The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural movement of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics, and scholarship centered in Harlem, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by philosopher Alain Locke, who is regarded as the "dean" of the Harlem Renaissance. The movement also included new African-American cultural expression across other urban areas in the Northeastern United States and the Midwestern United States. It was prompted by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South."NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom". , Library of Congress. Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north, and had also seen significant Black immigration from British, French and other colonies in the Caribbean.
Though the movement was geographically tied to Harlem, few of the associated visual artists lived in the area, while those who did (such as Aaron Douglas) had migrated elsewhere by the end of World War II. Many Francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were influenced by the movement. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson described the Harlem Renaissance, took place between approximately 1924—when Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance—and 1929, the year of the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. The Harlem Renaissance is considered to have been a creative crucible for African-American art-making and its institutionalisation within white-dominated museums and cultural institutions."Project MUSE – Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Harlem Renaissance: The Case of Countee Cullen." Project MUSE – Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Harlem Renaissance: The Case of Countee Cullen. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 April 2015.
Background
The origins of the Harlem Renaissance can be dated back to 1865, when the American Civil War ended. Until the end of the war, the majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived in the South. During the Reconstruction era, emancipated African Americans began to strive for civic participation, political equality, and economic and cultural self-determination. Once the war ended, many African American slaves were freed and scattered across the US, ending up mainly in Northern states where they were allowed to work.
Most of the future leading lights of what was to become known as the Harlem Renaissance movement arose from a generation that had memories of the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Sometimes their parents, grandparents—or they themselves—had been slaves. Their ancestors had sometimes benefited by paternal investment in cultural capital, including better-than-average education.
Many in the Harlem Renaissance were part of the early 20th-century Great Migration out of the South into the African-American neighborhoods of the Northeast and Midwest. African Americans sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the South. Others were people of African descent from racially stratified communities in the Caribbean who came to the United States hoping for a better life. Uniting most of them was their convergence in Harlem.
Development
During the early 20th century, Harlem was a destination for migrants from around the country, attracting both people from the South seeking work and an educated class who made the area a center of culture, as well as a growing "Negro" middle class. These migrants were seeking a fresh start in an area offering greater economic and social opportunities. The district had originally been developed in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for the white middle and upper middle classes; its affluent beginnings led to the development of stately houses, grand avenues, and world-class amenities such as the Polo Grounds and the Harlem Opera House. During the enormous influx of European immigrants in the late 19th century, the once exclusive district was abandoned by the white middle class, who moved farther north.
With African Americans running up North, black communities began to grow as they shared experiences with one another, becoming united as one group. "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." . African Americans used this movement as inspiration to boost their careers, and it was a never-ending cycle of succession for these Black communities. Harlem became an African-American neighborhood in the early 1900s. In 1910, a large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various African-American realtors and a church group. Many more African Americans arrived during the First World War. Due to the war, the migration of laborers from Europe virtually ceased, while the war effort resulted in a massive demand for unskilled industrial labor. The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and New York.
Despite the increasing popularity of Negro culture, virulent white racism, often by more recent ethnic immigrants, continued to affect African-American communities, even in the North. After the end of World War I, many African-American soldiers—who fought in segregated units such as the Harlem Hellfighters—came home to a nation whose citizens often did not respect their accomplishments. Race riots and other civil uprisings occurred throughout the United States during the Red Summer of 1919, reflecting economic competition over jobs and housing in many cities, as well as tensions over social territories.
Mainstream recognition of Harlem culture Through the course of this renaissance, talents would be shared, and we would see a blow-up in the industry of African American artists, sculptors, musical artists, etc. The first stage of the Harlem Renaissance started in the late 1910s. In 1917, the premiere of Granny Maumee, The Rider of Dreams, and Simon the Cyrenian: Plays for a Negro Theater took place. These plays, written by white playwright Ridgely Torrence, featured African-American actors conveying complex human emotions and yearnings. They rejected the stereotypes of the blackface and minstrel show traditions. In 1917, James Weldon Johnson called the premieres of these plays "the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American Theater".McKay, Nellie Y., and Henry Louis Gates (eds), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, New York: Norton, 1997, p. 931.
Another landmark came in 1919, when the communist poet Claude McKay published his militant sonnet "If We Must Die", which introduced a dramatically political dimension to the themes of African cultural inheritance and modern urban experience featured in his 1917 poems "Invocation" and "Harlem Dancer". Published under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, these were his first appearance in print in the United States after immigrating from Jamaica. Although "If We Must Die" did not explicitly refer to race, African-American readers heard its note of defiance in the face of racism and the nationwide race riots and lynchings then taking place. By the end of the First World War, the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and the poetry of Claude McKay were describing the reality of contemporary African-American life in America.
The Harlem Renaissance grew out of the changes that had taken place in the African-American community since the abolition of slavery, as the expansion of communities in the North. These accelerated as a consequence of World War I and the great social and cultural changes in the early 20th-century United States. Industrialization attracted people from rural areas to cities and gave rise to a new mass culture. Contributing factors leading to the Harlem Renaissance were the Great Migration of African Americans to Northern cities, which concentrated ambitious people in places where they could encourage each other, and the First World War, which had created new industrial work opportunities for tens of thousands of people. Factors leading to the decline of this era include the Great Depression.
The arts in the Harlem Renaissance Literature
In 1917, Hubert Harrison, "The Father of Harlem Radicalism", founded the Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper, respectively, of the "New Negro Movement". Harrison's organization and newspaper were political but also emphasized the arts (his newspaper had "Poetry for the People" and book review sections). In 1927, in the Pittsburgh Courier, Harrison challenged the notion of the Renaissance. He argued that the "Negro Literary Renaissance" notion overlooked "the stream of literary and artistic products which had flowed uninterruptedly from Negro writers from 1850 to the present," and said the so-called "Renaissance" was largely a white invention. Alternatively, a writer like the Chicago-based author, Fenton Johnson, who began publishing in the early 1900s, is called a "forerunner" of the Harlem Renaissance, "one of the first negro revolutionary poets".
Nevertheless, with the Harlem Renaissance came a sense of acceptance for African-American writers; as Langston Hughes put it, with Harlem came the courage "to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame". Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro was considered the cornerstone of this cultural revolution. The anthology featured several African-American writers and poets, from the well-known, such as Zora Neale Hurston and communists Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, to the lesser known, like the poet Anne Spencer.
Many poets of the Harlem Renaissance were inspired to tie threads of African-American culture into their poems; as a result, jazz poetry was heavily developed during this time. "The Weary Blues" was a notable jazz poem written by Langston Hughes. Through their works of literature, black authors were able to give a voice to the African-American identity, and strived for a community of support and acceptance.
Richard Bruce Nugent (1906–1987), who wrote "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade", made an important contribution, especially in relation to experimental form and LGBT themes in the period.
Music
A new way of playing the piano called the Harlem Stride style was created during the Harlem Renaissance helping to blur the lines between the poor African Americans and socially elite African Americans. The traditional jazz band was composed primarily of brass instruments and was considered a symbol of the South, but the piano was considered an instrument of the wealthy. With this instrumental modification to the existing genre, the wealthy African Americans now had more access to jazz music. Its popularity soon spread throughout the country and was consequently at an all-time high.