By the End of the Twentieth Century the Art Form That Attracted the Most Investment Was
On February 28, 2014, Humanities Texas held a i-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 following lecture titled "The Harlem Renaissance: What Was It, and Why Does It Matter?" In his remarks, Wintz addresses the origins and nature of the movement—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 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 House; and The Harlem Renaissance in the Due west. He served every bit an editor of the Oxford University Press five-volume Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present, 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 Solitary 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 begin?
This seemingly simple question reveals the complexities of the move we know varyingly as the New Negro Renaissance, the New Negro Movement, the Negro Renaissance, the Jazz Age, or the Harlem Renaissance. To answer the question it is necessary to identify the motion within time and space, and so to define its nature. This job is much more complex than it might seem.
Traditionally the Harlem Renaissance was viewed primarily every bit a literary move centered in Harlem and growing out of the black migration and the emergence of Harlem as the premier black city in the United States. Music and theater were mentioned briefly, more as background and local color, as providing inspiration for poetry and local color for fiction. Withal, in that location was no analysis of the developments in these fields. Likewise, art was discussed mostly in terms of Aaron Douglas and his clan with Langston Hughes and other young writers who produced Fire!! in 1926, but there was little or no analysis of the work of African American artists. And there was fifty-fifty less give-and-take 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 culture that places increasing emphasis on the non-literary aspects of the movement.
Time
Kickoff, to know when the Harlem Renaissance began, we must decide 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 motion, the Civic Club 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 Twelfth Street off 5th Avenue. Charles S. Johnson, the immature editor of Opportunity, the National Urban League's monthly magazine, conceived the event to honor writer Jessie Fauset on the occasion of the publication of her novel, There Is Confusion. Johnson planned a small-scale dinner party with about xx guests—a mix of white publishers, editors, and literary critics, black intellectuals, and young blackness writers. But, when he asked Alain Locke to preside over the event, Locke agreed merely if the dinner honored African American writers in general rather than i novelist.
And then the simple celebratory dinner morphed into a transformative consequence with over one hundred attendees. African Americans were represented by West. 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 audience to make their contribution to the "new literary age" emerging in America.1
The Civic Order dinner significantly accelerated the literary stage of the Harlem Renaissance. Frederick Allen, editor of Harper's, approached Countee Cullen, securing his poems for his magazine every bit soon as the poet finished reading them. As the dinner concluded Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic, hung around talking to Cullen, Fauset, and several other young writers, so offered Charles S. 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.two Information technology was an overnight awareness. Later that year Locke published a book-length version of the "Harlem" edition, expanded and re-titled The New Negro: An Interpretation.iii In the album Locke laid downwards his vision of the aesthetic and the parameters for the emerging Harlem Renaissance; he too included a collection of poetry, fiction, graphic arts, and critical essays on fine art, literature, and music.
For those who viewed the Harlem Renaissance in terms of musical theater and entertainment, the nativity occurred iii 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 cast featured unknowns, but some, like Josephine Bakery and Paul Robeson, who had only minor 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 great African American performers—Bob Cole and J. Rosamund Johnson, Bert Williams and George Walker—had tried, but failed to achieve. "We did it, that's the story," he exclaimed, "We put Negroes back on Broadway!"4
Poet Langston Hughes also saw Shuffle Along every bit a seminal event 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 procedure, it introduced white New Yorkers to black 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 touch of Shuffle Along was not on his mind. In 1921, it was all about the evidence, 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. Besides, look who were in it: The now famous choir director, Hall Johnson, and the composer, William Grant Notwithstanding, were a part of the orchestra. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle wrote the music and played and acted in the testify. Miller and Lyles were the comics. Florence Mills skyrocketed to fame in the second act. Trixie Smith sang "He May Exist Your Man But He Comes to See Me Sometimes." And Caterina Jarboro, now a European prima donna, and the internationally celebrated Josephine Baker were merely in the chorus. Everybody was in the audition—including me. People came to meet information technology innumerable times. It was ever packed.v
Shuffle Along also brought jazz to Broadway. It combined jazz music with very creatively choreographed jazz dance 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 iii touring companies. Information technology was a hit bear witness written, performed, and produced by 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 characteristic of African American culture during the Harlem Renaissance. The term "Jazz Historic period" was used by many who saw African American music, peculiarly the dejection and jazz, as the defining features of the Renaissance. However, both jazz and the blues were imports to Harlem. They emerged out of the African American experience around the plow of the century in southern towns and cities, like New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis. From these origins these musical forms spread across the state, north to Chicago before arriving in New York a few years earlier Globe War I.
Dejection and black dejection performers such as musician W. C. Handy and vocalist Ma Rainey were popular on the Vaudeville circuit in the belatedly nineteenth century. The publication of Due west. C. Handy'south "Memphis Blues" in 1912 and the first 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 bars and brothels of the infamous Storyville district of New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton claimed to accept invented jazz in that location in 1902, but it is hundred-to-one that any ane person holds that honour.
According to James Weldon Johnson, jazz reached New York in 1905 at Proctor's 20-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 good name, overlooking the fact that the performers were not students and were not from Memphis. At that place was also a violin, a couple of brass instruments, and a double-bass." Vii years later, composer and ring leader James Reese Europe, i of the "Memphis Students," took his Clef Club Orchestra to Carnegie Hall. During World War I, while serving every bit an officer for a machine-gun company in the famed 369th U.Due south. Infantry Sectionalisation, James Europe, fellow officer Noble Sissel, and the regimental ring introduced the sounds of ragtime, jazz, and the blues to European audiences.
Following the state of war, black music, specially 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 blues singers began to sign recording contracts, initially with African American tape companies like Black Swan Records, but very quickly with Paramount, Columbia, and other mainstream recording outlets. In Harlem, one club opened after another, each featuring jazz orchestras or blues singers. Noble Sissle, of class, was 1 of the squad 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 afterwards in Harlem than did music, musical theater, and literature. Ane of the nearly notable visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, arrived in Harlem from Kansas City in 1925. After that year his showtime pieces appeared in Opportunity, and ten Douglas pieces appeared as "X Decorative Designs" illustrating Locke's The New Negro. Early the next yr 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 mag Fire!! and his role designing book jackets and illustrating literary works, Douglas was the almost high-profile creative person clearly connected to the Harlem Renaissance in the mid- to belatedly-1920s. And while these connections to the literary part of the Renaissance were notable, they were not typical of the experience of other African American artists of this flow.
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 exhibit of African American artists ii years after at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library. Even more important to the nurturing and promotion of African American art were the activities of the Harmon Foundation. Starting time in 1926 the Foundation awarded cash prizes for outstanding achievement past African Americans in eight fields, including fine arts. Additionally, from 1928 through 1933, the Harmon Foundation organized an annual showroom of African American art.
Identify
Situating the Harlem Renaissance in space is almost equally complex as defining its origins and time span. Certainly Harlem is key to the Harlem Renaissance, but information technology serves more than as an anchor for the movement than as its sole location. In reality, the Harlem Renaissance both drew from and spread its influence beyond the U.s., the Caribbean, and the globe. Merely 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 pocket-sized number lived in Harlem throughout the Renaissance period. And yet, Harlem impacted the art, music, and writing of virtually all of the participants in the Harlem Renaissance.
Harlem refers to that part of Manhattan Island northward of Central Park and more often than not east of Eighth Artery or St. Nicholas Artery. Originally established in the seventeenth century as a Dutch village, it evolved over time. Following its annexation by the city in 1873, urban growth commenced. The resulting Harlem real estate boom lasted about twenty years during which developers erected well-nigh of the concrete structures that divers Harlem every bit tardily every bit the mid-twentieth century. They designed this new, urban Harlem primarily for the wealthy and the upper center class; it contained broad avenues, a rail connection to the metropolis on 8th Avenue, and consisted of expensive homes and luxurious apartment 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 boom turned into a bust. Desperate white developers began to sell or rent to African Americans, often at profoundly discounted prices, while blackness 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'south black population swelled in the twentieth century every bit newcomers from the S moved north and as redevelopment destroyed existing black neighborhoods, pressure for additional and hopefully better housing pushed blacks northward up the west side of Manhattan into Harlem.
Harlem's transition, once it began, followed fairly traditional patterns. As before long as blacks started moving onto a cake, property values dropped further as whites began to go out. This process was especially evident in the early on 1920s. Both black and white realtors took reward of declining property values in Harlem—the panic selling that resulted when blacks moved in. Addressing the demand for housing generated past the urban center's rapidly growing blackness population, they acquired, subdivided, and leased Harlem property to black tenants.
Yr past twelvemonth, the boundaries of blackness Harlem expanded, as blacks streamed into Harlem every bit quickly as they could find affordable housing. By 1910, they had go the majority group on the west side of Harlem north of 130th Street; past 1914, the population of black Harlem was estimated to be fifty thousand. Past 1930 blackness Harlem had expanded due north ten blocks to 155th Street and south to 115th Street; it spread from the Harlem River to Amsterdam Artery, and housed approximately 164,000 blacks. The core of this customs—bounded roughly past 126th Street on the south, 159th Street on the north, the Harlem River and Park Avenue on the east, and 8th Avenue on the due west—was more than 95 per centum black.
Past 1920, Harlem, by virtue of the sheer size of its blackness population, had emerged every bit the virtual capital of black America; its proper name evoked a magic that lured all classes of blacks from all sections of the state to its streets. Impoverished southern farmers and sharecroppers made their fashion n, where they were joined in Harlem by black intellectuals such equally West. Eastward. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. Although the old blackness social elites of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia were disdainful of Harlem'due south vulgar splendor, and while it housed no significant blackness academy as did Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Nashville, Harlem still became the race's cultural centre 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 blackness 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 center of New York nightlife in the mid-1920s. Harlem, in short, was where the action was in black America during the decade post-obit Earth War I.
Harlem and New York City also contained the infrastructure to support and sustain the arts. In the early twentieth century, New York had replaced Boston equally the center of the book publishing manufacture. Furthermore, new publishing houses in the urban center, such as Alfred A. Knopf, Harper Brothers, and Harcourt Brace, were open to calculation greater diversity to their volume lists by including works by African American writers. By the late nineteenth century, New York Metropolis housed Tin Pan Alley, the middle of the music publishing manufacture. In the 1920s, when recordings and broadcasting emerged, New York was over again in the forefront. Broadway was the epicenter of American theater, and New York was the center of the American 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 amidst African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Was it the Negro metropolis, blackness Manhattan, the political, cultural, and spiritual center of African America, a land of plenty, a city of refuge, or a blackness ghetto and emerging slum? For some, the prototype of Harlem was more personal. King Solomon Gillis, the main character in Rudolph Fisher'southward "The Urban center of Refuge," was one 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-instance and wiped his black, shining brow. Then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; upwardly and down Lenox Avenue, upward and down Ane Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street; big, lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; black ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men continuing idle on the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping well-nigh the sidewalks; here and in that location a white face drifting along, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. In that location was convincingly 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 control of the traffic cop—an African American traffic cop:
The Southern Negro'south eyes opened wide; his oral fissure opened wider. . . . For at that place stood a handsome, brass-buttoned behemothic 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 i hand while he swept similar tons peremptorily on with the other; ruling the wide crossing with supreme self-assurance; and he, besides, was a Negro!
Yet nearly of the vehicles that leaped or crouched at his bidding carried white passengers. One of these overdrove premises a few feet and Gillis heard the officer's shrill whistle and gruff reproof, saw the driver's confront turn ruby-red and his car draw back like a threatened pup. Information technology was across belief—incommunicable. Blackness might be white, but it couldn't be that white!
"Done died an' woke up in Heaven," thought King Solomon, watching, fascinated; and after a while, as if the wonder of it were as well slap-up to believe just by seeing, "Cullud policemans!" he said, half aloud; then repeated over and over, with greater and greater confidence, "Even got cullud policemans…"8
Gillis was one of those who sought refuge in Harlem. He fled Northward Carolina after shooting a white man. Now, in Harlem, the policeman was blackness. Not that this changed his fate. At the end of the story, 1 of these black policemen dragged Gillis abroad 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 once or another with his mother or father, grandmother, or neighbors, Hughes convinced his stern and foreboding father to finance his didactics at Columbia University. He recalled his 1921 arrival:
"I went up the steps and out into the brilliant September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy once again. I registered at the Y. When college opened, I did not desire to motion into the dormitory at Columbia. I really did not want to go the college at all. I didn't want to do anything but live in Harlem, get a job and piece of work there."nine
After a less than happy year at Columbia, Hughes did exactly that. He dropped out of schoolhouse and moved into Harlem. Hughes, though, never lost sight that poverty, overcrowded and dilapidated housing, and racial prejudice were part of the daily experience of near Harlem residents.
For Hughes, too, the desire to just "live in Harlem" was as much myth every bit reality. After dropping out of Columbia and moving to Harlem he actually spent piffling fourth dimension there. Until the late 1930s, he was much more of a visitor or transient in Harlem than a resident. While Hughes spent many weekends and vacations in Harlem during his years at Lincoln University, during the top of the Renaissance, betwixt 1923 and 1938 he was away from the metropolis more than he was there, more a visitor than a full-time resident.
James Weldon Johnson saw a still different Harlem. In his 1930 book, Black Manhattan, he described the black city in near utopian terms as the race'southward great hope and its grand social experiment: "So here we have Harlem—not merely a colony or a community or a settlement . . . but a blackness metropolis, located in the middle of white Manhattan, and containing more Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on earth. 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 run across an emerging slum or a ghetto, simply a blackness neighborhood north of Central Park that was "one of the virtually beautiful and healthful" in the city. "It is non a fringe, it is not a slum, nor is it a 'quarter' consisting of dilapidated tenements. It is a department of new-law apartment houses and handsome dwellings, with streets as well paved, every bit well lighted, and too kept as in any other function of the city."11
Without question Harlem was a apace growing blackness metropolis, but what kind of metropolis was it becoming? Harlem historian Gilbert Osofsky argued, "the virtually profound change that Harlem experienced in the 1920's was its emergence as a slum. Largely within the space of a single decade Harlem was transformed from a potentially ideal customs to a neighborhood with manifold social and economic problems called 'lamentable,' 'unspeakable,' 'incredible.'"12 Equally a upshot, most of Harlem'southward 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, law-breaking, juvenile malversation, and drug addiction.
In brusque, the day-to-day realities that about Harlemites faced differed dramatically from the prototype of Harlem life presented past 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 demand for equality, and information technology reflected the aspirations and artistic genius of the talented young people of the Harlem Renaissance along with the economic aspirations of the blackness migrants seeking a better life in the n, 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 male child was caught stealing a ten-cent pocketknife from the counter of a 135th Street v-and-dime shop. Following the arrest, rumors spread that police had beaten the youth to expiry. 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, two hundred stores trashed and burned, and more than than two meg dollars worth of destroyed holding. The Puerto Rican youth whose abort precipitated the anarchism 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 Due east. Franklin Frazier, a professor of folklore at Howard University, to investigate the riot. They concluded the obvious: the anarchism resulted from a general frustration with racial discrimination and poverty.
What the commission failed to report was that the riot shattered in one case and for all James Weldon Johnson's image of Harlem as the African American urban utopia. In spite of the presence of artists and writers, nightclubs, music, and amusement, Harlem was a slum, a black ghetto characterized by poverty and discrimination. Burned-out storefronts might be fertile ground for political activity, but not for art, literature, and culture. Harlem would see new black writers in the years to come. Musicians, poets, and artists would go on to make their home there, only it never again served equally the focal point of a artistic movement with the national and international bear upon of the Harlem Renaissance.
Johnson did non personally witness the 1935 Riot. He had left the metropolis in 1931, the twelvemonth later on he published Black Manhattan, to accept the Spence Chair in Artistic Literature at Fisk University in Nashville. He lived there until his death in 1938.
Renaissance
So, what was the Harlem Renaissance? The uncomplicated answer is that the Harlem Renaissance (or the New Negro Move, or whatever name is preferred) was the about important result in twentieth-century African American intellectual and cultural life. While best known for its literature, it touched every aspect of African American literary and creative creativity from the stop of Globe State of war I through the Great Depression. Literature, critical writing, music, theater, musical theater, and the visual arts were transformed by this move; it also afflicted politics, social evolution, and nigh every aspect of the African American feel from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s.
But there was also something ephemeral almost the Harlem Renaissance, something vague and hard to define. The Harlem Renaissance, then, was an African American literary and artistic movement anchored in Harlem, just cartoon from, extending to, and influencing African American communities beyond the country and across. As we take seen, it also had no precise beginning; nor did it take a precise ending. Rather, it emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American customs that followed Earth War I, blossomed in the 1920s, and and so faded away in the mid-to-late 1930s and early 1940s.
Likewise the Harlem Renaissance has no single divers ideological or stylistic standard that unified its participants and defined the motility. Instead, most participants in the movement resisted black or white efforts to define or narrowly categorize their fine art. For case, in 1926, a group of writers, spearheaded by writer Wallace Thurman and including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and artist Aaron Douglas, among others, produced their own literary magazine, Burn down!! One purpose of this venture was the proclamation of their intent to assume ownership of the literary Renaissance. In the process, they turned their backs on Alain Locke and W. East. B. Du Bois and others who sought to channel black creativity into what they considered to be the proper aesthetic and political directions. Despite the efforts of Thurman and his young colleagues, Fire!! fizzled out after only one issue and the move remained sick defined. In fact, this was its most distinguishing characteristic. There would be no common literary style or political ideology associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It was far more an identity than an ideology or a literary or artistic school. What united participants was their sense of taking part in a common try and their commitment to giving artistic expression to the African American experience.
If there was a statement that defined the philosophy of the new literary movement it was Langston Hughes's essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mount," published in The Nation, June sixteen, 1926:
We younger Negro artists who create at present intend to express our private night-skinned selves without fright or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are non, it doesn't matter. We know nosotros are beautiful. And ugly likewise. 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 matter either. We will build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and nosotros will stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.13
Similar Fire!!, this essay was the movement's declaration of independence, both from the stereotypes that whites held about 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 work.
There was, not surprisingly, resistance to this independence, particularly among 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 spoken language that was later published in The Crisis every bit "The Criteria of Negro Art" (October 1926): "Thus all Art is propaganda and always must exist, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used e'er for propaganda for gaining the right of blackness folk to love and enjoy. I practice non intendance a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I exercise care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent."
The determination of blackness writers to follow their own artistic vision led to the artistic diversity that was the principal 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 inventive. Langston Hughes, for example, 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 appropriation of the course of blackness music, especially jazz and the dejection, and his employ of the black colloquial, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen utilized more traditional and classical forms for their poesy. McKay used sonnets for much of his protest verse, while Cullen's poems relied both on classical literary allusions and symbols and standard poetic forms.
This diversity and experimentation likewise characterized music. This was evidenced in the blues of Bessie Smith and the range of jazz from the early rhythms of Jelly Roll 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 utilize of bright colors and sharply defined images.
Within this multifariousness, several themes emerged which set the grapheme of the Harlem Renaissance. No black writer, musician, or artist expressed all of these themes, simply each did accost one or more in his or her work. The first of these themes was the try 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'south ideology and besides a concern of W. Due east. B. Du Bois in the 1920s.
It also reflected the general fascination with aboriginal African history that followed the discovery of Male monarch 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 However to jazz great 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'due south art. Zora Neale Hurston used her experience every bit a folklorist as the ground 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-canvas series' of paintings, the Harriett Tubman series 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 poetry, and McKay used the ghetto every bit the setting for his offset novel, Home to Harlem. Some blackness writers, including McKay and Hughes, as well every bit Rudolph Fisher and Wallace Thurman, were accused of overemphasizing criminal offence, sexuality, and other less-savory aspects of ghetto life in lodge to feed the voyeuristic desires of white readers and publishers, in imitation of white novelist Carl Van Vechten'south controversial Harlem novel, Nigger Heaven.
A third major theme addressed by the literature of the Harlem Renaissance was race. Nigh every novel and play, and most of the poetry, explored race in America, especially the impact of race and racism on African Americans. In their simplest class 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 virtually every black writer at one time or another.
Among the visual artists, Lawrence's historical series emphasized the racial struggle that dominated African American history, while Romare Bearden's early illustrative work oft focused on racial politics. The struggle against lynching in the mid-1920s stimulated anti-lynching poetry, also as Walter White'south advisedly researched written report of the subject, Rope and Faggot. In the early 1930s, the Scottsboro incident stimulated considerable protest writing, as well as a 1934 album, Negro, which addressed race in an international context. Almost of the literary efforts of the Harlem Renaissance avoided overt protest or propaganda, focusing instead on the psychological and social impact of race. Amidst the all-time of these studies were Nella Larsen'due south two novels, Quicksand in 1928 and, a yr later, Passing. Both explored characters of mixed racial heritage who struggled to ascertain 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, as did Jessie Fauset in her 1929 novel, Plum Bun. That same year Wallace Thurman made colour discrimination within the urban black community the focus of his novel, The Blacker the Berry.
Finally, the Harlem Renaissance incorporated all aspects of African American civilisation in its creative work. This ranged from the use of black music as 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 blues in much of his early poetry. James Weldon Johnson, who published 2 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 Road, continued the practice that Hughes had initiated. Other writers exploited black organized religion equally a literary source. Johnson made the blackness preacher and his sermons the basis for the poems in God'due south Trombones, while Hurston and Larsen used black religion and black preachers in their novels. Hurston's first novel, Jonah'southward Gourd Vine (1934), described the exploits of a southern black preacher, while in the last portion of Quicksand, Larsen's heroine was ensnared by organized 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 diverseness and complexity equally realistically every bit 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 black life in minor towns such as in Hughes's novel, Not Without Laughter, or the witty and biting depiction of Harlem's black literati in Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring.
The Harlem Renaissance appealed to and relied on a mixed audience—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 articles, reviews, and almanac literary prizes. They also printed illustrations by black artists and used black artists in the layout blueprint of their periodicals. Also, blacks attempted to produce their own literary and artistic venues. In addition to the short-lived Fire!!, Wallace Thurman spearheaded some other unmarried-upshot 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 anthology of African American poesy, Caroling Sunset, in 1927.
Equally important as 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 artistic works. Publishing houses, magazines, recording companies, theaters, and art galleries were primarily white-owned, and financial back up through grants, prizes, and awards generally involved white money. In fact, one of the major accomplishments of the Renaissance was to push open up the door to mainstream periodicals, publishing houses, and funding sources. African American music besides played to mixed audiences. Harlem'southward cabarets attracted both Harlem residents and white New Yorkers seeking out Harlem nightlife. The famous Cotton Club carried this to a bizarre 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 virtually African American critics strongly supported the movement, others like Benjamin Brawley and even W. Due east. B. Du Bois were sharply critical and defendant Renaissance writers of reinforcing negative African American stereotypes. Langston Hughes'southward assertion that black artists intended to express themselves freely, no matter what the black public or white public thought, accurately reflected the mental attitude of near writers and artists.
Dull fade to black
The end of the Harlem Renaissance is as difficult to define as its ancestry. It varies somewhat from one artistic field to another. In musical theater, the popularity of blackness musical reviews died out by the early 1930s, although there were occasional efforts, mostly unsuccessful, to revive the genre. However, blackness performers and musicians continued to work, although non so often in all black shows. Black music continued into the Earth War Ii era, although the popularity of blues singers waned somewhat, and jazz changed every bit the big band style became popular. Literature also changed, and a new generation of blackness writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison emerged with picayune involvement in or connection with the Harlem Renaissance. In art, a number of artists who had emerged in the 1930s continued to piece of work, just again, 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 continued to a literary movement. And Harlem lost some of its magic following the 1935 race riot. In any case, few, if whatsoever, people were talking nigh a Harlem Renaissance past 1940.
The Harlem Renaissance flourished in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but its antecedents and legacy spread many years before 1920 and after 1930. It had no universally recognized name, only was known variously as the New Negro Movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, likewise equally the Harlem Renaissance. It had no clearly divers beginning or finish, but emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American community that followed World War I, blossomed in the mid- to late-1920s, and so faded away in the mid-1930s.
What was the Harlem Renaissance and why was it important?
While at its cadre 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 manner, or aesthetic principle. This was a movement of individuals free 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 every bit much hostility and criticism as it did support and praise. From the moment of its birth, its legitimacy was debated. Nevertheless, past at least one measure, its success was articulate: the Harlem Renaissance was the start 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 large.
1Carl Van Doren, "The Younger Generation of Negro Writers," Opportunity 2 (1924): 144–45. Van Doren's Borough Social 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 Ocean (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), 223–24.
6James Weldon Johnson, Blackness Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 120–21.
7Rudolph Fisher, "The Metropolis of Refuge," in The New Negro, 57–8. The City of Refuge was showtime published in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1925.
8Ibid. 58–9.
9Hughes, Large Bounding main, 81–2.
10Johnson, Blackness Manhattan, 3–4.
11Ibid, 146. Johnson also expresses this view of Harlem in "The Making of Harlem," Survey Graphic, half dozen (March 1925), 635–39.
12Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930, (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 135.
13Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, The Nation. June xvi, 1926, 694.
Song of the Towers by Aaron Douglas for the mural series 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 Black Civilisation, Fine art and Artifacts Sectionalization, 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 heighten classroom instruction and student comprehension.
Portrait of Charles South. 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 Administration/Office of State 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 Center for Research in Black Civilization, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Segmentation, The New York Public Library.
The cast of Shuffle Forth, 1921.
Sheet music for "I'm Only Wild About Harry" from Shuffle Forth, the first Broadway musical written, produced, and performed by African Americans, by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Music Sectionalization, Library of Congress. Copyright deposit, 1921 (155.3b).
Dejection composer and musician W. C. Handy (left) with bandleader and composer Duke Ellington (correct), ca. 1940s. Schomburg Eye for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Partition, New York Public Library.
Sheet music for "Goodnight Angeline" by James Reese Europe, 1919. The photographs on the comprehend show Europe with the 369th U.S. Infantry Partitioning "Hell Fighters" Band. Performing Arts Encyclopedia, Library of Congress.
The Prodigal Son by Aaron Douglas in God'southward Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse by James Weldon Johnson. New York: The Viking Printing, 1927. Douglas's painting was inspired by Johnson's verse form of the aforementioned proper name. Courtesy of Amon Carter Museum of American 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 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 Edifice Company, Brooklyn, New York, organized September 1892. Photograph from The Negro in Business concern 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 by F. F. Hopper. Schomburg Center for Research in Blackness Civilisation, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.
In Black Manhattan (1930), James Weldon Johnson's 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 S. Johnson, E. 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' honor, 1924. Schomburg Center for Inquiry in Black Civilization, Photographs and Prints Partitioning, New York Public Library.
Lenox Avenue in Harlem, ca. 1920s.
Policemen in Harlem, 1929. Schomburg Eye for Inquiry in Black Civilisation, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, New York Public Library.
Portrait of Langston Hughes equally a young man. Photo by James L. Allen. Schomburg Center for Research in Blackness Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.
Portrait of James Weldon Johnson, December 3, 1932. Photo past Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Report to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia by the interracial committee headed past East. Franklin Frazier assigned to investigate the March xix, 1935, anarchism 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 Bribe Center.
Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston, ca. tardily 1930s. Hurston was an author, anthropologist, and among the publishers of Fire!! Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
The front and back covers of the first and only issue of Burn down!!, published in 1926, with artwork by Aaron Douglas. Harry Ransom Center.
Portrait of W. E. B. Du Bois, May 31, 1919. Prints and Photographs Sectionalisation, Library of Congress.
The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, published in 1926, dust cover artwork by Miguel Covarrubias. Harry Ransom Center.
Portrait of Countee Cullen in Key Park, June twenty, 1941. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Segmentation, Library of Congress.
Grit encompass for Passing by Nella Larsen, published in 1928. Harry Ransom Center.
Portrait of Jessie Redmon Fauset, n.d. Harmon Foundation Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
Due west. Eastward. B. Du Bois (back correct) and staff in the Crisis magazine office, n.d. Schomburg Eye for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Sectionalization, New York Public Library.
Advertisement for the Cotton Club featuring Cab Calloway and his Cotton Gild Orchestra, 1925. Schomburg Center for Research in Blackness Culture, Photographs and Prints Segmentation, New York Public Library.
Portrait of author Richard Wright, June 23, 1939. Ralph Ellison served as all-time human being at Wright's hymeneals this same yr. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Drove, Prints and Photographs Sectionalization, Library of Congress.
Cover 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 magazine published in San Antonio, Texas, that declared itself to be "the only magazine in the South devoted to Negro life and culture." This particular issue includes a review of Rudolph Fisher's novel The Walls of Jericho (page xiii). Courtesy of Michael 50. Gillette.
Download the Full Issue of The Negro American
You can explore the full event of The Negro American (Oct 1928) described above by 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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