Jansons History of Art Portable Edition Book 3 the Renaissance Through the Rococo Rent

On Feb 28, 2014, Humanities Texas held a one-day instructor professional evolution workshop in Austin focusing on the history and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Professor Cary D. Wintz, Distinguished Professor of History at Texas Southern University, opened the workshop with the post-obit lecture titled "The Harlem Renaissance: What Was Information technology, and Why Does Information technology Affair?" In his remarks, Wintz addresses the origins and nature of the motion—a task, he says, that is far more than complex than it may seem.

Wintz is a specialist in the Harlem Renaissance and in African American political thought. Wintz is an writer or editor of numerous books including Harlem Speaks; Blackness Culture and the Harlem Renaissance; African American Political Thought, 1890–1930; African Americans and the Presidency: The Route to the White House; and The Harlem Renaissance in the W. He served as an editor of the Oxford University Printing five-volume Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present, and the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Routledge). He has also written extensively on Texas history and is an author of ane of the standard Texas history texts, Texas: The Lone Star State. He is a native Houstonian and a graduate of Rice University and Kansas State Academy.

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What was the Harlem Renaissance and when did it begin?

This seemingly simple question reveals the complexities of the movement we know varyingly every bit the New Negro Renaissance, the New Negro Movement, the Negro Renaissance, the Jazz Age, or the Harlem Renaissance. To respond the question it is necessary to place the motion within time and space, and then to define its nature. This job is much more complex than it might seem.

Traditionally the Harlem Renaissance was viewed primarily as a literary motion centered in Harlem and growing out of the black migration and the emergence of Harlem as the premier black metropolis in the U.s.. Music and theater were mentioned briefly, more as background and local color, every bit providing inspiration for poetry and local colour for fiction. However, there was no analysis of the developments in these fields. As well, art was discussed mostly in terms of Aaron Douglas and his association with Langston Hughes and other immature writers who produced Fire!! in 1926, but there was picayune or no assay of the work of African American artists. And there was even less discussion or assay of the work of women in the fields of fine art, music, and theater.

Fortunately, this narrow view has changed. The Harlem Renaissance is increasingly viewed through a broader lens that recognizes it every bit a national movement with connections to international developments in art and civilisation that places increasing emphasis on the non-literary aspects of the movement.

Fourth dimension

Beginning, to know when the Harlem Renaissance began, we must determine its origins. Understanding the origins depends on how nosotros perceive the nature of the Renaissance. For those who view the Renaissance as primarily a literary motion, the Civic Social club Dinner of March 21, 1924, signaled its emergence. This event did not occur in Harlem, only was held almost 1 hundred blocks south in Manhattan at the Civic Club on 12th Street off 5th Artery. Charles Southward. Johnson, the young editor of Opportunity, the National Urban League'due south monthly magazine, conceived the event to honor writer Jessie Fauset on the occasion of the publication of her novel, There Is Defoliation. Johnson planned a small dinner party with most twenty guests—a mix of white publishers, editors, and literary critics, black intellectuals, and young blackness writers. But, when he asked Alain Locke to preside over the event, Locke agreed merely if the dinner honored African American writers in general rather than one novelist.

So the simple celebratory dinner morphed into a transformative effect with over ane hundred attendees. African Americans were represented by W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others of the black intelligentsia, along with Fauset and a representative grouping of poets and authors. White guests predominately were publishers and critics; Carl Van Doren, editor of Century magazine, spoke for this grouping calling upon the young writers in the audience to make their contribution to the "new literary age" emerging in America.^one

The Civic Club dinner significantly accelerated the literary phase of the Harlem Renaissance. Frederick Allen, editor of Harper'southward, approached Countee Cullen, securing his poems for his mag as presently as the poet finished reading them. As the dinner concluded Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic, hung around talking to Cullen, Fauset, and several other young writers, then offered Charles S. Johnson a unique opportunity: an entire result of Survey Graphic devoted to the Harlem literary movement. Under the editorship of Alain Locke the "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro" number of Survey Graphic hit the newsstands March 1, 1925.²  It was an overnight sensation. Afterward that year Locke published a book-length version of the "Harlem" edition, expanded and re-titled The New Negro: An Interpretation.³  In the anthology Locke laid down his vision of the aesthetic and the parameters for the emerging Harlem Renaissance; he also included a collection of poetry, fiction, graphic arts, and critical essays on art, literature, and music.

For those who viewed the Harlem Renaissance in terms of musical theater and entertainment, the nativity occurred three years earlier when Shuffle Along opened at the 63rd Street Musical Hall. Shuffle Along was a musical play written by a pair of veteran Vaudeville acts—comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, and composers/singers Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Well-nigh of its cast featured unknowns, just some, like Josephine Bakery and Paul Robeson, who had only pocket-sized roles in the production, were on their way to international fame. Eubie Blake recalled the significance of the production, when he pointed out that he and Sissle and Lyles and Miller achieved something that the other not bad African American performers—Bob Cole and J. Rosamund Johnson, Bert Williams and George Walker—had tried, only failed to reach. "We did it, that's the story," he exclaimed, "We put Negroes back on Broadway!"^four

Poet Langston Hughes also saw Shuffle Along as a seminal event in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. Information technology introduced him to the creative globe of New York, and it helped to redefine and energize music and nightlife in Harlem. In the process, it introduced white New Yorkers to black music, theater, and entertainment and helped generated the white fascination with Harlem and the African American arts that was so much a part of the Harlem Renaissance. For the immature Hughes, just arrived in the urban center, the long-range impact of Shuffle Along was not on his mind. In 1921, it was all about the bear witness, and, equally he wrote in his autobiography, information technology was "a honey of a show:"

Swift, brilliant, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes. Also, expect who were in it: The at present famous choir manager, Hall Johnson, and the composer, William Grant Withal, were a part of the orchestra. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle wrote the music and played and acted in the prove. Miller and Lyles were the comics. Florence Mills skyrocketed to fame in the 2d act. Trixie Smith sang "He May Be Your Human But He Comes to See Me Sometimes." And Caterina Jarboro, at present a European prima donna, and the internationally historic Josephine Baker were just in the chorus. Everybody was in the audience—including me. People came to run into it innumerable times. Information technology was always packed.⁵

Shuffle Forth too brought jazz to Broadway. It combined jazz music with very creatively choreographed jazz dance to transform musical theater into something new, exciting, and daring. And the show was a critical and fiscal success. It ran 474 performances on Broadway and spawned three touring companies. It was a hitting show written, performed, and produced by blacks, and it generated a need for more. Within three years, nine other African American shows appeared on Broadway, and white writers and composers rushed to produce their versions of black musical comedies.

Music was also a prominent characteristic of African American culture during the Harlem Renaissance. The term "Jazz Age" was used by many who saw African American music, especially the dejection and jazz, as the defining features of the Renaissance. Notwithstanding, both jazz and the blues were imports to Harlem. They emerged out of the African American experience effectually the plough of the century in southern towns and cities, similar New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis. From these origins these musical forms spread across the land, north to Chicago before arriving in New York a few years before Globe War I.

Blues and blackness blues performers such every bit musician West. C. Handy and singer Ma Rainey were popular on the Vaudeville circuit in the tardily nineteenth century. The publication of W. C. Handy's "Memphis Blues" in 1912 and the showtime recordings a few years later brought this genre into the mainstream of American pop culture. Jazz reportedly originated among the musicians who played in the bars and brothels of the infamous Storyville commune of New Orleans. Jelly Curlicue Morton claimed to have invented jazz there in 1902, simply information technology is hundred-to-one that whatever one person holds that honor.

According to James Weldon Johnson, jazz reached New York in 1905 at Proctor's Twenty-Third Street Theater. Johnson described the band in that location as "a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making ascendant use of banjos, mandolins, guitars, saxophones, and drums in combination, and [it] was chosen the Memphis Students—a very expert name, overlooking the fact that the performers were not students and were non from Memphis. In that location was too a violin, a couple of contumely instruments, and a double-bass."  7 years later, composer and band leader James Reese Europe, 1 of the "Memphis Students," took his Clef Club Orchestra to Carnegie Hall. During Globe State of war I, while serving as an officer for a automobile-gun company in the famed 369th U.S. Infantry Division, James Europe, beau officeholder Noble Sissel, and the regimental band introduced the sounds of ragtime, jazz, and the dejection to European audiences.

Following the war, black music, peculiarly the blues and jazz, became increasingly pop with both black and white audiences. Europe continued his career as a successful bandleader until his untimely death in 1919. Ma Rainey and other jazz artists and dejection singers began to sign recording contracts, initially with African American record companies similar Black Swan Records, but very chop-chop with Paramount, Columbia, and other mainstream recording outlets. In Harlem, i society opened later on another, each featuring jazz orchestras or dejection singers. Noble Sissle, of course, was ane of the team behind the product of Shuffle Along, which opened Broadway upwardly to Chocolate Dandies and a series of other black musical comedies, featuring these new musical styles.

The visual arts, particularly painting, prints, and sculpture, emerged somewhat subsequently in Harlem than did music, musical theater, and literature. I of the most notable visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, arrived in Harlem from Kansas City in 1925. After that year his first pieces appeared in Opportunity, and x Douglas pieces appeared equally "10 Decorative Designs" illustrating Locke's The New Negro. Early the side by side yr Westward. East. B. Du Bois published Douglas'southward showtime illustrations in The Crunch. Due to his personal clan with Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and other African American writers, his collaboration with them in the publication of their literary magazine Burn down!! and his role designing book jackets and illustrating literary works, Douglas was the virtually high-contour artist conspicuously connected to the Harlem Renaissance in the mid- to late-1920s. And while these connections to the literary office of the Renaissance were notable, they were not typical of the experience of other African American artists of this period.

More pregnant in launching the art phase of the Harlem Renaissance were the exhibits of African American art in Harlem and the funding and exhibits that the Harmon Foundation provided. The early stirrings of the African American fine art motion in Harlem followed a 1919 exhibit on the work of Henry Ossawa Tanner at a midtown gallery in New York, and an exhibit of African American artists two years later at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library. Even more important to the nurturing and promotion of African American art were the activities of the Harmon Foundation. Beginning in 1926 the Foundation awarded cash prizes for outstanding accomplishment by African Americans in eight fields, including fine arts. Additionally, from 1928 through 1933, the Harmon Foundation organized an annual exhibit of African American art.

Place

Situating the Harlem Renaissance in space is almost as complex equally defining its origins and fourth dimension span. Certainly Harlem is central to the Harlem Renaissance, just information technology serves more as an anchor for the movement than as its sole location. In reality, the Harlem Renaissance both drew from and spread its influence across the U.s.a., the Caribbean, and the globe. Only a handful of the writers, artists, musicians, and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance were native to Harlem or New York, and only a relatively small number lived in Harlem throughout the Renaissance catamenia. And notwithstanding, Harlem impacted the art, music, and writing of virtually all of the participants in the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem refers to that office of Manhattan Island northward of Central Park and generally east of Eighth Avenue or St. Nicholas Avenue. Originally established in the seventeenth century as a Dutch village, information technology evolved over time. Following its annexation past the city in 1873, urban growth commenced. The resulting Harlem real estate boom lasted about twenty years during which developers erected most of the physical structures that defined Harlem equally late as the mid-twentieth century. They designed this new, urban Harlem primarily for the wealthy and the upper middle grade; it independent broad avenues, a rail connection to the urban center on Eighth Avenue, and consisted of expensive homes and luxurious apartment buildings accompanied past commercial and retail structures, along with stately churches and synagogues, clubs, social organizations, and fifty-fifty the Harlem Philharmonic Orchestra.

By 1905, Harlem's boom turned into a bust. Desperate white developers began to sell or rent to African Americans, ofttimes at greatly discounted prices, while black real manor firms provided the customers. At this time, approximately lx thousand blacks lived in New York, scattered through the five boroughs, including a small community in Harlem. The largest concentration inhabited the overcrowded and congested Tenderloin and San Juan Colina sections of the west side of Manhattan. When New York's black population swelled in the twentieth century as newcomers from the Southward moved due north and as redevelopment destroyed existing black neighborhoods, force per unit area for additional and hopefully meliorate housing pushed blacks northward up the due west side of Manhattan into Harlem.

Harlem's transition, once information technology began, followed fairly traditional patterns. Equally shortly equally blacks started moving onto a block, property values dropped further every bit whites began to leave. This process was especially evident in the early 1920s. Both black and white realtors took advantage of declining property values in Harlem—the panic selling that resulted when blacks moved in. Addressing the demand for housing generated by the city'southward quickly growing black population, they caused, subdivided, and leased Harlem property to blackness tenants.

Year by year, the boundaries of blackness Harlem expanded, as blacks streamed into Harlem as quickly every bit they could detect affordable housing. By 1910, they had become the majority grouping on the west side of Harlem north of 130th Street; by 1914, the population of black Harlem was estimated to be fifty one thousand. Past 1930 black Harlem had expanded due north ten blocks to 155th Street and s to 115th Street; it spread from the Harlem River to Amsterdam Avenue, and housed approximately 164,000 blacks. The core of this community—bounded roughly by 126th Street on the south, 159th Street on the due north, the Harlem River and Park Avenue on the east, and Eighth Avenue on the westward—was more than 95 percent black.

Past 1920, Harlem, by virtue of the sheer size of its black population, had emerged every bit the virtual upper-case letter of blackness America; its name evoked a magic that lured all classes of blacks from all sections of the country to its streets. Impoverished southern farmers and sharecroppers fabricated their way n, where they were joined in Harlem by black intellectuals such every bit West. Eastward. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. Although the old blackness social elites of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia were disdainful of Harlem'due south vulgar splendor, and while it housed no pregnant black university as did Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Nashville, Harlem still became the race's cultural center and a Mecca for its aspiring young. It housed the National Urban League, A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Machine Porters, and the black leadership of the NAACP. Marcus Garvey launched his ill-fated black nationalist movement amongst its masses, and Harlem became the geographical focal point of African American literature, fine art, music, and theater. Its night clubs, music halls, and jazz joints became the heart of New York nightlife in the mid-1920s. Harlem, in short, was where the action was in black America during the decade post-obit Globe War I.

Harlem and New York City as well contained the infrastructure to support and sustain the arts. In the early twentieth century, New York had replaced Boston as the center of the book publishing industry. Furthermore, new publishing houses in the urban center, such as Alfred A. Knopf, Harper Brothers, and Harcourt Brace, were open up to calculation greater diversity to their volume lists by including works past African American writers. By the late nineteenth century, New York City housed Tin Pan Alley, the center of the music publishing industry. In the 1920s, when recordings and broadcasting emerged, New York was once again in the forefront. Broadway was the epicenter of American theater, and New York was the center of the American art globe. In short, in the early twentieth century no other American city possessed the businesses and institutions to support literature and the arts that New York did.

In spite of its physical presence, size, and its literary and arts infrastructure, the nature of Harlem and its relation to the Renaissance are very circuitous. The word "Harlem" evoked strong and conflicting images among African Americans during the kickoff half of the twentieth century. Was it the Negro metropolis, blackness Manhattan, the political, cultural, and spiritual heart of African America, a state of plenty, a metropolis of refuge, or a black ghetto and emerging slum? For some, the image of Harlem was more personal. King Solomon Gillis, the main character in Rudolph Fisher'southward "The City of Refuge," was one of these. Emerging out of the subway at 135th and Lennox Artery, Gillis was transfixed:

Clean air, blue sky, bright sunlight. Gillis set down his tan-paper-thin extension-case and wiped his black, shining brow. And then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every plow; up and down Lenox Avenue, up and downward One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street; large, lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; black ones, dark-brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping about the sidewalks; here and there a white face globe-trotting along, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. In that location was convincingly no doubt of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem.^vii

Gillis then noticed the mayhem in the street as trucks and autos crowded into the intersection at the command of the traffic cop—an African American traffic cop:

The Southern Negro's eyes opened wide; his rima oris opened wider. . . . For there stood a handsome, brass-buttoned giant directing the heaviest traffic Gillis had ever seen; halting unnumbered tons of automobiles and trucks and wagons and pushcarts and street-cars; holding them at bay with one hand while he swept similar tons peremptorily on with the other; ruling the wide crossing with supreme self-assurance; and he, too, was a Negro!

Notwithstanding nearly of the vehicles that leaped or crouched at his bidding carried white passengers. One of these overdrove bounds a few feet and Gillis heard the officeholder's shrill whistle and gruff reproof, saw the commuter's face plow red and his car draw back like a threatened pup. It was beyond belief—incommunicable. Black might exist white, only information technology couldn't be that white!

"Done died an' woke up in Heaven," thought Male monarch Solomon, watching, fascinated; and after a while, as if the wonder of information technology were besides great to believe only by seeing, "Cullud policemans!" he said, half aloud; and then repeated over and over, with greater and greater conviction, "Even got cullud policemans…"^eight

Gillis was one of those who sought refuge in Harlem. He fled N Carolina after shooting a white man. At present, in Harlem, the policeman was black. Not that this changed his fate. At the stop of the story, one of these black policemen dragged Gillis away in handcuffs. The reality of Harlem often contradicted the myth.

For poet Langston Hughes, Harlem was too something of a refuge. Following a by and large unhappy babyhood living at ane fourth dimension or another with his mother or father, grandmother, or neighbors, Hughes convinced his stern and foreboding begetter to finance his didactics at Columbia University. He recalled his 1921 arrival:

"I went upward the steps and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy over again. I registered at the Y. When college opened, I did non desire to movement into the dormitory at Columbia. I really did not want to get the college at all. I didn't desire to do annihilation but alive in Harlem, get a task and piece of work there."⁹

Subsequently a less than happy twelvemonth at Columbia, Hughes did exactly that. He dropped out of school and moved into Harlem. Hughes, though, never lost sight that poverty, overcrowded and dilapidated housing, and racial prejudice were part of the daily experience of virtually Harlem residents.

For Hughes, also, the want to only "alive in Harlem" was equally much myth as reality. Afterward dropping out of Columbia and moving to Harlem he actually spent piddling time there. Until the late 1930s, he was much more of a company or transient in Harlem than a resident. While Hughes spent many weekends and vacations in Harlem during his years at Lincoln Academy, during the height of the Renaissance, between 1923 and 1938 he was away from the urban center more than he was there, more than a visitor than a full-time resident.

James Weldon Johnson saw a withal different Harlem. In his 1930 book, Black Manhattan, he described the blackness metropolis in nearly utopian terms as the race'south neat hope and its yard social experiment: "So here we take Harlem—not merely a colony or a community or a settlement . . . but a blackness urban center, located in the heart of white Manhattan, and containing more Negroes to the foursquare mile than any other spot on earth. It strikes the uninformed observer as a phenomenon, a phenomenon directly out of the skies."¹⁰  When Johnson looked at Harlem he did not meet an emerging slum or a ghetto, but a black neighborhood north of Central Park that was "one of the nigh cute and healthful" in the city. "It is not a fringe, it is not a slum, nor is information technology a 'quarter' consisting of dilapidated tenements. It is a section of new-constabulary apartment houses and handsome dwellings, with streets too paved, equally well lighted, and also kept every bit in any other office of the city."^eleven

Without question Harlem was a quickly growing black city, merely what kind of metropolis was it condign? Harlem historian Gilbert Osofsky argued, "the near profound modify that Harlem experienced in the 1920's was its emergence as a slum. Largely within the space of a single decade Harlem was transformed from a potentially platonic customs to a neighborhood with manifold social and economic bug chosen 'deplorable,' 'unspeakable,' 'incredible.'"¹²  As a result, nearly of Harlem'due south residents lived in poor housing, either in poverty or on the verge of poverty, in a neighborhood experiencing the typical results of poverty and bigotry: growing vice, crime, juvenile delinquency, and drug addiction.

In short, the day-to-day realities that about Harlemites faced differed dramatically from the image of Harlem life presented by James Weldon Johnson. Harlem was beset with contradictions. While information technology reflected the self-confidence, militancy, and pride of the New Negro in his or her demand for equality, and information technology reflected the aspirations and creative genius of the talented young people of the Harlem Renaissance along with the economical aspirations of the black migrants seeking a meliorate life in the north, ultimately Harlem failed to resolve its problems and to fulfill these dreams.

The 1935 Harlem Race Riot put to residuum the conflicting images of Harlem. On March nineteen, 1935, a young Puerto Rican boy was defenseless stealing a ten-cent knife from the counter of a 135th Street five-and-dime shop. Following the arrest, rumors spread that police had beaten the youth to death. A large oversupply gathered, shouting "law brutality" and "racial bigotry." A window was smashed, annexation began, and the riot spread throughout the dark. The violence resulted in three blacks dead, two hundred stores trashed and burned, and more than two million dollars worth of destroyed holding. The Puerto Rican youth whose arrest precipitated the riot had been released the previous evening when the merchant chose not to press charges. Shocked by the uprising, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia established an interracial committee headed by E. Franklin Frazier, a professor of sociology at Howard University, to investigate the riot. They concluded the obvious: the riot resulted from a full general frustration with racial discrimination and poverty.

What the committee failed to report was that the anarchism shattered once and for all James Weldon Johnson'south image of Harlem as the African American urban utopia. In spite of the presence of artists and writers, nightclubs, music, and entertainment, Harlem was a slum, a blackness ghetto characterized by poverty and discrimination. Burned-out storefronts might be fertile basis for political activeness, but non for art, literature, and culture. Harlem would run into new black writers in the years to come up. Musicians, poets, and artists would continue to make their abode in that location, but it never once more served as the focal point of a creative movement with the national and international impact of the Harlem Renaissance.

Johnson did non personally witness the 1935 Anarchism. He had left the metropolis in 1931, the year after he published Black Manhattan, to take the Spence Chair in Creative Literature at Fisk University in Nashville. He lived there until his death in 1938.

Renaissance

Then, what was the Harlem Renaissance? The unproblematic answer is that the Harlem Renaissance (or the New Negro Movement, or whatever proper noun is preferred) was the most of import event in twentieth-century African American intellectual and cultural life. While best known for its literature, it touched every attribute of African American literary and creative creativity from the end of World State of war I through the Peachy Depression. Literature, critical writing, music, theater, musical theater, and the visual arts were transformed by this movement; information technology also affected politics, social development, and well-nigh every aspect of the African American experience from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s.

Simply there was too something ephemeral most the Harlem Renaissance, something vague and hard to ascertain. The Harlem Renaissance, so, was an African American literary and artistic movement anchored in Harlem, but drawing from, extending to, and influencing African American communities beyond the country and across. Equally nosotros accept seen, information technology too had no precise beginning; nor did it have a precise ending. Rather, it emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American customs that followed World War I, blossomed in the 1920s, then faded away in the mid-to-belatedly 1930s and early on 1940s.

As well the Harlem Renaissance has no single defined ideological or stylistic standard that unified its participants and defined the movement. Instead, nearly participants in the move resisted black or white efforts to ascertain or narrowly categorize their art. For example, in 1926, a group of writers, spearheaded by author Wallace Thurman and including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and artist Aaron Douglas, amongst others, produced their ain literary magazine, Burn down!! I purpose of this venture was the declaration of their intent to assume ownership of the literary Renaissance. In the procedure, they turned their backs on Alain Locke and Westward. E. B. Du Bois and others who sought to channel black creativity into what they considered to be the proper aesthetic and political directions. Despite the efforts of Thurman and his immature colleagues, Fire!! fizzled out after only one outcome and the motion remained ill defined. In fact, this was its most distinguishing characteristic. In that location would be no common literary style or political ideology associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It was far more than an identity than an ideology or a literary or artistic school. What united participants was their sense of taking part in a common try and their commitment to giving creative expression to the African American feel.

If there was a statement that defined the philosophy of the new literary movement it was Langston Hughes'southward essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," published in The Nation, June sixteen, 1926:

Nosotros younger Negro artists who create now intend to limited our individual dark-skinned selves without fearfulness or shame. If white people are pleased nosotros are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. Nosotros know nosotros are cute. And ugly besides. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased nosotros are glad. If they are not their displeasure doesn't matter either. Nosotros will build our temples for tomorrow, strong equally we know how, and we will stand on peak of the mount, costless within ourselves.¹³

Like Fire!!, this essay was the motility's annunciation of independence, both from the stereotypes that whites held near African Americans and the expectations that they had for their literary works, and from the expectations that blackness leaders and black critics had for black writers, and the expectations that they placed on their work.

At that place was, not surprisingly, resistance to this independence, especially among those concerned with the political costs that the realistic expressions of blackness life could engender—feeding white prejudice by exposing the less savory elements of the black community. Du Bois responded to Hughes a few weeks later in a Chicago oral communication that was later published in The Crisis as "The Criteria of Negro Art" (October 1926): "Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must exist, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that any art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to dearest and enjoy. I do non care a damn for whatever art that is non used for propaganda. But I practice care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent."

The conclusion of blackness writers to follow their ain artistic vision led to the creative diversity that was the principal characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance. This diversity is clearly evident in the verse of the catamenia where field of study thing, style, and tone ranged from the traditional to the more inventive. Langston Hughes, for instance, captured the life and language of the working class, and the rhythm and mode of the dejection in a number of his poems, none more and so than "The Weary Blues." In contrast to Hughes's appropriation of the form of black music, especially jazz and the blues, and his use of the black vernacular, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen utilized more traditional and classical forms for their poetry. McKay used sonnets for much of his protestation verse, while Cullen'south poems relied both on classical literary allusions and symbols and standard poetic forms.

This diverseness and experimentation besides characterized music. This was evidenced in the blues of Bessie Smith and the range of jazz from the early rhythms of Jelly Whorl Morton to the instrumentation of Louis Armstrong or the sophisticated orchestration of Duke Ellington. In painting, the soft colors and pastels that Aaron Douglas used to create a veiled view for the African-inspired images in his paintings and murals contrast sharply with Jacob Lawrence's use of bright colors and sharply defined images.

Inside this diversity, several themes emerged which set the character of the Harlem Renaissance. No blackness writer, musician, or artist expressed all of these themes, but each did accost one or more in his or her work. The get-go of these themes was the attempt to recapture the African American past—its rural southern roots, urban feel, and African heritage. Interest in the African past corresponded with the rise of Pan-Africanism in African American politics, which was at the centre of Marcus Garvey's ideology and also a business concern of West. East. B. Du Bois in the 1920s.

It also reflected the full general fascination with ancient African history that followed the discovery of Rex Tut'south tomb in 1922. Poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes addressed their African heritage in their works, while artist Aaron Douglas used African motifs in his art. A number of musicians, from the classical composer William Grant Notwithstanding to jazz groovy Louis Armstrong, introduced African inspired rhythms and themes in their compositions.

The exploration of black southern heritage was reflected in novels past Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as in Jacob Lawrence'due south art. Zora Neale Hurston used her experience as a folklorist as the basis for her all-encompassing study of rural southern black life in her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Jacob Lawrence turned to African American history for much of his work including two of his multi-canvas series' of paintings, the Harriett Tubman series and the one on the Black Migration.

Harlem Renaissance writers and artists also explored life in Harlem and other urban centers. Both Hughes and McKay drew on Harlem images for their poetry, and McKay used the ghetto as the setting for his first novel, Habitation to Harlem. Some black writers, including McKay and Hughes, besides equally Rudolph Fisher and Wallace Thurman, were defendant of overemphasizing crime, sexuality, and other less-savory aspects of ghetto life in order to feed the voyeuristic desires of white readers and publishers, in simulated of white novelist Carl Van Vechten's controversial Harlem novel, Nigger Heaven.

A third major theme addressed by the literature of the Harlem Renaissance was race. Virtually every novel and play, and well-nigh of the poetry, explored race in America, specially the impact of race and racism on African Americans. In their simplest course these works protested racial injustice. Claude McKay'south sonnet, "If Nosotros Must Dice," was among the best of this genre. Langston Hughes as well wrote protest pieces, equally did almost every black writer at i time or another.

Among the visual artists, Lawrence's historical series emphasized the racial struggle that dominated African American history, while Romare Bearden'south early on illustrative work frequently focused on racial politics. The struggle confronting lynching in the mid-1920s stimulated anti-lynching poetry, likewise as Walter White's carefully researched study of the subject, Rope and Faggot. In the early 1930s, the Scottsboro incident stimulated considerable protestation writing, as well every bit a 1934 anthology, Negro, which addressed race in an international context. Most of the literary efforts of the Harlem Renaissance avoided overt protest or propaganda, focusing instead on the psychological and social impact of race. Among the best of these studies were Nella Larsen'southward two novels, Quicksand in 1928 and, a yr later, Passing. Both explored characters of mixed racial heritage who struggled to define their racial identity in a world of prejudice and racism. Langston Hughes addressed similar themes in his poem "Cross," and in his 1931 play, Mulatto, as did Jessie Fauset in her 1929 novel, Plum Bun. That same year Wallace Thurman fabricated color discrimination within the urban blackness customs the focus of his novel, The Blacker the Berry.

Finally, the Harlem Renaissance incorporated all aspects of African American culture in its artistic work. This ranged from the employ of black music as an inspiration for verse or black sociology as an inspiration for novels and short stories. Best known for this was Langston Hughes who used the rhythms and styles of jazz and the blues in much of his early poetry. James Weldon Johnson, who published two collections of black spirituals in 1927 and 1928, and Sterling Brown, who used the blues and southern piece of work songs in many of the poems in his 1932 book of poetry, Southern Road, connected the practice that Hughes had initiated. Other writers exploited black religion as a literary source. Johnson made the black preacher and his sermons the basis for the poems in God's Trombones, while Hurston and Larsen used black organized religion and blackness preachers in their novels. Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), described the exploits of a southern blackness preacher, while in the last portion of Quicksand, Larsen's heroine was ensnared by religion and a southern black preacher.

Through all of these themes, Harlem Renaissance writers, musicians, and artists were determined to limited the African American experience in all of its diverseness and complexity as realistically as possible. This commitment to realism ranged from the ghetto realism that created such controversy when writers exposed negative aspects of African American life, to beautifully crafted and detailed portraits of black life in modest towns such as in Hughes's novel, Not Without Laughter, or the witty and bitter depiction of Harlem'southward black literati in Wallace Thurman'south Infants of the Spring.

The Harlem Renaissance appealed to and relied on a mixed audition—the African American center form and white consumers of the arts. African American magazines such as The Crisis (the NAACP monthly journal) and Opportunity (the monthly publication of the Urban League) employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staff, published their poetry and short stories, and promoted African American literature through articles, reviews, and almanac literary prizes. They also printed illustrations by black artists and used blackness artists in the layout design of their periodicals. As well, blacks attempted to produce their own literary and artistic venues. In addition to the short-lived Fire!!, Wallace Thurman spearheaded another single-issue literary magazine, Harlem, in 1927, while poet Countee Cullen edited a "Negro Poets" outcome of the avant-garde poetry magazine Palms in 1926, and brought out an anthology of African American poetry, Caroling Dusk, in 1927.

As important every bit these literary outlets were, they were not sufficient to support a literary movement. Consequently, the Harlem Renaissance relied heavily on white-endemic enterprises for its creative works. Publishing houses, magazines, recording companies, theaters, and fine art galleries were primarily white-owned, and fiscal support through grants, prizes, and awards generally involved white money. In fact, one of the major accomplishments of the Renaissance was to push open the door to mainstream periodicals, publishing houses, and funding sources. African American music also played to mixed audiences. Harlem'south cabarets attracted both Harlem residents and white New Yorkers seeking out Harlem nightlife. The famous Cotton wool Club carried this to a bizarre extreme past providing black entertainment for exclusively white audiences. Ultimately, the more successful black musicians and entertainers moved their performances downtown.

The relationship of the Harlem Renaissance to white venues and white audiences created controversy. While about African American critics strongly supported the movement, others like Benjamin Brawley and fifty-fifty W. Eastward. B. Du Bois were sharply disquisitional and defendant Renaissance writers of reinforcing negative African American stereotypes. Langston Hughes's assertion that black artists intended to limited themselves freely, no matter what the black public or white public thought, accurately reflected the attitude of most writers and artists.

Ho-hum fade to blackness

The end of the Harlem Renaissance is equally hard to ascertain equally its ancestry. It varies somewhat from one artistic field to another. In musical theater, the popularity of black musical reviews died out by the early 1930s, although there were occasional efforts, mostly unsuccessful, to revive the genre. All the same, blackness performers and musicians continued to piece of work, although not and then oft in all black shows. Black music continued into the Globe State of war Ii era, although the popularity of blues singers waned somewhat, and jazz changed as the big band style became popular. Literature also inverse, and a new generation of black writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison emerged with little interest in or connection with the Harlem Renaissance. In art, a number of artists who had emerged in the 1930s connected to piece of work, merely again, with no connexion to a broader African American motility. As well, a number of Harlem Renaissance literary figures went silent, left Harlem, or died. Some, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, continued to write and publish into the 1940s and beyond, although there was no longer any sense that they were connected to a literary move. And Harlem lost some of its magic following the 1935 race riot. In any instance, few, if any, people were talking nigh a Harlem Renaissance by 1940.

The Harlem Renaissance flourished in the tardily 1920s and early on 1930s, but its antecedents and legacy spread many years earlier 1920 and after 1930. Information technology had no universally recognized name, but was known variously as the New Negro Move, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, as well equally the Harlem Renaissance. It had no clearly defined showtime or end, but emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American community that followed World State of war I, blossomed in the mid- to late-1920s, and then faded away in the mid-1930s.

What was the Harlem Renaissance and why was it important?

While at its core information technology was primarily a literary movement, the Harlem Renaissance touched all of the African American artistic arts. While its participants were adamant to truthfully stand for the African American feel and believed in racial pride and equality, they shared no common political philosophy, social belief, creative style, or aesthetic principle. This was a movement of individuals free of whatsoever overriding manifesto. While cardinal to African American artistic and intellectual life, past no ways did it relish the full support of the black or white intelligentsia; it generated as much hostility and criticism every bit it did support and praise. From the moment of its birth, its legitimacy was debated. Nevertheless, by at least 1 measure, its success was articulate: the Harlem Renaissance was the first time that a considerable number of mainstream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously, and it was the first fourth dimension that African American literature and the arts attracted significant attending from the nation at big.

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¹Carl Van Doren, "The Younger Generation of Negro Writers," Opportunity 2 (1924): 144–45. Van Doren'southward Civic Order Dinner accost was reprinted in Opportunity.

^two Survey Graphic, Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, 6 (March 1925).

ⁱⁱⁱAlain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Atheneum, 1969).

⁴Encounter Terry Waldo, "Eubie Blake," in Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Cary D. Wintz (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2007), 151–65.

⁵Langston Hughes, The Big Body of water (New York: Colina and Wang, 1963), 223–24.

⁶James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 120–21.

⁷Rudolph Fisher, "The Metropolis of Refuge," in The New Negro, 57–8. The City of Refuge was first published in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1925.

^viiiIbid. 58–9.

⁹Hughes, Big Sea, 81–2.

¹⁰Johnson, Black Manhattan, three–4.

^xiIbid, 146. Johnson likewise expresses this view of Harlem in "The Making of Harlem," Survey Graphic, vi (March 1925), 635–39.

¹²Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930, (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 135.

^xiiiLangston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mount, The Nation. June 16, 1926, 694.

Song of the Towers by Aaron Douglas for the mural serial Aspects of Negro Life, commissioned in 1934 by the WPA for the Harlem Co-operative of the New York City Public Library. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Civilization, Art and Artifacts Sectionalization, New York Public Library.

Online Educational Resources: The Harlem Renaissance

Humanities Texas has assembled a list of online educational resources related to the Harlem Renaissance and its history, literature, and civilization. These websites include principal source documents, lesson plans, photographs, and other interactive elements that will raise classroom instruction and pupil comprehension.

Portrait of Charles Due south. Johnson. Johnson was founder of Opportunity, the National Urban League'due south monthly mag, and organizer of the Civic Social club Dinner that marked the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance as a literary motion. U.S. Farm Security Assistants/Role of War Information Drove, Prints and Photographs Partition, Library of Congress. Photo by Gordon Parks.

The cover of the "Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro" result of Survey Graphic, featuring an illustration of lyric tenor and composer Roland Hayes past Winold Reiss, 1925. Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library.

The bandage of Shuffle Along, 1921.

Sheet music for "I'one thousand Merely Wild Well-nigh Harry" from Shuffle Along, the showtime Broadway musical written, produced, and performed by African Americans, by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Music Division, Library of Congress. Copyright deposit, 1921 (155.3b).

Blues composer and musician W. C. Handy (left) with bandleader and composer Duke Ellington (right), ca. 1940s. Schomburg Center for Enquiry in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.

Canvass music for "Goodnight Angeline" by James Reese Europe, 1919. The photographs on the cover show Europe with the 369th U.Due south. Infantry Division "Hell Fighters" Band. Performing Arts Encyclopedia, Library of Congress.

The Prodigal Son past Aaron Douglas in God's Trombones: 7 Negro Sermons in Verse by James Weldon Johnson. New York: The Viking Press, 1927. Douglas's painting was inspired by Johnson's poem of the same name. Courtesy of Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

The Seine by Henry Ossawa Tanner, c. 1902. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Tanner moved to Paris in 1891 and achieved international recognition for his piece of work. Souvenir of the Avalon Foundation. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Section of a map of New York Metropolis showing Primal Park, Yorkville, and the southern part of Harlem, 1870. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Sectionalisation, New York Public Library.

Directors of the Afro-American Investment and Building Visitor, Brooklyn, New York, organized September 1892. Photograph from The Negro in Business by Booker T. Washington. Boston: Hartel, Jenkins & Co., 1907. openlibrary.org

Within thirty seconds walk of the 135th Street Co-operative (New York Public Library), Harlem, 1919. Photo by F. F. Hopper. Schomburg Center for Enquiry in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Sectionalisation, New York Public Library.

In Blackness Manhattan (1930), James Weldon Johnson's history of African Americans in New York, 2 demographic maps of Harlem evidence its quick flourishing in the early decades of the twentieth century. Harry Bribe Center.

From left to right: Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher, and Hubert T. Delany, on the roof of 580 St. Nicholas Artery, Harlem, on the occasion of a party in Hughes' honor, 1924. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Sectionalization, New York Public Library.

Lenox Avenue in Harlem, ca. 1920s.

Policemen in Harlem, 1929. Schomburg Heart for Research in Black Civilization, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, New York Public Library.

Portrait of Langston Hughes as a immature man. Photo past James Fifty. Allen. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Civilization, Photographs and Prints Sectionalisation, New York Public Library.

Portrait of James Weldon Johnson, December 3, 1932. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Sectionalization, Library of Congress.

Written report to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia past the interracial committee headed past E. Franklin Frazier assigned to investigate the March 19, 1935, anarchism in Harlem. Library of Congress.

Harlem Bully past Miguel Covarrubias, 1927. Covarrubias, a Mexican painter, caricaturist, illustrator, ethnologist, and art historian, had a deep appreciation for the people of Harlem. His 1927 book, Negro Drawings, reflected his interest in Harlem performers and people on the street. Harry Ransom Middle.

Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston, ca. late 1930s. Hurston was an author, anthropologist, and among the publishers of Burn!! Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

The front and back covers of the offset and only issue of Burn!!, published in 1926, with artwork by Aaron Douglas. Harry Ransom Middle.

Portrait of West. E. B. Du Bois, May 31, 1919. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, published in 1926, dust cover artwork by Miguel Covarrubias. Harry Ransom Center.

Portrait of Countee Cullen in Cardinal Park, June 20, 1941. Photograph past Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Dust cover for Passing by Nella Larsen, published in 1928. Harry Ransom Center.

Portrait of Jessie Redmon Fauset, northward.d. Harmon Foundation Records, Manuscript Partition, Library of Congress.

W. E. B. Du Bois (dorsum right) and staff in the Crisis magazine office, n.d. Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.

Advertisement for the Cotton Social club featuring Cab Calloway and his Cotton Order Orchestra, 1925. Schomburg Middle for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Partition, New York Public Library.

Portrait of author Richard Wright, June 23, 1939. Ralph Ellison served equally best man at Wright's wedding this aforementioned yr. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Embrace of the Oct 1928 issue of The Negro American with photograph of Miss Erma Sweatt, sis of civil-rights activist Heman Sweatt. The Negro American was a Harlem Renaissance era mag published in San Antonio, Texas, that declared itself to exist "the but magazine in the South devoted to Negro life and culture." This detail effect includes a review of Rudolph Fisher'south novel The Walls of Jericho (folio xiii). Courtesy of Michael Fifty. Gillette.

Download the Full Issue of The Negro American

Y'all tin can explore the full issue of The Negro American (Oct 1928) described to a higher place by downloading a PDF version here.

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Source: https://www.humanitiestexas.org/news/articles/harlem-renaissance-what-was-it-and-why-does-it-matter

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