organized an annual exhibit of African American art.
Place
Situating the Harlem Renaissance in space is almost every bit complex as defining its origins and time span. Certainly Harlem is primal to the Harlem Renaissance, but it serves more equally an anchor for the movement than equally its sole location. In reality, the Harlem Renaissance both drew from and spread its influence across the United States, the Caribbean, and the earth. Only a handful of the writers, artists, musicians, and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance were native to Harlem or New York, and only a relatively small-scale number lived in Harlem throughout the Renaissance period. And withal, Harlem impacted the art, music, and writing of nigh all of the participants in the Harlem Renaissance.
Harlem refers to that function of Manhattan Isle north of Cardinal Park and generally east of 8th Artery or St. Nicholas Avenue. Originally established in the seventeenth century equally a Dutch village, information technology evolved over time. Following its annexation past the city in 1873, urban growth commenced. The resulting Harlem existent estate boom lasted about 20 years during which developers erected most of the concrete structures that defined Harlem every bit late as the mid-twentieth century. They designed this new, urban Harlem primarily for the wealthy and the upper middle grade; information technology contained broad avenues, a rails connectedness to the urban center on Eighth Avenue, 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 fifty-fifty the Harlem Philharmonic Orchestra.
By 1905, Harlem's blast turned into a bust. Desperate white developers began to sell or rent to African Americans, often at greatly discounted prices, while black real estate firms provided the customers. At this time, approximately sixty thousand blacks lived in New York, scattered through the 5 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's blackness population swelled in the twentieth century every bit newcomers from the South moved due north and every bit redevelopment destroyed existing blackness neighborhoods, pressure for additional and hopefully better housing pushed blacks northward up the west side of Manhattan into Harlem.
Harlem's transition, one time it began, followed fairly traditional patterns. Equally soon as blacks started moving onto a cake, property values dropped further equally whites began to get out. This process was specially evident in the early 1920s. Both blackness and white realtors took reward of failing property values in Harlem—the panic selling that resulted when blacks moved in. Addressing the demand for housing generated by the city'southward apace growing blackness population, they acquired, subdivided, and leased Harlem property to black tenants.
Twelvemonth past year, the boundaries of black Harlem expanded, as blacks streamed into Harlem every bit quickly as they could detect affordable housing. By 1910, they had go the bulk grouping on the w side of Harlem northward of 130th Street; by 1914, the population of blackness Harlem was estimated to be fifty chiliad. Past 1930 black Harlem had expanded due north x blocks to 155th Street and south to 115th Street; it spread from the Harlem River to Amsterdam Avenue, and housed approximately 164,000 blacks. The cadre of this customs—bounded roughly by 126th Street on the southward, 159th Street on the due north, the Harlem River and Park Artery on the east, and 8th Avenue on the west—was more than 95 pct blackness.
Past 1920, Harlem, past virtue of the sheer size of its black population, had emerged as the virtual upper-case letter of black America; its name evoked a magic that lured all classes of blacks from all sections of the state to its streets. Impoverished southern farmers and sharecroppers fabricated their way northward, where they were joined in Harlem past black intellectuals such equally W. East. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. Although the old black social elites of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia were disdainful of Harlem'southward vulgar splendor, and while it housed no significant black university equally 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'south Brotherhood of Sleeping Auto Porters, and the black leadership of the NAACP. Marcus Garvey launched his sick-fated blackness nationalist motility among 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 center of New York nightlife in the mid-1920s. Harlem, in brusque, was where the action was in black America during the decade following World War I.
Harlem and New York Urban center also contained the infrastructure to back up and sustain the arts. In the early twentieth century, New York had replaced Boston as the heart of the volume publishing manufacture. Furthermore, new publishing houses in the urban center, such as Alfred A. Knopf, Harper Brothers, and Harcourt Caryatid, were open to calculation greater diversity to their volume lists by including works past African American writers. Past the late nineteenth century, New York City housed Can Pan Alley, the center of the music publishing manufacture. In the 1920s, when recordings and broadcasting emerged, New York was once more in the forefront. Broadway was the epicenter of American theater, and New York was the eye of the American art earth. In brusque, in the early on 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 concrete 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 potent and conflicting images amid African Americans during the commencement one-half of the twentieth century. Was it the Negro metropolis, black Manhattan, the political, cultural, and spiritual center of African America, a state of plenty, a city of refuge, or a black ghetto and emerging slum? For some, the prototype of Harlem was more personal. King Solomon Gillis, the main graphic symbol in Rudolph Fisher'due south "The City of Refuge," was ane of these. Emerging out of the subway at 135th and Lennox Avenue, Gillis was transfixed:
Clean air, blue sky, bright sunlight. Gillis set down his tan-cardboard extension-case and wiped his blackness, shining brow. Then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; up and downwardly Lenox Artery, up and downwards Ane Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street; big, lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; blackness ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on the curb, women, packet-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping about the sidewalks; here and there a white confront drifting forth, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. There was assuredly no doubt of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem.7
Gillis then noticed the commotion 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 rima oris opened wider. . . . For there stood a handsome, brass-buttoned behemothic directing the heaviest traffic Gillis had e'er seen; halting unnumbered tons of automobiles and trucks and wagons and pushcarts and street-cars; holding them at bay with i mitt while he swept similar tons peremptorily on with the other; ruling the wide crossing with supreme self-assurance; and he, also, was a Negro!
Nevertheless most of the vehicles that leaped or crouched at his behest carried white passengers. One of these overdrove bounds a few feet and Gillis heard the officer'southward shrill whistle and gruff reproof, saw the driver'south face turn red and his car describe back like a threatened pup. It was across belief—impossible. Black might exist white, merely it couldn't be that white!
"Done died an' woke up in Heaven," thought King Solomon, watching, fascinated; and later on a while, as if the wonder of it were too great to believe simply by seeing, "Cullud policemans!" he said, one-half aloud; then repeated over and over, with greater and greater conviction, "Even got cullud policemans…"viii
Gillis was one of those who sought refuge in Harlem. He fled Northward Carolina after shooting a white man. At present, in Harlem, the policeman was black. Not that this changed his fate. At the end of the story, ane of these black policemen dragged Gillis abroad in handcuffs. The reality of Harlem ofttimes contradicted the myth.
For poet Langston Hughes, Harlem was likewise something of a refuge. Post-obit a mostly unhappy childhood living at ane fourth dimension or another with his mother or father, grandmother, or neighbors, Hughes convinced his stern and foreboding father to finance his teaching at Columbia Academy. 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 once more. I registered at the Y. When college opened, I did not want to move into the dormitory at Columbia. I really did not desire to go the higher at all. I didn't want to do anything but live in Harlem, go a job and work there."9
After 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 dilapidated housing, and racial prejudice were function of the daily experience of most Harlem residents.
For Hughes, too, the want to only "alive in Harlem" was every bit much myth as reality. After dropping out of Columbia and moving to Harlem he actually spent niggling time there. Until the belatedly 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 summit of the Renaissance, between 1923 and 1938 he was away from the city more than he was there, more a visitor than a full-time resident.
James Weldon Johnson saw a withal different Harlem. In his 1930 volume, Black Manhattan, he described the black metropolis in nigh utopian terms as the race's bully hope and its yard social experiment: "Then hither we take Harlem—not just a colony or a community or a settlement . . . but a black metropolis, located in the middle of white Manhattan, and containing more Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on world. It strikes the uninformed observer every bit a phenomenon, a miracle straight out of the skies."10 When Johnson looked at Harlem he did not see an emerging slum or a ghetto, but a blackness neighborhood north of Central Park that was "one of the most beautiful and healthful" in the city. "Information technology is non a fringe, it is non a slum, nor is information technology a 'quarter' consisting of dilapidated tenements. It is a section of new-constabulary flat houses and handsome dwellings, with streets besides paved, equally well lighted, and equally well kept as in any other part of the urban center."11
Without question Harlem was a rapidly growing blackness metropolis, merely what kind of city was it becoming? Harlem historian Gilbert Osofsky argued, "the about profound alter that Harlem experienced in the 1920's was its emergence equally 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 economic problems called 'deplorable,' 'unspeakable,' 'incredible.'"12 Equally a consequence, 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 discrimination: growing vice, criminal offence, juvenile delinquency, and drug addiction.
In short, the day-to-mean solar day realities that most Harlemites faced differed dramatically from the image of Harlem life presented by James Weldon Johnson. Harlem was aggress with contradictions. While it reflected the self-confidence, militancy, and pride of the New Negro in his or her need 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 better life in the north, ultimately Harlem failed to resolve its problems and to fulfill these dreams.
The 1935 Harlem Race Riot put to remainder the conflicting images of Harlem. On March 19, 1935, a young Puerto Rican boy was defenseless stealing a ten-cent pocketknife from the counter of a 135th Street five-and-dime store. Following the arrest, rumors spread that police had browbeaten the youth to death. A large crowd gathered, shouting "constabulary brutality" and "racial discrimination." A window was smashed, annexation began, and the riot spread throughout the nighttime. The violence resulted in three blacks dead, two hundred stores trashed and burned, and more than 2 million dollars worth of destroyed holding. 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 sociology at Howard University, to investigate the riot. 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'south epitome 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 past poverty and discrimination. Burned-out storefronts might be fertile ground for political activity, simply not for fine art, literature, and culture. Harlem would run into new blackness writers in the years to come. Musicians, poets, and artists would go on to brand their domicile there, merely it never again served every bit the focal point of a creative movement with the national and international impact of the Harlem Renaissance.
Johnson did not personally witness the 1935 Riot. He had left the city in 1931, the year after he published Black Manhattan, to have the Spence Chair in Creative Literature at Fisk University in Nashville. He lived in that location until his death in 1938.
Renaissance
So, what was the Harlem Renaissance? The uncomplicated answer is that the Harlem Renaissance (or the New Negro Motility, or any name is preferred) was the most important consequence in twentieth-century African American intellectual and cultural life. While best known for its literature, it touched every attribute of African American literary and artistic creativity from the terminate of World War I through the Great Low. Literature, disquisitional writing, music, theater, musical theater, and the visual arts were transformed by this motility; it too affected politics, social development, and almost every aspect of the African American feel from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s.
But there was also something ephemeral most the Harlem Renaissance, something vague and difficult to ascertain. The Harlem Renaissance, then, was an African American literary and artistic movement anchored in Harlem, but drawing from, extending to, and influencing African American communities across the land and beyond. As nosotros accept seen, it also had no precise commencement; nor did it have a precise ending. Rather, it emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American customs that followed Globe War I, blossomed in the 1920s, and then faded away in the mid-to-belatedly 1930s and early 1940s.
Too the Harlem Renaissance has no single defined ideological or stylistic standard that unified its participants and defined the movement. 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 artist Aaron Douglas, amid others, produced their ain literary magazine, Fire!! 1 purpose of this venture was the declaration of their intent to assume buying of the literary Renaissance. In the process, they turned their backs on Alain Locke and West. East. B. Du Bois and others who sought to channel black creativity into what they considered to be the proper artful and political directions. Despite the efforts of Thurman and his young colleagues, Burn down!! fizzled out later only one outcome and the movement remained ill divers. In fact, this was its most distinguishing characteristic. At that place would be no common literary mode or political credo associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It was far more than an identity than an ideology or a literary or creative schoolhouse. What united participants was their sense of taking part in a common endeavour and their delivery to giving artistic expression to the African American experience.
If there was a statement that divers the philosophy of the new literary movement it was Langston Hughes's essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," published in The Nation, June 16, 1926:
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual night-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased nosotros are glad. If they are not, it doesn't thing. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased nosotros are glad. If they are non their displeasure doesn't thing either. We will build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and nosotros will stand on peak of the mount, free within ourselves.13
Like Burn!!, this essay was the movement'south announcement of independence, both from the stereotypes that whites held near African Americans and the expectations that they had for their literary works, and from the expectations that blackness leaders and black critics had for black writers, and the expectations that they placed on their piece of work.
In that location was, not surprisingly, resistance to this independence, specially amidst those concerned with the political costs that the realistic expressions of black life could engender—feeding white prejudice past exposing the less savory elements of the black community. Du Bois responded to Hughes a few weeks later in a Chicago speech that was later published in The Crunch as "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 have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the correct of black folk to love and enjoy. I practice not care a damn for whatever fine 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 principal characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance. This diversity is conspicuously axiomatic in the poetry of the period where subject matter, manner, and tone ranged from the traditional to the more inventive. Langston Hughes, for case, captured the life and language of the working grade, and the rhythm and manner of the dejection in a number of his poems, none more so than "The Weary Blues." In contrast to Hughes's appropriation of the class of blackness music, especially jazz and the blues, and his apply of the black vernacular, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen utilized more traditional and classical forms for their poetry. McKay used sonnets for much of his protest poetry, while Cullen's poems relied both on classical literary allusions and symbols and standard poetic forms.
This variety and experimentation as well characterized music. This was evidenced in the dejection of Bessie Smith and the range of jazz from the early rhythms of Jelly Curl 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 contrast sharply with Jacob Lawrence's utilise of bright colors and sharply divers images.
Within this variety, several themes emerged which set the character of the Harlem Renaissance. No blackness writer, musician, or creative person 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 by—its rural southern roots, urban feel, and African heritage. Interest in the African past corresponded with the rise of Pan-Africanism in African American politics, which was at the eye of Marcus Garvey'due south credo and besides 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 art. A number of musicians, from the classical composer William Grant Still to jazz nifty Louis Armstrong, introduced African inspired rhythms and themes in their compositions.
The exploration of black southern heritage was reflected in novels by Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as in Jacob Lawrence's fine art. Zora Neale Hurston used her experience every bit a folklorist every bit the basis for her all-encompassing 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 piece of work including two of his multi-canvas serial' of paintings, the Harriett Tubman serial and the ane on the Black Migration.
Harlem Renaissance writers and artists too explored life in Harlem and other urban centers. Both Hughes and McKay drew on Harlem images for their verse, and McKay used the ghetto equally the setting for his first novel, Home to Harlem. Some black writers, including McKay and Hughes, besides every bit Rudolph Fisher and Wallace Thurman, were accused of overemphasizing crime, sexuality, and other less-savory aspects of ghetto life in society to feed the voyeuristic desires of white readers and publishers, in imitation of white novelist Carl Van Vechten's controversial Harlem novel, Nigger Sky.
A third major theme addressed past the literature of the Harlem Renaissance was race. Almost every novel and play, and most of the poetry, explored race in America, peculiarly the impact of race and racism on African Americans. In their simplest form these works protested racial injustice. Claude McKay'due south sonnet, "If We Must Die," was amid the best of this genre. Langston Hughes too wrote protestation pieces, equally did almost every black writer at in one case or another.
Among the visual artists, Lawrence'due south historical series emphasized the racial struggle that dominated African American history, while Romare Bearden's early on illustrative work often focused on racial politics. The struggle against lynching in the mid-1920s stimulated anti-lynching poetry, as well as Walter White'due south carefully researched written report of the subject area, Rope and Faggot. In the early 1930s, the Scottsboro incident stimulated considerable protest writing, every bit well as a 1934 anthology, Negro, which addressed race in an international context. Most of the literary efforts of the Harlem Renaissance avoided overt protestation or propaganda, focusing instead on the psychological and social bear upon of race. Amidst the all-time of these studies were Nella Larsen'due south ii novels, Quicksand in 1928 and, a year afterwards, 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 poem "Cross," and in his 1931 play, Mulatto, every bit did Jessie Fauset in her 1929 novel, Plum Bun. That same year Wallace Thurman made color discrimination within the urban blackness 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 use of black music equally an inspiration for verse or black folklore as an inspiration for novels and short stories. All-time known for this was Langston Hughes who used the rhythms and styles of jazz and the blues in much of his early poetry. James Weldon Johnson, who published two collections of blackness spirituals in 1927 and 1928, and Sterling Chocolate-brown, who used the blues and southern work songs in many of the poems in his 1932 book of poetry, Southern Route, continued the do that Hughes had initiated. Other writers exploited black organized religion every bit a literary source. Johnson fabricated the black preacher and his sermons the ground for the poems in God'due south Trombones, while Hurston and Larsen used blackness 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 last portion of Quicksand, Larsen's heroine was ensnared past religion and a southern blackness preacher.
Through all of these themes, Harlem Renaissance writers, musicians, and artists were determined to express the African American feel in all of its variety and complexity equally realistically equally possible. This commitment 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 blackness life in small towns such as in Hughes's novel, Not Without Laughter, or the witty and biting delineation of Harlem's black literati in Wallace Thurman'southward Infants of the Spring.
The Harlem Renaissance appealed to and relied on a mixed audition—the African American middle class and white consumers of the arts. African American magazines such as 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 poetry and short stories, and promoted African American literature through manufactures, reviews, and almanac literary prizes. They as well printed illustrations by black artists and used blackness artists in the layout design of their periodicals. Also, blacks attempted to produce their own literary and artistic venues. In addition to the brusque-lived Fire!!, Wallace Thurman spearheaded some other single-effect literary magazine, Harlem, in 1927, while poet Countee Cullen edited a "Negro Poets" result of the avant-garde poesy magazine Palms in 1926, and brought out an anthology of African American verse, Caroling Dusk, in 1927.
As important as these literary outlets were, they were not sufficient to back up a literary move. Consequently, the Harlem Renaissance relied heavily on white-endemic enterprises for its artistic works. Publishing houses, magazines, recording companies, theaters, and art galleries were primarily white-owned, and fiscal support through grants, prizes, and awards generally involved white money. In fact, 1 of the major accomplishments of the Renaissance was to button open the door to mainstream periodicals, publishing houses, and funding sources. African American music also played to mixed audiences. Harlem's cabarets attracted both Harlem residents and white New Yorkers seeking out Harlem nightlife. The famous Cotton fiber Club carried this to a bizarre extreme past providing blackness 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 move, 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'due south assertion that blackness artists intended to express themselves freely, no matter what the black public or white public thought, accurately reflected the attitude of almost writers and artists.
Slow fade to black
The finish of the Harlem Renaissance is as hard to define as its beginnings. Information technology varies somewhat from one artistic field to another. In musical theater, the popularity of black musical reviews died out by the early on 1930s, although at that place were occasional efforts, more often than not unsuccessful, to revive the genre. Still, black performers and musicians connected to work, although not and then oft in all black shows. Blackness music connected into the Earth War Ii era, although the popularity of blues singers waned somewhat, and jazz changed as the big band style became popular. Literature besides changed, and a new generation of black writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison emerged with niggling involvement in or connectedness with the Harlem Renaissance. In art, a number of artists who had emerged in the 1930s continued to work, but again, with no connectedness to a broader African American movement. As well, 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 beyond, although there was no longer whatever sense that they were connected to a literary movement. And Harlem lost some of its magic following the 1935 race riot. In any case, few, if any, people were talking most a Harlem Renaissance by 1940.
The Harlem Renaissance flourished in the late 1920s and early 1930s, simply its antecedents and legacy spread many years earlier 1920 and after 1930. It had no universally recognized name, but was known variously every bit the New Negro Movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, besides equally the Harlem Renaissance. Information technology had no clearly defined beginning or cease, but emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American community that followed World War I, blossomed in the mid- to tardily-1920s, and then faded abroad in the mid-1930s.
What was the Harlem Renaissance and why was it important?
While at its cadre information technology was primarily a literary motion, the Harlem Renaissance touched all of the African American creative arts. While its participants were determined to truthfully stand for the African American experience and believed in racial pride and equality, they shared no mutual political philosophy, social belief, creative style, or aesthetic principle. This was a motility of individuals gratuitous of any overriding manifesto. While central to African American artistic and intellectual life, past no means did it enjoy the full back up of the black or white intelligentsia; it generated as much hostility and criticism as it did support and praise. From the moment of its nascence, its legitimacy was debated. Nevertheless, past at least one measure, its success was clear: the Harlem Renaissance was the first time that a considerable number of mainstream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously, and it was the first time that African American literature and the arts attracted significant attention from the nation at big.
aneCarl Van Doren, "The Younger Generation of Negro Writers," Opportunity 2 (1924): 144–45. Van Doren'due south Civic Club Dinner accost was reprinted in Opportunity.
two Survey Graphic, Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, half dozen (March 1925).
threeAlain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Atheneum, 1969).
4Encounter 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: Hill and Wang, 1963), 223–24.
6James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 120–21.
sevenRudolph Fisher, "The City of Refuge," in The New Negro, 57–8. The City of Refuge was get-go published in The Atlantic Monthly, Feb 1925.
8Ibid. 58–9.
9Hughes, Big Sea, 81–ii.
10Johnson, Black Manhattan, three–four.
11Ibid, 146. Johnson too 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.
xiiiLangston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, The Nation. June 16, 1926, 694.
Song of the Towers by Aaron Douglas for the mural serial Aspects of Negro Life, commissioned in 1934 by the WPA for the Harlem Co-operative of the New York City Public Library. Schomburg Center for Research in Blackness Civilization, Art and Artifacts Division, 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 will enhance classroom didactics and student comprehension.
Portrait of Charles South. Johnson. Johnson was founder of Opportunity, the National Urban League'south monthly mag, and organizer of the Civic Society Dinner that marked the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance equally a literary movement. U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Photograph by Gordon Parks.
The cover of the "Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro" issue of Survey Graphic, featuring an illustration of lyric tenor and composer Roland Hayes by Winold Reiss, 1925. Schomburg Heart for Research in Black Civilization, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Sectionalisation, The New York Public Library.
The bandage of Shuffle Along, 1921.
Sheet music for "I'thousand Just Wild Well-nigh Harry" from Shuffle Forth, the first Broadway musical written, produced, and performed past African Americans, past Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Music Division, Library of Congress. Copyright eolith, 1921 (155.3b).
Dejection composer and musician West. C. Handy (left) with bandleader and composer Knuckles Ellington (correct), ca. 1940s. Schomburg Center for Research in Blackness Civilization, Photographs and Prints Sectionalisation, New York Public Library.
Canvas music for "Goodnight Angeline" by James Reese Europe, 1919. The photographs on the comprehend prove 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'due south Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse by James Weldon Johnson. New York: The Viking Press, 1927. Douglas'south painting was inspired by Johnson'due south poem of the same name. Courtesy of Amon Carter Museum of American Fine art.
The Seine by 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 Urban center 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 organization 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. Photo past F. F. Hopper. Schomburg Centre for Inquiry in Blackness Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.
In Blackness Manhattan (1930), James Weldon Johnson'south history of African Americans in New York, two demographic maps of Harlem show its quick flourishing in the early decades of the twentieth century. Harry Ransom Center.
From left to right: Langston Hughes, Charles Due south. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher, and Hubert T. Delany, on the roof of 580 St. Nicholas Avenue, Harlem, on the occasion of a party in Hughes' laurels, 1924. Schomburg Center for Enquiry in Black Civilization, Photographs and Prints Sectionalization, New York Public Library.
Lenox Avenue in Harlem, ca. 1920s.
Policemen in Harlem, 1929. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Sectionalisation, New York Public Library.
Portrait of Langston Hughes as a fellow. Photo by James L. Allen. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Partitioning, New York Public Library.
Portrait of James Weldon Johnson, Dec three, 1932. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Sectionalisation, Library of Congress.
Report to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia past the interracial commission headed by 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 art historian, had a deep appreciation for the people of Harlem. His 1927 book, Negro Drawings, reflected his interest in Harlem performers and people on the street. Harry Ransom Eye.
Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston, ca. late 1930s. Hurston was an author, anthropologist, and amongst the publishers of Fire!! Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
The front and dorsum covers of the outset and only issue of Fire!!, published in 1926, with artwork by Aaron Douglas. Harry Ransom Center.
Portrait of West. E. B. Du Bois, May 31, 1919. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, published in 1926, dust cover artwork by Miguel Covarrubias. Harry Ransom Middle.
Portrait of Countee Cullen in Central Park, June twenty, 1941. Photo past Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Dust encompass for Passing past Nella Larsen, published in 1928. Harry Ransom Center.
Portrait of Jessie Redmon Fauset, n.d. Harmon Foundation Records, Manuscript Partitioning, Library of Congress.
W. Due east. B. Du Bois (back right) and staff in the Crisis magazine part, north.d. Schomburg Heart for Research in Black Civilization, Photographs and Prints Partitioning, New York Public Library.
Advertisement for the Cotton fiber Club featuring Cab Calloway and his Cotton Club Orchestra, 1925. Schomburg Heart for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.
Portrait of writer Richard Wright, June 23, 1939. Ralph Ellison served as best man at Wright'south wedding this aforementioned year. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Sectionalisation, Library of Congress.
Comprehend of the October 1928 effect 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 mag published in San Antonio, Texas, that declared itself to be "the merely magazine in the Southward devoted to Negro life and culture." This particular outcome includes a review of Rudolph Fisher'due south novel The Walls of Jericho (folio thirteen). Courtesy of Michael L. Gillette.
Download the Total Event of The Negro American
Y'all can explore the total result of The Negro American (October 1928) described higher up past downloading a PDF version here.
Source: https://www.humanitiestexas.org/news/articles/harlem-renaissance-what-was-it-and-why-does-it-matter
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