Harlem Renaissance: Difference between revisions

The Harlem Renaissance was an flowering of African-American social thought and culture based in the African-American community forming in Harlem in New York City (USA). This period, extending from roughly 1920 to 1940, was expressed through every cultural medium—visual art, dance, music, theatre, literature, poetry, history and politics. Instead of using direct political means, African-American arists, writers, and musicians employed culture to work for goals of civil rights and equality. Its lasting legacy is that for the first time (and across racial lines), African-American paintings, writings, and jazz became absorbed into mainstream culture. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after an anthology named The New Negro of notable African-American works, published by philosopher Alain Locke in 1925.

Historical Roots of a Cultural Revolution

Harlem

In 1658, Dutch settlers formally incorporated a village on the northern tip of Manhattan Island, and christened it Nieuw Haarlem (New Haarlem) after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. From its origins until the latter half of the 19th Century, the area remained a rural farming community, many of the farms being owned by upper-class New Yorkers who resided only a few miles south in the lower sections of Manhattan. In 1880, elevated railroad lines were extended to Harlem, and their introduction gave birth to an rapid explosion in urban development. Early New York entrepreneurs created grand plans for Harlem, constructing fine townhouses, the original Polo Grounds (where Polo was played before becoming home to the New York Giants baseball franchise), and in 1889 an opera house opened by theatre impresario Oscar Hammerstein I.

By the turn of the century, Harlem became an attractive location for immigrants, and by early 1900's the population was chiefly German, Eastern European, or Jewish in the west, and Italian in the east (where Spanish Harlem is now).

Development of Harlem as an African-American Community

Before relocating to Harlem, most of New York City's African-American population lived in neighborhoods like Tenderloin, San Juan Hill (Upper West Side), and Hell's Kitchen (now called Clinton). These neighborhoods were known as "Black Bohemia." Starting in 1904, several middle-class African American families abandoned Black Bohemia in favour of Harlem. This initiated a move north of educated African Americans and a foothold into Harlem. In 1910, a large block along 135th and Fifth Ave was bought up by various African-American realtors and a church group.

As World War I approached, unskilled European labor decreased so drastically, that a shortage of labor ensued. To fill this void, large numbers of African-Americans from the Old South—attracted not only by the prospect of paid labour but an escape from the inherent inequities and institutional racism of the South.—relocated to New York City.

An Explosion of Culture in Harlem

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Seminal Works of the Period

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Langston Hughes, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936

The Apollo Theater

While the Savoy Ballroom, on Lenox Avenue, was a renowned venue for swing dancing, and jazz and was immortalized in a popular song of the era, Stompin' At The Savoy, the Apollo Theater has been the most lasting legacy of the Harlem Renaissance. Opened on 125th Street on 26 January 1934, in a former burlesque house, it has remained a symbol of African-American culture. As one fo the most famous clubs for popular music in the United States, many figures from the Harlem Renaissance found a venue for their talents and a start to their careers. The club fell into a decline in the 1960s but is now run by a non-profit organization, the Apollo Theater Foundation Inc., and reportedly draws 1.3 million visitors annually. It is the home of Showtime at the Apollo, a nationally syndicated variety show showcasing new talent.

End of an Era

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Quintessential Themes of the Harlem Renaissance

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Impact of the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was successful in that it brought the Black experience clearly within the corpus of American cultural history. Now only through an explosion of culture, but on a sociological level, the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance is that it redefined how America, and the world, viewed the African-American population. The migration of southern Blacks to the north changed the image of the African-American from rural, undereducated peasants to one of urban, cosmopolitan sophistication. This new identity lead to a greater social consciousness, and African-Americans became players on the world stage, expanding intellectual and social contacts internationally.

The progress—both symbolic and real—during this period, became a point of reference from which the African-American community gained a spirit of self-determination that provided a growing sense of both Black urbanity and Black militancy as well as a foundation for the community to build upon for the Civil Rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s.

The urban setting of rapidly developing Harlem provided a venue for African-Americans of all backgrounds to appreciate the variety of Black life and culture. Through this expression, the Harlem Renaissance encouraged the new appreciation of folk roots and culture. For instance, folk materials and spirituals provided a rich source for the artistic and intellectual imagination and it freed the Blacks from the establishment of past condition. Through sharing in these cultural experiences, a consciousness sprung forth in the form of a united racial identity.

Criticism of the Movement

Many critics point out that the Harlem Renaissance could not escape its history and culture in its attempt to create a new one, or sufficiently separate itself from the foundational elements of White, European culture. Often Harlem intellectuals, while proclaiming a new racial consciousnss, resorted to mimicry of their White counterparts by adopting their manner of clothing, sophisticated manners and etiquette. This abandonment of the authentic culture of their African routes was seen as hypocritical, and intellectuals who engaged in such mimicry earned the epithet "dicty niggers" from disillusioned blacks. This could be seen as a reason by which the artistic and cultural products of the Harlem Renaissance did not overcome the presence of White-American values, and did not reject these values. In this regard, the creation of the "New Negro" as the Harlem intellectuals sought, was considered a failure.

Certain aspects of the Harlem Renaissance were accepted without question, without debate, and without scrutiny. One of these was the future of the "New Negro." Artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance echoed the American progressivism in its faith in democratic reform, in its belief in art and literature as agents of change, and in its almost uncritical belief in itself and its future. This progressivist worldview rendered Black intellectuals—just as their White counterparts— totally unprepared for the rude shock of the Great Depression, and the Harlem Renaissance ended abruptly because of it because of naive assumptions about the centrality of culture, unrelated to economic and social realities.

However, what emerges as a chief criticism of the Harlem Renaissance is that while African-American culture became absorbed into the mainstream American culture, a strange separation emerged of the Black community from American culture. As African-Americans with roots in this country dating to beginning of the North American slave trade in the early 17th Century, their worldview is distinctly native. Blacks, unlike other immigrants, had no immediate past, history and culture to celebrate as they were separated by generations from their roots in Africa. But the positive implications of American nativity have never been fully appreciated by them. It seems too simple: the Afro-American's history and culture is American, more completely so than most other ethnic groups within the United States.

Harlem Today

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Quotes

"Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination."

—Alain Locke, in The New Negro (1925)

"One ever feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings: two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

—W.E.B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folks (1903)

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

—Langston Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred (published 1951)

Notable figures

Writers

• Zora Neale Hurston, novelist, anthropologist
• Nella Larsen, novelist
• Langston Hughes, poet
• Jessie Fauset, editor, poet, essayist and novelist
• Countee Cullen, poet
• Claude McKay, poet
• James Weldon Johnson, poet
• Arna Bontemps, poet
• Alain Locke published The New Negro

Painters

• Romare Bearden
• John T. Biggers
• Edward Burra
• Aaron Douglas
• Palmer Hayden
• Sargent Claude Johnson, sculptor and printmaker
• William H. Johnson
• Lois Mailou Jones
• Jacob Lawrence
• Archibald Motley
• Hale Woodruff

Musicians

• Louis Armstrong
• Duke Ellington
• Pops Foster
• Fletcher Henderson
• Luis Russell

External Links

• Harlem Renaissance
• The Harlem Renaissance
• PAL: Harlem Renaissance: A Brief Introduction