A Celebration of African American Culture in Literature and Art
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 creative explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the menstruation is considered a golden age in African American civilization, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art.
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Bang-up Migration
The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem was meant to be an upper-form 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 centre-class Black families from some other neighborhood known as Black Bohemia moved to Harlem, and other Black families followed. Some white residents initially fought to proceed African Americans out of the area, but declining that many whites eventually fled.
Outside factors led to a population smash: From 1910 to 1920, African American populations migrated in big numbers from the South to the North, with prominent figures like W.E.B. Du Bois leading what became known as the Smashing Migration.
In 1915 and 1916, natural disasters in the south put Blackness workers and sharecroppers out of work. Additionally, during and after Globe War I, immigration to the United States fell, and northern recruiters headed due south to entice Black workers to their companies.
By 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the South had moved northward, and Harlem was one of the well-nigh popular destinations for these families.
Langston Hughes
This considerable population shift resulted in a Black Pride move with leaders like Du Bois working to ensure that Blackness 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 by 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 Blackness Americans finding a cultural identity in a white-dominated Manhattan. Fauset was literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis and adult a mag for Black children with Du Bois.
Sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, who was integral in shaping the Harlem literary scene, used the debut party for At that place Is Confusion to organize resource 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 Blackness writers and editors, besides equally powerful white New York publishing figures. Soon many writers found their piece of work actualization in mainstream magazines like Harper'south.
Zora Neale Hurston
Anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston courted controversy through her involvement with a publication called FIRE!!
Helmed past white writer and Harlem writers' patron Carl Van Vechten and filled with works from prolific Blackness writers including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Aaron Douglas, the magazine exoticized the lives of Harlem residents. Van Vechten's previous fiction stirred upwards involvement amidst whites to visit Harlem and take advantage of the culture and nightlife at that place.
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 xv when he moved into the Harlem abode of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the pastor of Harlem's largest congregation, in 1918.
The neighborhood and its civilisation informed his poetry, and every bit a college student at New York Academy, he obtained prizes in a number of poetry contests before going onto Harvard'due south masters program and publishing his first volume of poesy: Colour. He followed it upward with Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown Girl, and went on to write plays every bit well equally children'southward books.
Cullen received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry in and married Nina Yolande, the girl of W.Due east.B. DuBois. Their wedding was a major social event in Harlem. Cullen's reviews for Opportunity magazine, which ran under the column "Dark Belfry," focused on works from the African-American literati and covered some of the biggest names of the age.
Louis Armstrong
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 neat describe for not only Harlem residents, but outside white audiences also.
Some of the virtually 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 similar John Bubbles and Neb "Bojangles" Robinson were besides popular.
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Cotton Club
With the groundbreaking new music came a 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 civilisation without having to socialize with African Americans and created clubs to cater to them.
The almost successful of these was the Cotton Society, which featured frequent performances by Ellington and Calloway. Some in the community derided the beingness of such clubs, while others believed they were a sign that Black civilization was moving toward greater acceptance.
Paul Robeson
The cultural boom in Harlem gave Blackness actors opportunities for stage work that had previously been withheld. Traditionally, if Black actors appeared onstage, it was in a minstrel evidence musical and rarely in a serious drama with not-stereotypical roles.
At the center of this phase revolution was the versatile Paul Robeson, an actor, singer, writer, activist and more. Robeson first moved to Harlem in 1919 while studying constabulary at Columbia Academy and continually maintained a social presence in the area, where he was considered an inspirational but approachable effigy.
Robeson believed that arts and civilization were the all-time paths forward for Blackness Americans to overcome racism and make advances in a white-dominated culture.
Josephine Baker
Black musical revues were staples in Harlem, and past the mid-1920s had moved south to Broadway, expanding into the white world. I of the earliest of these was Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle'south Shuffle Along, which launched the career of Josephine Bakery.
White patron Van Vechten helped bring more serious lack phase 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 a several one-human action plays written in the 1920s, also as articles in Opportunity magazine outlining his goals. Stock companies similar the Krigwa Players and the Harlem Experimental Theater too gave Blackness actors serious roles.
Aaron Douglas
The visual arts were never welcoming to Black artists, with fine 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 Begetter of Black American Art," who adapted African techniques to realize paintings and murals, too equally volume illustration.
Sculptor Augusta Savage's 1923 bosom of Du Bois garnered considerable attending. She followed that up with small, dirt portraits of everyday African Americans, and would later exist pivotal to enlisting black artists into the Federal Art Projection, a division of the Work Progress Assistants (WPA).
James VanDerZee'southward photography captured Harlem daily life, besides equally past deputed portraits in his studio that he worked to fill with optimism and split up philosophically from the horrors of the by.
Marcus Garvey
Black nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism motion Marcus Garvey was built-in 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, Southward and Primal America, Canada and Africa.
Garvey is perhaps all-time known for founding the Universal Negro Comeback Association, or UNIA, which advocated for "separate simply equal" condition 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 chosen him "the most unsafe enemy of the Negro race in America." His outspoken views besides 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 place crash of 1929 and The Slap-up Depression. It wavered until Prohibition ended in 1933, which meant white patrons no longer sought out the illegal alcohol in uptown clubs.
By 1935, many pivotal Harlem residents had moved on to seek work. They were replaced past the continuous menses of refugees from the South, many requiring public assistance.
The Harlem Race Riot of 1935 broke out following the abort of a young shoplifter, resulting in iii dead, hundreds injured and millions of dollars in belongings damage. The riot was a expiry knell for the Harlem Renaissance.
Touch on of the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a golden historic period for African American artists, writers and musicians. Information technology gave these artists pride in and control over how the Black experience was represented in American culture and set the phase for the ceremonious rights move.
Sources
Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance. Laban Carrick Loma.
The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Civilisation, 1920-1930. Steven Watson.
The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary For The Era. Bruce Kellner, Editor.
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/harlem-renaissance
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