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, entitled The New Negro, of notable African-American works, published by philosopher Alain Locke in 1925.

History of a Cultural Revolution

Historical Roots of 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 Street and Fifth Avenue 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.

Emerging Black Identity

During the 1910s, a new political agenda advocating racial equality arose in the African-American community, particularly in its growing middle class. Championing the agenda were black historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909 to advance the rights of blacks. This agenda was also reflected in the efforts of Jamaican-born black nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose Back to Africa movement inspired racial pride among working-class blacks in the United States in the 1920s.

An Explosion of Culture in Harlem

(more to come)

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 of 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 careers of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and James Brown, and later Michael Jackson and Lauryn Hill, were launched at the Apollo.

The club fell into a decline in the 1960s but was revived in 1983 through city, state, and federal grant money. It is now operated 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

A number of factors contributed to the decline of the Harlem Renaissance by the mid-1930s. The Great Depression of the 1930s increased the economic pressure on all sectors of life. Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, which had actively promoted the Renaissance in the 1920s, shifted their interests to economic and social issues in the 1930s. Many influential black writers and literary promoters, including Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Charles S. Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois, left New York City in the early 1930s, most relocating to France. Finally, the Harlem Riot of 1935—set off in part by the growing economic hardship of the Depression and mounting tension between the black community and the white shop-owners in Harlem who profited from that community—shattered the notion of Harlem as the Mecca of the New Negro. In spite of these problems the Renaissance did not disappear overnight. Almost one-third of the books published during the Renaissance appeared after 1929. In the last analysis, the Harlem Renaissance ended when most of those associated with it left Harlem or stopped writing. Among the new young artists who appeared in the 1930s and 1940s, social realism replaced modernism and primitivism as the dominant mode of literary and artistic expression.

Quintessential Themes of the Harlem Renaissance

(more to come)

No common literary style or political ideology defined the Harlem Renaissance. What united participants was their sense of taking part in a common endeavor and their commitment to giving artistic expression to the African-American experience. Some common themes existed, such as an interest in the roots of the 20th-century African-American experience in Africa and the American South, and a strong sense of racial pride and desire for social and political equality. But the most characteristic aspect of the Harlem Renaissance was the diversity of its expression.

Impact of the Harlem Renaissance

A New Black Identity

Langston Hughes, novelist and poet, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936

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 consciousness, 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.

Influence on Culture Today

The Harlem Renaissance changed forever the dynamics of African-American arts and literature in the United States. The writers that followed in the 1930s and 1940s found that publishers and the public were more open to African-American literature than they had been at the beginning of the century. Furthermore, the existence of the body of African-American literature from the period inspired writers such as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright to pursue literary careers in the late 1930s and the 1940s, even if they defined themselves against the various ideologies and literary practices of the Renaissance. The outpouring of African-American literature of the 1980s and 1990s by such writers as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison also had its roots in the writing of the Harlem Renaissance.

The influence of the Harlem Renaissance was not confined to the United States. Writers Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, actor and musician Paul Robeson, dancer Josephine Baker, and others traveled to Europe and attained a popularity abroad that rivaled or surpassed what they achieved in the United States. The founders of the Négritude movement in the French Caribbean traced their ideas directly to the influence of Hughes and McKay. South African writer Peter Abrahams cited his youthful discovery of the anthology The New Negro as the event that turned him toward a career as a writer. For thousands of blacks around the world, the Harlem Renaissance was proof that whites did not hold a monopoly on literature and culture.

Notable Figures and their Works

Novels

• Sherwood Anderson — Dark Laughter (1925)
• Jessie Redmon Fauset — There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1928), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), Comedy, American Style (1933)
• Rudolph Fisher — The Walls of Jericho (1928), The Conjure Man Dies (1932)
• Langston Hughes — Not Without Laughter (1930)
• Zora Neal Hurston — Jonah's Gourd Wine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
• Nella Larsen — Quicksand (1928), Passing (1929)
• Claude McKay — Home to Harlem (1927), Banjo (1929), Gingertown (1931), Banana Bottom (1933)
• George Schuyler — Black No More (1930), Slaves Today (1931)
• Wallace Thurman — The Blacker the Berry (1929), Infants of the Spring (1932), Interne (1932)
• Jean Toomer — Cane (1923)
• Carl Van Vechten — Nigger Heaven (1926)
• Eric Walrond — Tropic Death (1926)
• Walter White — The Fire in the Flint (1924), Flight (1926)

Drama

• Charles Gilpin, actor
• Eugene O'Neill, playwright—Emperor Jones, All God's Chillun Got Wings
• Paul Robeson

Poetry

• Langston Hughes, poet
• Jessie Fauset, editor, poet, essayist and novelist
• Countee Cullen, poet — The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929)
• Claude McKay, poet
• James Weldon Johnson, poet
• Arna Bontemps, poet

Painting and Sculpture

• 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

Dance

• Josephine Baker

Music

• Louis Armstrong, trumpeter
• Duke Ellington, composer and pianist — Take the A Train, Black & Tan Fantasy, Mood Indigo
• Pops Foster
• George Gershwin, composer — Porgy and Bess (1935)
• Fletcher Henderson
• Billie Holiday, singer — Strange Fruit
• Luis Russell
• Ethel Waters

Intellectual and Social Thought

• Benjamin Brawley — The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (1919), Social History of the American Negro (1921)
• W.E.B. DuBois — Darkwater (1920)
• Marcus Garvey, Aims and Objects for a Solution of the Negro Problem Outlined (1924)
• Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist
• Alain Locke, published The New Negro

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)

"The Complex of color...every colored man feels it sooner or later. It gets in the way of his dreams, of his education, of his marriage, of the rearing of his children."

—Jessie Redmon Fauset, There is Confusion (1924)

External Links

• Harlem Renaissance
• The Harlem Renaissance