thesis of the harlem renaissance

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A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance

With the end of the Civil War in 1865, hundreds of thousands of African Americans newly freed from the yoke of slavery in the South began to dream of fuller participation in American society, including political empowerment, equal economic opportunity, and economic and cultural self-determination.

Unfortunately, by the late 1870s, that dream was largely dead, as white supremacy was quickly restored to the Reconstruction South. White lawmakers on state and local levels passed strict racial segregation laws known as “Jim Crow laws” that made African Americans second-class citizens. While a small number of African Americans were able to become landowners, most were exploited as sharecroppers, a system designed to keep them poor and powerless. Hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) perpetrated lynchings and conducted campaigns of terror and intimidation to keep African Americans from voting or exercising other fundamental rights.

With booming economies across the North and Midwest offering industrial jobs for workers of every race, many African Americans realized their hopes for a better standard of living—and a more racially tolerant environment—lay outside the South. By the turn of the 20th century, the Great Migration was underway as hundreds of thousands of African Americans relocated to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York. The Harlem section of Manhattan, which covers just three square miles, drew nearly 175,000 African Americans, giving the neighborhood the largest concentration of black people in the world. Harlem became a destination for African Americans of all backgrounds. From unskilled laborers to an educated middle-class, they shared common experiences of slavery, emancipation, and racial oppression, as well as a determination to forge a new identity as free people.

The Great Migration drew to Harlem some of the greatest minds and brightest talents of the day, an astonishing array of African American artists and scholars. Between the end of World War I and the mid-1930s, they produced one of the most significant eras of cultural expression in the nation’s history—the Harlem Renaissance. Yet this cultural explosion also occurred in Cleveland, Los Angeles and many cities shaped by the great migration. Alain Locke, a Harvard-educated writer, critic, and teacher who became known as the “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance, described it as a “spiritual coming of age” in which African Americans transformed “social disillusionment to race pride.”

The Harlem Renaissance encompassed poetry and prose, painting and sculpture, jazz and swing, opera and dance. What united these diverse art forms was their realistic presentation of what it meant to be black in America, what writer Langston Hughes called an “expression of our individual dark-skinned selves,” as well as a new militancy in asserting their civil and political rights.

Among the Renaissance’s most significant contributors were intellectuals W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Cyril Briggs, and Walter Francis White; electrifying performers Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson; writers and poets Zora Neale Hurston, Effie Lee Newsome, Countee Cullen; visual artists Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage; and an extraordinary list of legendary musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ivie Anderson, Josephine Baker, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and countless others.

Josaphine Baker

At the height of the movement, Harlem was the epicenter of American culture. The neighborhood bustled with African American-owned and run publishing houses and newspapers, music companies, playhouses, nightclubs, and cabarets. The literature, music, and fashion they created defined culture and “cool” for blacks and white alike, in America and around the world.

As the 1920s came to a close, so did the Harlem Renaissance. Its heyday was cut short largely due to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and resulting Great Depression, which hurt African American-owned businesses and publications and made less financial support for the arts available from patrons, foundations, and theatrical organizations.

However, the Harlem Renaissance’s impact on America was indelible. The movement brought notice to the great works of African American art, and inspired and influenced future generations of African American artists and intellectuals. The self-portrait of African American life, identity, and culture that emerged from Harlem was transmitted to the world at large, challenging the racist and disparaging stereotypes of the Jim Crow South. In doing so, it radically redefined how people of other races viewed African Americans and understood the African American experience.

Most importantly, the Harlem Renaissance instilled in African Americans across the country a new spirit of self-determination and pride, a new social consciousness, and a new commitment to political activism, all of which would provide a foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In doing so, it validated the beliefs of its founders and leaders like Alain Locke and Langston Hughes that art could be a vehicle to improve the lives of the African Americans. 

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 10, 2020 • ( 0 )

Between 1919 and 1934 African-American artists flocked to New York City, specifically to Harlem. This era was to become one of the most prolific periods of African-American writing. What Alain Locke called in 1925 a “New Negro Movement” was later defined by historians as the Harlem Renaissance. Among the poets who gained popularity during this era were Langston Hughes, Claude Mckay, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, Anne Spencer, Gwendolyn Bennett, Helene Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimké, and James Weldon Johnson. Many leading fiction writers also emerged during this period, including Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, Jessie Redmond Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Wallace Thurman. Moreover many of the poets of this era also wrote fiction. The Harlem Renaissance also included the creative works produced by brilliantly talented, prolific dancers, musicians, visual artists, and photographers.

Several conditions enabled this renaissance: Booker T. Washington’s death, World War I, deteriorating southern racial conditions, greater publishing opportunities, and Marcus Garvey’s influence on racial pride. When Booker T. Washington, a former slave and founder of Tuskegee Institute, died in 1915, W. E. B. DuBois, the first African American to take a Ph.D. from Harvard and one of the principal organizers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), replaced him as the principal spokesperson for African Americans. Although he held tremendous respect for Washington, DuBois disagreed strongly with his conciliatory attitude toward racial injustice in the South. DuBois endorsed more urgent demands for social change.

Langston Hughes

When World War I ended in 1918, returning black soldiers, especially those who had been recognized in France for their heroic achievements, were angered by racial conditions that remained unchanged in the United States. When in 1917 Woodrow Wilson proclaimed U.S. involvement in the war as a means to make the world safe for democracy, many African- American soldiers had felt certain that U.S. discrimination would be dismantled. Confronted by the same racial injustice and violence they left, many black veterans joined their anger with a rising spirit of unrest that was beginning to pervade the country.

Racial conditions in the South were becoming unbearable for African Americans, especially in rural areas. Workers faced unfair sharecropping arrangements, lynching, and segregation, as well as inferior schools and living conditions. Many began moving north with the hope of finding greater economic opportunity in the industrial cities of New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh. Soon African-American professionals followed. This huge influx of African Americans to the North became known as the Great Migration. Many of these people settled in Harlem, which was rapidly becoming known as a center for artistic opportunity.

In his essay “The New Negro,” Alain Locke, the first African-American Rhodes scholar, attempted to direct the spirit of unrest he saw rising in many black communities as a result of these changing conditions. Riots were breaking out across the country. McKay’s famous sonnet “If We Must Die” (1919) addresses this revolutionary spirit: “If we must die, O let us nobly die, / . . . Pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back!”

Locke’s solution was the creation and display of talented art, which would become the black ticket into the social fabric of white America. Placing the future in the hands of young artists like McKay, Locke charged them to produce the uncompromising art essential to the reconstruction of African-American identity. Johnson agreed that “nothing will do more to change [the] mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through his production of literature and art” (9).

In this art blacks would be more authentically represented. No more minstrel figures, such as the mammy and coon, comic grotesque figures that represented black females as asexual nurturers and black males as comic buffoons. Crisis, a publication of the NAACP, as well as Opportunity, the publishing arm of the Urban League, held writing contests to inspire young artists. Other outlets included the black socialist publication the Messenger , and white publishers and patrons who became more receptive to black art as well.

A variety of styles and literary devices, including dialect, strict standard English, high and low culture, parody, irony, and satire, fill the pages of Harlem Renaissance writings, creating a window into the rich diversity of perspectives alive in African-American communities. Yet artists continued to debate the best way to represent blacks, which classes to foreground in their work, and whether or not to use dialect. In addition writers struggled against the mean-spirited images of blacks as promiscuous. Some artists considered downplaying the theme of sexuality, which, when used unwisely, could only fuel the harmful effects of this stereotype. Others, like Hughes, insisted that artists must not be servants to outside approval. In his famous essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), Hughes responds to a fellow artist’s dismissal of his own culture in favor of uncritical acceptance of white Western culture as standard. Declaring the artist’s inability to realize full creative potential without respect for his own culture, Hughes issues a bold mandate to all young black artists:

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. . . . If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. (309)

Toomer was the first artist to enjoy widespread critical acceptance of his first work, Cane (1923), success that charged the confidence of other Harlem Renaissance writers. The collection, containing a novella, poetry, and short fiction, as well as drawings, is most noted for its focus on the strength and beauty of rural black women, such as Fern. In his free verse Hughes treats themes of black pride, black unity, racial violence, black poverty, black womanhood, African heritage, and integration. He also transcribed blues, jazz, and gospel into poetic verse. Such innovation gained him the reputation of “poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance.” In one of his most famous poems, the musician and his sounds come alive on the page: “Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. / He played the chords then he sang some more.” Johnson explored the sermonic tradition in his poetry, maintaining black verbal art forms, while McKay and Cullen cast their poetry in the traditional form of the sonnet. Cullen, perhaps more closely aligned with European-inspired poetic verse, nonetheless indulged in social protest with his poems “Hritage” (1925) and “Yet Do I Marvel” (1925), which questions God and the paradox of a black poet: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing; / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” Although Bontemps once collaborated with Hughes on a literary project, his poetry, influenced by his religious upbringing, is meditative and spiritual with a deep sense of racial pride.

While the movement often seemed to be dominated by men, women also managed to leave their enduring mark on the poetry of the era. Georgia Douglas Johnson attended to racial themes, yet was equally drawn to romanticism, sentimentalism, and issues concerning the human condition. Angelina Weld Grimké treated racial themes with a lyric sensibility. Much of Anne Spencer’s work is concerned with gender more than race. Race-conscious Gwendolyn Bennett wrote lyrics that focused on the “grace and loveliness” of the descendants of Africans (Gates 1227). Helene Johnson was described as “one of the younger group who has taken . . . the ‘racial’ bull by the horns” (Johnson 279).

Other important writers of the period include Eric Walrond, Sterling A. Brown, and Dorothy West. Walrond wrote of his experiences as a West Indian in Harlem, Brown continued Hughes’s emphasis on the poetics of blues culture, and West examined the wealthy class of blacks, writing and publishing well into her nineties.

In opposition to the radical modernist movement and such poets as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Harlem Renaissance poets did not view the entire modern world as a wasteland (see THE WASTE LAND ). Instead a sense of optimism pervaded their work, unlike the fatalism and pessimism found in many works of modernism . Like blues music, the poetry transformed hopelessness with love and laughter, the words and images infused with the power of persistence.

Historians David Levering Lewis and Nathan Huggins argue that the Harlem Renaissance failed in its mission to challenge inequitable conditions for blacks in North America through art. Literary critic Houston A. Baker, Jr., disagrees: He insists that such faith in the power of art could be “a mark of British and American modernism,” but that British and white American scholars would dismiss such efforts by labeling the movement a failure (14). Certainly if the success of the movement can be gauged by its influence on generations to follow, the Harlem Renaissance was a tremendous success. Not only did the movement have an impact on individual artists, but the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT of the 1960s looked to the Harlem Renaissance for guidance and direction.

An Introduction to the Black Arts Movement

An Introduction to the Beat Poets

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baker, Houston A., Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., et al., eds. “The Harlem Renaissance.” Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Nathan Huggins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. “The Weary Blues.” In Norton Anthology of African- American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Johnson, James Weldon, ed. The Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1922. Karenga, Maulana. Introduction to Black Studies. Los Angeles: Kawaida Publications, 1982. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. McKay, Claude. “If We Must Die.” In The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1922. ———. A Long Way from Home. New York: Lee Furman, 1937. Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Liveright, 1923. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins, 1980.

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Tags: A Brief Guide to Harlem Renaissance , African Literature , American Literature , An Introduction to the Harlem Renaissance , Angelina Weld Grimké , Anne Spencer , Arna Bontemps , Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance , Black Poetry , Black Poetry History , Claude Mckay , Countee Cullen , Guide to the Black Poetry , Guide to the Harlem Renaissance , Gwendolyn Bennett , Harlem Renaissance , Harlem Renaissance Characteristics , Harlem Renaissance in Poetry , Harlem Renaissance Literary Movement , Harlem Renaissance Members , Harlem Renaissance Themes , Helene Johnson , History of Black Poetry , History of Harlem Renaissance , James Weldon Johnson , Jean Toomer , Jessie Redmond Fauset , Langston Hughes , Literary Criticism , Literary Terms and Techniques , Literary Theory , Literature , Nella Larsen , Poetry , Rudolph Fisher , The Harlem Renaissance , The Harlem Renaissance Poets , Wallace Thurman , Zora Neale Hurston

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A Brief Guide to the Harlem Renaissance

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Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,      I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light      He did a lazy sway. . .      He did a lazy sway. . . To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.

            — Langston Hughes , “ The Weary Blues ”

When considering essential movements in American poetry, no conversation would be complete without a discussion of the Harlem Renaissance. With a lyricism seated in the popular blues and jazz music of the time, an awareness of Black life in America, its assertion of an independent African American identity, and its innovation in form and structure, the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance is unmistakable.

Though the exact dates of the movement are debatable, most consider its beginnings to be rooted in the end of the Reconstruction era, when legal segregation made living conditions for African Americans in the South unbearable. The lack of economic opportunities, and, more importantly, the prevalence of prejudice, lynching, and segregation in public spaces all contributed to the intolerable conditions of African Americans. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, jobs previously held by white males suddenly became available, and industrial expansion in the North provided opportunities for African Americans to seek a new lifestyle. They settled in various northern cities during this Great Migration, though New York City was the most popular, particularly the district of Harlem. African Americans of all social classes joined together in Harlem, which became the focal point of a growing interest in African American culture: jazz, blues, dance, theater, art, fiction, and poetry. Harlem and New York also became the home of many seminal African American institutions, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, W. E. B. Du Bois ’s  The Crisis , and more.

The Harlem Renaissance ushered in a time of many renewed firsts for African Americans in publishing: Langston Hughes , a central figure of the movement, published his first poem, “ The Negro Speaks of Rivers ,” in the June 1921 of The Crisis ; two years later, Jean Toomer ’s Cane was the first book of fiction (though it is more accurate to deem it a hybrid text, as it also contains dramatic dialogue and poetry) by an African American writer to appear from a New York publisher since Charles Chestnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream (Doubleday, Page, 1905); and Countee Cullen ’s first poetry collection, Color (Harper & Brothers, 1925), was the first book of poetry written by an African American to be published by a major American publisher since Dodd, Mead published Paul Laurence Dunbar .

These writers sought to examine and celebrate their experiences. In his preface to his anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), editor, author, and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson writes that African American artists need to find “a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos” of their experience. Another important anthology of the time appeared three years later: The New Negro , edited by sociologist and critic Alain Locke. The anthology collected essays, stories, poems, and artwork by a diversity of artists old and young, Black and white. Locke’s term “The New Negro” became popularized during the Harlem Renaissance, promoting a sense of pride and advocacy in the African American community, and a refusal to submit to the injustices they were subjected to. In fact, the Harlem Renaissance is alternately referred to as the “New Negro Renaissance.”

The same year The New Negro appeared, Cullen’s Color , a collection of poems that addressed racial injustice in the style of the English Romantics , was published. In his book, Cullen discussed his own and the collective African-American identity. Some of his strongest poems question the benevolence of a creator who has bestowed a race with such mixed blessings. His book was soon followed by Hughes’s The Weary Blues , a lyrical text whose sounds and cadences moved with the rhythms of the jazz and blues he was exposed to in his daily life in Harlem.

Other major writers of the time included Arna Bontemps , Sterling Brown , Claude McKay , Alice Dunbar-Nelson , Angelina Weld Grimké , and Georgia Douglas Johnson . McKay, born and raised in Jamaica, wrote of the immigrant’s nostalgia and the Black man’s pride and rage. Toomer remains a mystery; light enough to “pass” and alone constituting the generation’s symbolist avant-garde, he appeared briefly on the Harlem Renaissance scene, became a follower of the mystic Gurdijeff, and disappeared into the white world.

Brown, for many years a professor at Howard University, emerged in the thirties with sometimes playful, often pessimistic poems in standard English and Black vernacular and in African American and European forms. In many of Brown’s poems, strong men and women resist the oppression of racism, poverty, and fate.

By 1928, the literary tides seemed to shift away from poetry and more toward fiction, with the publication of such texts as Nella Larsen’s Quicksand , McKay’s Home to Harlem , and Bontemps’s God Sends Sunday , among others.

The Harlem Renaissance, which was sparked by industrial expansion and prosperity in the art fields, began its decline with the crash of Wall Street in 1929. Harlem became affected by rising unemployment and crime, and the neighborhood erupted in the Harlem Riot of 1935. Still, the immediate effects of the movement would echo into the Negritude movement of the 1930s and beyond.

The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance opened doors and deeply influenced the generations of African American writers that followed, including Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks . In the forties, fifties, and sixties, Hayden taught at Fisk University and the University of Michigan and served two terms as the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. After the publication in 1945 of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville , Brooks combined a quiet life with critical success. Her second book, Annie Allen , won the 1950 Pulitzer prize, the first time a book by a Black poet had won that coveted distinction, and the last time until Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah , almost forty years later. Many of the poets who would follow the Cullens and the Hugheses, these descendents of the Harlem Renaissance and the subsequent cultural, social, and literary trends, would also bring in the politically and socially radical Black Arts Movement of the sixties, which similarly sought to promote social change and a uniquely self-crafted African American identity.

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Harlem Renaissance

By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 14, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art.

Great Migration

The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem was meant to be an upper-class white neighborhood in the 1880s, but rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and desperate landlords seeking to fill them.

In the early 1900s, a few middle-class Black families from another neighborhood known as Black Bohemia moved to Harlem, and other Black families followed. Some white residents initially fought to keep African Americans out of the area, but failing that many whites eventually fled.

How Did the Harlem Renaissance Start?

Outside factors led to a population boom: From 1910 to 1920, African American populations migrated in large numbers from the South to the North, with prominent figures like W.E.B. Du Bois leading what became known as the Great Migration .

In 1915 and 1916, natural disasters in the south put Black workers and sharecroppers out of work. Additionally, during and after World War I , immigration to the United States fell, and northern recruiters headed south to entice Black workers to their companies.

By 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the South had moved north, and Harlem was one of the most popular destinations for these families.

Langston Hughes

This considerable population shift resulted in a Black Pride movement with leaders like Du Bois working to ensure that Black Americans got the credit they deserved for cultural areas of life. Two of the earliest breakthroughs were in poetry, with Claude McKay’s collection Harlem Shadows in 1922 and Jean Toomer’s Cane in 1923. Civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man in 1912 , followed b y God’s Trombones in 1927, left their mark on the world of fiction.

Novelist and du Bois protege Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1924 novel There Is Confusion explored the idea of Black Americans finding a cultural identity in a white-dominated Manhattan. Fauset was the literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis and developed a magazine for Black children with Du Bois.

Sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, who was integral in shaping the Harlem literary scene, used the debut party for There Is Confusion to organize resources to create Opportunity , the National Urban League magazine he founded and edited, a success that bolstered writers like Langston Hughes .

Hughes was at that party along with other promising Black writers and editors, as well as powerful white New York publishing figures. Soon many writers found their work appearing in mainstream magazines like Harper’s .

Zora Neale Hurston

Anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston courted controversy through her involvement with a publication called FIRE!!

Helmed by white author and Harlem writers’ patron Carl Van Vechten and filled with works from prolific Black writers including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Aaron Douglas, the magazine exoticized the lives of Harlem residents. Van Vechten’s previous fiction stirred up interest among whites to visit Harlem and take advantage of the culture and nightlife there.

Though Van Vechten’s work was condemned by older luminaries like DuBois, it was embraced by Hurston, Hughes and others.

Countee Cullen

Poetry, too, flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. Countee Cullen was 15 when he moved into the Harlem home of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the pastor of Harlem’s largest congregation, in 1918.

The neighborhood and its culture informed his poetry, and as a college student at New York University, he obtained prizes in a number of poetry contests before going on to Harvard’s master's program and publishing his first volume of poetry: Color. He followed it up with Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown Girl and went on to write plays as well as children’s books.

Cullen received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry and married Nina Yolande, the daughter of W.E.B. DuBois. Their wedding was a major social event in Harlem. Cullen’s reviews for Opportunity magazine, which ran under the column "Dark Tower," focused on works from the African-American literati and covered some of the biggest names of the age.

Harlem Renaissance Musicians

The music that percolated in and then boomed out of Harlem in the 1920s was jazz, often played at speakeasies offering illegal liquor. Jazz became a great draw for not only Harlem residents but outside white audiences also.

Some of the most celebrated names in American music regularly performed in Harlem— Louis Armstrong , Duke Ellington , Bessie Smith , Fats Waller and Cab Calloway , often accompanied by elaborate floor shows. Tap dancers like John Bubbles and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson were also popular.

Cotton Club

With the groundbreaking new music came vibrant nightlife. The Savoy opened in 1927, an integrated ballroom with two bandstands that featured continuous jazz and dancing well past midnight, sometimes in the form of battling bands helmed by Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford and King Oliver.

While it was fashionable to frequent Harlem nightlife, entrepreneurs realized that some white people wanted to experience Black culture without having to socialize with African Americans and created clubs to cater to them.

The most successful of these was the Cotton Club, which featured frequent performances by Ellington and Calloway. Some in the community derided the existence of such clubs, while others believed they were a sign that Black culture was moving toward greater acceptance.

Paul Robeson

The cultural boom in Harlem gave Black actors opportunities for stage work that had previously been withheld. Traditionally, if Black actors appeared onstage, it was in a minstrel show musical and rarely in a serious drama with non-stereotypical roles.

At the center of this stage revolution was the versatile Paul Robeson , an actor, singer, writer, activist and more. Robeson first moved to Harlem in 1919 while studying law at Columbia University and continually maintained a social presence in the area, where he was considered an inspirational but approachable figure.

Robeson believed that arts and culture were the best paths forward for Black Americans to overcome racism and make advances in a white-dominated culture.

Josephine Baker

Black musical revues were staples in Harlem, and by the mid-1920s had moved south to Broadway, expanding into the white world. One of the earliest of these was Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s Shuffle Along , which launched the career of Josephine Baker .

White patron Van Vechten helped bring a more serious lack of stage work to Broadway, though largely the work of white authors. It wasn’t until 1929 that a Black-authored play about Black lives, Wallace Thurman and William Rapp’s Harlem , played Broadway.

Playwright Willis Richardson offered more serious opportunities for Black actors with several one-act plays written in the 1920s, as well as articles in Opportunity magazine outlining his goals. Stock companies like the Krigwa Players and the Harlem Experimental Theater also gave Black actors serious roles.

Aaron Douglas

The visual arts were never welcoming to Black artists, with art schools, galleries and museums shutting them out. Sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, a protégé of Auguste Rodin , explored African American themes in her work and influenced Du Bois to champion Black visual artists.

The most celebrated Harlem Renaissance artist is Aaron Douglas , often called “the Father of Black American Art,” who adapted African techniques to realize paintings and murals, as well as book illustrations.

Sculptor Augusta Savage ’s 1923 bust of Du Bois garnered considerable attention. She followed that up with small, clay portraits of everyday African Americans, and would later be pivotal to enlisting black artists into the Federal Art Project, a division of the Work Progress Administration (WPA) .

James VanDerZee ’s photography captured Harlem's daily life, as well as commissioned portraits in his studio that he worked to fill with optimism and separate philosophically from the horrors of the past.

Marcus Garvey

Black nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism movement Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica but moved to Harlem in 1916 and began publishing the influential newspaper Negro World in 1918. His shipping company, Black Star Line, established trade between Africans in America, the Caribbean, South and Central America, Canada and Africa.

Garvey is perhaps best known for founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association, or UNIA, which advocated for “separate but equal” status for persons of African ancestry with the goal of establishing Black states around the world. Garvey was famously at odds with W.E.B. DuBois, who called him "the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America." His outspoken views also made him a target of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI .

Harlem Renaissance Ends

The end of Harlem’s creative boom began with the stock market crash of 1929 and The Great Depression . It wavered until Prohibition ended in 1933, which meant white patrons no longer sought out illegal alcohol in uptown clubs.

By 1935, many pivotal Harlem residents had moved on to seek work. They were replaced by the continuous flow of refugees from the South, many requiring public assistance.

The Harlem Race Riot of 1935 broke out following the arrest of a young shoplifter, resulting in three dead, hundreds injured and millions of dollars in property damage. The riot was a death knell for the Harlem Renaissance.

Why Was the Harlem Renaissance Important?

The Harlem Renaissance was a golden age for African American artists, writers and musicians. It gave these artists pride in and control over how the Black experience was represented in American culture and set the stage for the civil rights movement .

Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance . Laban Carrick Hill . The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930 . Steven Watson. The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary For The Era . Bruce Kellner, Editor.

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Eng 102 - The Argumentative Essay: Harlem Renaissance

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Harlem Renaissance

Issues and Controversies in American History  is an excellent source for information on the Harlem Renaissance . 

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The issue:  Should Harlem Renaissance writers and artists primarily seek to integrate with mainstream culture and advance the political goals of the civil rights establishment through their works? Or should Renaissance artists be free to express authentic and distinctly African American themes?

• Arguments for cultural integration:  In order to counter more than a century of racist stereotypes of blacks in American pop culture, Renaissance artists have an obligation to convey "respectable" images of African Americans to white society. In other words, art should be used as a political means, not for its own sake. Once black culture is accepted and integrated into mainstream culture, then political, social and economic equality will follow. Furthermore, the whole notion of "black art" is stereotypical in its own right; artists should express a wide array of themes and subject matter that aims to transcend racial identity.
• Arguments against cultural integration:  Countering racist portrayals in popular culture is crucial to achieving equality for African Americans, but not at the cost of sacrificing authentic and realistic forms of black artistry. A Renaissance artist should capture the unique voice of the black masses, not the whitewashed, "proper" portrayals that cater to the elite tastes of the black bourgeoisie and white society. The melting pot of cultural integration should be rejected in favor of the mosaic of cultural harmony, in which many cultures coexist apart from one another. Only when African Americans are accepted and respected for their own unique culture can genuine equality follow.

Harlem 1900-1940 . The website for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture contains an online exhibition on black life in Harlem during the era of the Harlem Renaissance. Includes timeline of events, images, text, bibliography, and resources for teachers.

Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia . A project Ferris State University, the Jim Crow Museum website houses an exhaustive collection of artifacts documenting the Jim Crow era.

Rhapsodies in Black . The Institute of International Visual Arts presents an online exhibition of text and images highlighting the history and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. 

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow . The website for the PBS series includes brief summary text and images exploring the Harlem Renaissance. Links to related topics and larger themes provided.  

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The Gale In Context: U.S. History database provides access to Academic Journals, Magazines, Primary Sources, Reference Books, and Biographies related to the Harlem Renaissance . 

The Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918- c. 1937) was an important period in the development of African American culture. During this era, a group of influential figures in the creative arts helped to turn the New York City neighborhood of Harlem into a major center of African American music, literature, politics, and culture. It was less a movement than an attempt by artists to support each other in a cultural environment during a period in American history when there was not broad support for African American creative expression.

Also called the “New Negro Movement,” the Harlem Renaissance was merely the most famous of several urban clusters of African American expression. Cities such as Chicago, Kansas City, Memphis, and Cleveland were also...

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• Magazines (39)
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MLA Citations are provided for all featured articles and associated sources.

"Harlem Renaissance."  Gale U.S. History Online Collection , Gale, 2020.  Gale In Context: U.S. History , https://link-gale-com.ezproxy.tmcc.edu/apps/doc/CSVSGR697740729/UHIC?u=tmcc_main&sid=UHIC&xid=5f9a33e3. Accessed 9 Apr. 2020.

The EBSCO ebook collection provides access to dozens of books dedicated to the Harlem Renaissance.

Use the Table of Contents to identify specific aspects of the Harlem Renaissance. 

Subjects:  SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / American / African American Studies; American literature--African American authors--History and criticism; African American arts--New York (State)--New York--20th century; African American arts--20th century; African Americans--Intellectual life--20th century;  Harlem Renaissance ; African Americans--New York (State)--New York--Intellectual life--20th century

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MLA Citations are provided:

Huggins, Nathan Irvin.  Harlem Renaissance . Vol. Updated ed, Oxford University Press, 2007.  EBSCOhost , search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=362479&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

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A History of the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms – from the roman à clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations – this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression. It aims to re-frame conventional ideas of the New Negro movement by presenting new readings of well-studied authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, alongside analysis of topics, authors, and artists that deserve fuller treatment. An authoritative collection on the major writers and issues of the period, A History of the Harlem Renaissance takes stock of nearly a hundred years of scholarship and considers what the future augurs for the study of 'the New Negro'.

Rachel Farebrother ,  University of Swansea Rachel Farebrother is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at Swansea University. She is the author of The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance (2009), which was awarded honourable mention in the 2010 British Association of American Studies book prize. Her essays have appeared in Journal of American Studies, MELUS, and Modernism/Modernity and various edited collections including Fionnghuala Sweeney and Kate Marsh's Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem, and the Avant-Garde (2013) and Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker's The Oxford Cultural and Critical History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North America (2012).

Miriam Thaggert ,  University of Iowa Miriam Thaggert is Associate Professor of English, Department of English, SUNY-Buffalo. She is the author of Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (2010). Her essays have appeared in African American Review, American Quarterly, American Literary History, Feminist Modernist Studies, and Meridians. Her second book is a social and literary history of African American women and the railroad in American culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Contributors:

Rachel Farebrother, Miriam Thaggert, Daniel G. Williams, Clare Corbould, Kathleen Pfeiffer, Caroline Goeser, Sonya Posmentier, Sinéad Moynihan, Fionnghuala Sweeney, Maureen Honey, Katharine Capshaw, James Smethurst, Jak Peake, Noelle Morrissette, Jonathan Munby, Mariel Rodney, Hannah Durkin, Andrew Warnes, Wendy Martin, Shane Vogel, Deborah E. McDowell

Farebrother, Rachel, and Miriam Thaggert, eds. A History of the Harlem Renaissance . Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021. https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/history-harlem-renaissance?format=HB .

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A century ago, a dinner party in New York set in motion one of the most influential cultural movements of the 20th century.

It was an interracial soirée that included intellectual and artistic luminaries.

It was barely covered at the time. But we explored archival material and have reconstructed much of it.

In the years after the dinner party, Black writers published more than 40 volumes of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

But most importantly, it organized a creative movement that reverberates to this day.

If the Harlem Renaissance had a birthplace, this party was it.

Supported by

The Dinner Party That Started the Harlem Renaissance

By Veronica Chambers and Michelle May-Curry

On March 21, 1924, Jessie Fauset sat inside the Civic Club in downtown Manhattan, wondering how the party for her debut novel had been commandeered.

The celebration around her was originally intended to honor that book, “There Is Confusion.” But Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke thought the dinner could serve a larger purpose. What if the two Black academic titans invited the best and brightest of the Harlem creative and political scene? What if, over a spread of fine food and drink, they brought together African American talent and white purveyors of culture? If they could marry the talent all around them with the opportunity that was so elusive, what would it mean to Black culture, both present and future?

What the resulting dinner led to, nurtured over the years in the pristine sitting rooms of brownstones and the buzzing corner booths of jazz clubs, was the Harlem Renaissance: a flowering of intellectual and artistic activity that would give the neighborhood and its residents global renown.

While there are plenty of galas and gatherings today, the goal of the 1924 dinner was far broader: It was intended to bring together that talent and those opportunities.

“Benefits are celebrations. They’re not operational meetings,” said Lisa Lucas, the senior vice president and publisher at Pantheon and Schocken Books who was the first woman and African American to head the National Book Foundation. “It’s unusual to really have an honest space for people to meet and hammer out what’s working and what’s not.”

Johnson and Locke chose the Civic Club because, as the historian David Levering Lewis would later write, “It was the only upper crust New York club without a color bar where Afro-American intellectuals and distinguished white liberals foregathered, more often than not around a table haloed by Benson and Hedges cigarette smoke exhaled by Du Bois” — W.E.B. Du Bois, arguably the center of the coalescing Harlem galaxy.

Among the party organizers: Locke was a dapper, Harvard-educated professor who was the first Black Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford; a column in the Black political and literary magazine The Messenger called him “the high priest of intellectual snobbocracy.” Johnson was a sociologist and the founding editor of Opportunity magazine, the pre-eminent Black magazine of the time.

“The thing has gone over big,” Johnson wrote to Locke in the days leading up to the dinner. “Nothing can be allowed to go wrong now.”

The evening is impossible to capture in full because so little was written about it in the mainstream news media. But we’ve reconstructed as much as we can, relying on rarely seen letters and other archival material to piece together the evening that set the Renaissance in motion.

A Call for Cultural Revolution

In the Civic Club, among over 100 attendees, Locke and Johnson rubbed shoulders with a cadre of white publishers. Elsewhere, leaders from the National Urban League, the N.A.A.C.P. and the Y.M.C.A. compared notes. Every relationship was a matrix of creative possibility and promise.

The evening’s guest list had been drawn up by, among others, Regina Andrews (then Anderson), one of a number of women essential to the movement who went unrecognized for decades. As one of the few Black librarians in the city, she found herself assigned to the branch in Harlem. (That library branch would become the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, named for Arturo Schomburg.)

Her nearby apartment, which she would eventually share with two roommates, both of whom worked at Opportunity magazine, became known as “Dream Haven.” The apartment was where friends and neighbors workshopped poems, got book recommendations and couch-surfed.

The most recognizable figure at the dinner, to guests both Black and white, was Du Bois, the first African American to earn a doctorate at Harvard University and one of the most important public intellectuals of the 20th century. His 1903 book “The Souls of Black Folk” was an instant classic, and he was both a pre-eminent scholar and activist. He arrived at the dinner freshly returned from Liberia, where he traveled as a representative of President Calvin Coolidge, as well as Senegal and Sierra Leone.

When Fauset, the 41-year-old literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the N.A.A.C.P., stood up to thank her friends who had supported the publishing of her debut novel, she praised Du Bois, calling him her “best friend and severest critic.”

The evening’s programming also highlighted a new, young Black guard. Gwendolyn Bennett, 21, read “To Usward,” a poem dedicated to Fauset and to every Black youth “who have a song to sing, a story to tell or a vision for the sons of earth.” Countee Cullen, an N.Y.U. undergraduate who had already been published, also read a recent work.

The more established among the group used their remarks to call for a generational shift.

Carl Van Doren, a white Columbia University professor and literary critic, spoke earnestly about how essential it was for the publishing world, and the nation at large, to hear from young Black writers.

“What American literature decidedly needs at this moment is color, gusto, the free expression of gay or desperate moods,” he said. “If the Negroes are not in a position to contribute these items, I do not know what Americans are.”

Van Doren was referencing the growing interest in Black American voices during the Roaring Twenties, in part because the soundtrack of the time was blues and jazz. “Shuffle Along,” among the earliest, major all-Black Broadway musicals, and one of its breakout songs, “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” were both hits. Louis Armstrong’s first recorded solo appeared in 1923, the same year Duke Ellington moved to Harlem. The attendees of the dinner — Black and white — were plotting how to capture some of the magic of the Jazz Age in books, magazines, plays and paintings.

Though the event itself may have glittered with promise, the writers at the Civic dinner were very aware that beyond the doors of the club, Jim Crow was still rampant — including uptown in Harlem. By 1920, largely because of the Great Migration, Black people made up over 30 percent of Central Harlem (compared with just under 1.5 percent of the entire city). Yet even as lynching numbers began to drop, in October 1925, a young Black man from Harlem was beaten by a mob who believed he had attacked a white girl.

“We can’t lose sight of the fact that the weight of these artists’ contributions is not only due to their mastery of form,” Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, said in a recent interview, “but also the juxtaposition of the beauty they created against the ugliness and indignities they had to endure at that time.”

A Complicated Legacy

It would take time for the seeds of the Civic Club event to fully take root. Locke, Du Bois and Johnson spent the next year writing letters, raising money and convincing young artists like the painter Aaron Douglas to come to Harlem. Zora Neale Hurston arrived in Harlem in 1925 as the first African American student at Barnard College. She spent her first few nights in town sleeping on the couch at Dream Haven.

Du Bois remained the elder statesman of the emerging movement. When Regina Anderson and her Dream Haven roommates, Ethel Nance (then Ray) and Louella Ray Tucker, would find themselves short on money at the end of the month, DuBois would take them out for a meal.

For Cullen, the N.Y.U. student, Du Bois’s influence was both professional and personal. Four years later, Du Bois would bless the union of his rebellious only surviving child, Yolande, and Cullen. Just weeks before the wedding, Cullen became one of the first Black writers to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, a sum so great that it would allow him to live in Europe for a year. He wrote to his soon to be father-in-law that he was sure that the award was “due to no small degree to your endorsement of my application.”

The Black news media covered every detail of the wedding; 1,200 people were invited, 3,000 showed up. Shortly after, Cullen took off on a yearlong trip to Europe — with his best man. Two years later, he admitted to his wife that he was attracted to men and the couple divorced.

Fauset, for her part, never got over having her event appropriated. In 1933, she wrote Locke a scathing letter, reminding him that in his “consummate cleverness,” he had managed, on that evening in 1924, to “keep speech and comment away from the person for whom the occasion was meant.”

A little over a year after the Civic Club dinner, Carl Van Vechten, a white writer and photographer, said in a letter to the white journalist and critic H.L. Mencken that “Jazz, the blues, Negro spirituals, all stimulate me enormously at the moment. Doubtless I shall discard them too in time.” During the economic trials of the Great Depression, support for Black artists plummeted and many of the most talented members of the Renaissance felt they had been discarded, just as Van Vechten had flippantly predicted.

“We always have the talent, but then the opportunity collapsed,” Farah Griffin, a professor of English and comparative literature and African American studies at Columbia University, said in a recent interview. “And I think the Black Arts movement in the ’60s and ’70s tried to learn from what happened when Black artists were dependent upon white philanthropy and white publishing institutions.”

Still, the audacious bet by Locke, Johnson, Du Bois, Anderson and many others in the room that first night more than paid off. In the decade after the dinner, the writers who were associated with the Renaissance published more than 40 volumes of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. That body of work transformed a community as well as the landscape of American literature.

And the Harlem Renaissance is still both inspiration and object lesson for groups of Black writers. Over the past three decades, members of the Cave Canem artists’ collective, for example, have won, as of November 2023, six Pulitzer Prizes, three MacArthur “genius” fellowships and 24 Guggenheim fellowships.

“The Harlem Renaissance is both mythology and history,” said Lucas, the publisher. “It really happened. Those works were really created. It’s a beautiful thing that all American boys and girls get to grow up and read about this magical moment when these people that America didn’t want to be free took their instruments and their paint brushes and their pens, their feet and their fingers, and they got free.”

That freedom took more time and strategy than the mythology sometimes suggests. On May 1, 1925, Johnson hosted the first Opportunity Literary Awards dinner at the Fifth Avenue Restaurant, off 24th Street. This time, more than 300 guests gathered, including figures that would come to define the Renaissance: the singer and actor Paul Robeson; Van Vechten; Hurston; and Langston Hughes, who signed his first book contract just four weeks later with the publisher Alfred Knopf.

The After-Party

If the Civic Club dinner was the seed of the movement, the Opportunity dinner was where its growth gained momentum. Hughes, then in his early 20s, had returned from Paris and won first prize for what would be considered his signature poem, “The Weary Blues.” Hurston had come to Harlem and won second prize for her play “Color Struck.”

Finally, the Renaissance had the attention of the mainstream news media. The New York Herald Tribune wrote in May 1925 that the Opportunity dinner was “A novel sight, that dinner — white critics, whom ‘everybody’ knows, Negro writers, whom ‘nobody’ knew — meeting on common ground.”

It was, as The Herald Tribune observed, a moment when “the American Negro is finding his artistic voice and that we are on the edge, if not already in the midst of, what might not be improperly called a Negro Renaissance.”

Veronica Chambers is the editor of Projects and Collaborations at The Times. Michelle May-Curry, Ph.D., is a Washington-based curator and writer and lecturer of engaged and public humanities at Georgetown University.

Susan C. Beachy and Sejla Rizvic contributed reporting.

Opening images credits: Barbecue painting by Archibald J. Motley Jr.: Chicago History Museum/Estate of Archibald John Motley Jr. via Bridgeman Images. Arturo Schomburg, Gwendolyn Bennett, Regina Anderson, the office of The Crisis magazine: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. Eugene O’Neill: General Photographic Agency/Getty Images. James Weldon Johnson: FPG/Getty Images. Eva D. Bowles: photographer unknown. W.E.B. Du Bois: Underwood Archives/Getty Images. Mary White Ovington, Jessie Fauset: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images. Carl Van Doren: Doris Ulman. Charles S. Johnson: U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Countee Cullen: Carl Van Vechten via Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Van Vechten Trust. “Quicksand” by Nella Larsen, “The New Negro” by Alain LeRoy Locke, “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neal Hurston: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. “Black No More” by George S. Schuyler, Survey Graphic “Harlem Mecca of the New Negro,” “Home to Harlem” by Claude McKay, “There is Confusion” by Jessie Fauset, Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to Younger Negro Artists, “The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man” by James Weldon Johnson: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library/James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection. “Color” by Countee Cullen: Harper and Brothers. “Cane” by Jean Toomer: Boni & Liveright. Duke Ellington Orchestra: “Black and Tan” film by Dudley Murphy via CriticalPast. Dancers performing at the Cotton Club circa 1930: via CriticalPast.

Because of an editing error, a picture caption misstated how long the writer Countee Cullen spent in Europe after his wedding. It was a year, not six months.

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A New Light on the Harlem Renaissance

A century after it burst on the scene in new york city, the first african american modernist movement continues to have an impact in the american cultural imagination..

The Dinner Party:  When Charles Johnson and Alain Locke thought that a celebration for Jessie Fauset’s book “There Is Confusion” could serve a larger purpose, the Harlem Renaissance was born .

A Period of Survival:  During the Harlem Renaissance, some Black people hosted rent parties , celebrations with an undercurrent of desperation in the face of racism and discrimination.

An Ambitious Show:  A new MoMA exhibition, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” aims to shift our view  of the time when Harlem flourished as a creative capital. It gets it right, our critic writes .

An Enduring Legacy: We asked six artists to share their thoughts on the contributions  that the Harlem Renaissance artists made to history

Crafting a New Life: At the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance, Augusta Savage fought racism to earn acclaim as a sculptor. The path she forged is also her legacy .

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87 Harlem Renaissance Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best harlem renaissance topic ideas & essay examples, ⭐ good research topics about harlem renaissance, 👍 simple & easy harlem renaissance essay titles, ❓ harlem renaissance research questions.

• Harlem Renaissance: “Dream Boogie” Poem by Langston Hughes Therefore, the selected work represents the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance and can be used for improving the understanding of the movement.
• The Harlem Renaissance and American Culture The Harlem Renaissance was born as a result of the significant events which occurred in the lives of Afro-Americans at the beginning of the 20th century. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Harlem Renaissance: Historical Roots and Climate Harlem Renaissance is, undoubtedly, a phenomenon unmatched in the strength of its impact both on the contemporary culture of the 1920s and 1930s, but also on the very identity of all African-Americans to this day.
• Harlem Renaissance and African American Culture The Harlem Reissuance grew after the abolition of slavery and later culminated into a greater force with the consequences brought about by WWI and the change in the cultural and social structure in the American […]
• Harlem Renaissance Influence on Afro-American Culture The Harlem Renaissance is widely known as a period in the history of the United States that greatly influenced the general development of American society and in particular the development of Afro-American culture.
• Harlem Renaissance Movement Analysis It was around this time that they began to advocate racial equality with the Americans and with the birth of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 their struggle for the […]
• Harlem Renaissance and Its Role for Afro-Americans The movement also helped to pave the way for the further struggle of the African-American population for their rights because now they emerged as educated and talented people.
• The Harlem Renaissance and the Struggle for a Black Identity The failure of Reconstruction and the implementation of the racial segregation threw the Afro-Americans into a difficult dilemma. Booker Washington was a prominent figure of the Post-Reconstruction Era and the leader of the Afro-American community.
• Harlem Renaissance: African American Art The use of OBSCURA cameras was one of the strategies that advanced the works of art that several artists of the time executed.
• Harlem Renaissance’ History: Issues of Negro Writers The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the ‘New Negro Movement,’ refers to the blossoming of African American intellectual and cultural life in the decade of the 1920s.
• Harlem Renaissance and Astonishing Literary Creativity Nevertheless, one of the most vital changes that laced the Harem Renaissance was the culture of music as explored in the remaining section of the paper.
• Harlem Renaissance Poets Overview The poet describes how the musician sways to the rhythm of the blues and the emotional uplifting he gets out of the experience.
• Literary Works of Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance was a term used collectively by social thinkers to represent the efforts by African-Americans to transcend the white-favored government systems in the new states, especially New York, from the southern states where […]
• Angelina Grimke’s Contribution to the Harlem Renaissance Grimke’s play was one of the first to be written by black authors highlighting the plight of blacks in the US.
• Harlem Renaissance: Historical and Social Background It was a period of social integration and the development of literary and artistic skills by the African Americans. The Harlem Renaissance was a period of artistic explosion of the African Americans and an opportunity […]
• Harlem Renaissance: The Cultural Movement In 1931, she collaborated with Langston Hughes in the production of the play “Mule Bone,” which was never published because of the tension between the two writers, and in 1934, she authored her first novel, […]
• Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance Within a short period, Harlem was transformed in to one of the trendiest neighborhoods in the whole of New York. Although Langston’s poems, spoke of the experiences of black Americans in light of a white […]
• Creative Movement, Harlem Renaissance, Helped Black People Express Themselves
• Harlem Renaissance Poets: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen
• The Harlem Renaissance: Creation of a New Nation
• Self Identity During the Harlem Renaissance
• Description, Analysis, Interpretation, and Judgment of the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance and Zora Neale Hurston
• The Harlem Renaissance and the Golden Age for African
• Coleman Hawkins’ Reign During the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance: The Center of the Urban Black Life
• Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance Summary
• Exploring African American Culture: The Harlem Renaissance
• James Langston Hughes and the Influence of the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance Art and the Birth of Black Identity
• The Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement
• Harlem Renaissance and White Literary Movements
• The Modernist Movement Harlem Renaissance Emerged Early 20th Century Both
• Surrealism and Harlem Renaissance Two Historical Art Periods
• The Harlem Renaissance and Its Role in American Literature
• The Poets and Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
• Colorism Within the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance Promotes Creative Development Among African-Americans
• African Drumming and Dance, Spirituals, Minstrel Shows and Harlem Renaissance
• The Harlem Renaissance and the Literature of Black America
• Harlem Renaissance and the Example of Duke Ellington, a Jazz Musician
• Black Music During the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance and the Influence of the Irish Renaissance
• The Harlem Renaissance Changed America Through Literature
• Slave Culture Into the Harlem Renaissance: Finding a Home in Modernism
• Christianity Through Harlem Renaissance Literature
• Langston Hughes, Prolific Writer of Black Pride During the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance and the Surrealism Historical Periods
• The Harlem Renaissance Popularized American Vernacular Dance
• The Past and Present Influence of the Harlem Renaissance
• Modern Day Racial Passing of the Harlem Renaissance
• Hurston and Her Novel’s Critics: Racism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Disputed Merits of the Eyes Were Watching God
• Beauty, Strength, and Intelligence of African Americans in the Harlem Renaissance
• Black Art Movement and the Harlem Renaissance
• The People, Art, and Literary Movement of the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance Period Transformed African-American Identity and History in the US
• African American Paintings During the Harlem Renaissance
• What Are Key Aspects of the Harlem Renaissance?
• How Did the Great Migration Impact the Harlem Renaissance?
• Did the Harlem Renaissance Make Important Contributions to the African American Experience?
• What Was the Overall Impact of the Harlem Renaissance?
• How Did Harlem Renaissance Lead to Many Social Changes?
• Was the Harlem Renaissance a Failure or Not?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Shape Literature?
• Did the Harlem Renaissance Represent Everyone or Was It an Elitist Movement?
• How Was the Harlem Renaissance Reflected in Toni Morrison’s Jazz?
• Who Did the Harlem Renaissance Movement Appeal to and How?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Writer Zora Neale Hurston Influence America?
• What Historical, Social, and Cultural Forces Shaped the Harlem Renaissance?
• How Did the Irish Renaissance Influence the Harlem Renaissance?
• Why Was Harlem the Center of the Renaissance of African American Arts in the 1920s and 1930s?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Affect Future African American Artists in America?
• Who Do You See as the Most Major Player in the Harlem Renaissance, and Why?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Impact American Society During the 1920S and Beyond?
• What Similarities and Differences of Theme, Imagery, Tone and Style Are Demonstrated in the Works of Harlem Renaissance Authors?
• How Did the Creative Expression of African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s Lead to a New Black Cultural Identity?
• What Does the Harlem Renaissance Reveal About U.S. History?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Help Americans to Understand the History and Culture of African Americans?
• What Were the Key Concerns of the Harlem Renaissance?
• Why Did the Harlem Renaissance End?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Influence Art Today?
• Who Was the Most Important Contributor to the Harlem Renaissance and Why?
• Why Is the Harlem Renaissance Important to America?
• How Did Harlem Become Black?
• Why Did Harlem Become the Capital of Black America?
• How Did Jazz Influence the Harlem Renaissance?
• Where Did the Harlem Renaissance Get Its Name?
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Black music in the Harlem Renaissance : a collection of essays

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Uploaded by station05.cebu on December 20, 2018

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Alumni Spotlight: Adam McKible Publishes Book

Adam McKible, who earned his PhD in English from UNC in 1998, published a new book in February: Behind the Lines: How Plagiarism Popularized the Harlem Renaissance . 

The book explores how an act of plagiarism in 1925 introduced the Harlem Renaissance to millions of Americans. In March 1925, Alain Locke published a special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic called “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.” Soon after, Locke organized the New Negro anthology, which scholars agree ushered in the Harlem Renaissance. McKible’s book focuses on how Chester T. Crowell plagiarized much of Locke’s material in another essay:

“But the contents of ‘Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro’ attracted their largest contemporary audience—of at least 2,414,308 readers—not through Locke’s initial work, but through the sort of plagiarism that would earn any student a painful visit to a college administrator. On August 8, 1925, just months after the appearance of the Harlem issue of the Survey Graphic , the Saturday Evening Post published an essay by Chester T. Crowell entitled ‘The World’s Largest Negro City.’ Crowell’s article is notable for at least two reasons: first, because he offers one of the very few representations of African Americans in the Saturday Evening Post that does not rely entirely on the anti-Black racist caricatures that were the Post ’s typical fare and, second, because Crowell flagrantly stole much of his material from Locke’s issue—and he got away with it.”

“Nevertheless, Crowell’s intellectual thievery did introduce millions of Post readers to several core ideas in Locke’s Harlem issue, including the rise of Black cosmopolitanism and the concomitant development of a new political consciousness. And, stealing from Walter White’s Survey Graphic essay, ‘Color Lines,’ Crowell also touched on racial passing, a phenomenon that was facilitated by the urban anonymity afforded to some African Americans after they fled the South during the Great Migration. Rather than raise an alarm, however, Crowell suggested that the vibrancy of Harlem and a concomitant rise in racial pride makes passing for white less appealing for most African Americans—but this element of his argument may have largely fallen on deaf ears. The editorial board at the Newport News Daily Press , for example, saw only peril in a rising Harlem: ‘Every negro who thus ‘passes’ from his own race into the white race is liable to mix negro blood with Anglo-Saxon blood, and that is the danger to which the Anglo-Saxon clubs are calling attention and seeking to guard against. The real menace is in the ‘passing’ to which Mr. Crowell refers.’ Such antipathy toward interracial relations would have been familiar to regular Post readers, who not only consumed anti-Black fiction but were also fed a steady diet of anti-immigrant and white supremacist ideology in the magazine’s pages.” 

In Behind the Lines, McKible writes about examples of this plagiarism and ultimately shows how “Locke’s work—through Crowell’s plagiarism—broke through the white noise of Lorimer’s [the white supremacist editor of the Saturday Evening Post ] racist editorial practice and thus provided millions of readers with a more objective view of rising Black modernity in Jim Crow America.”

Read more about the book here .