How Did These Accomplishments Increase The Pride Of African Americans?

On February 28, 2022, Humanities Texas held a one-day teacher professional development 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 It, and Why Does Information technology Matter?" In his remarks, Wintz addresses the origins and nature of the movement—a task, he says, that is far more circuitous than it may seem.

Wintz is a specialist in the Harlem Renaissance and in African American political thought. Wintz is an author or editor of numerous books including Harlem Speaks; Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance; African American Political Thought, 1890–1930; African Americans and the Presidency: The Road to the White Firm; and The Harlem Renaissance in the Due west. He served as an editor of the Oxford University Press 5-volume Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Nowadays, and the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Routledge). He has also written extensively on Texas history and is an author of 1 of the standard Texas history texts, Texas: The Lone Star Country. He is a native Houstonian and a graduate of Rice University and Kansas Country Academy.

What was the Harlem Renaissance and when did it begin?

This seemingly elementary question reveals the complexities of the move we know varyingly as the New Negro Renaissance, the New Negro Movement, the Negro Renaissance, the Jazz Age, or the Harlem Renaissance. To reply the question it is necessary to place the movement within fourth dimension and space, then to define its nature. This task is much more complex than information technology might seem.

Traditionally the Harlem Renaissance was viewed primarily equally a literary movement centered in Harlem and growing out of the black migration and the emergence of Harlem as the premier black metropolis in the United states of america. Music and theater were mentioned briefly, more as background and local color, every bit providing inspiration for poetry and local color for fiction. However, there was no assay of the developments in these fields. Likewise, art was discussed by and large in terms of Aaron Douglas and his association with Langston Hughes and other young writers who produced Fire!! in 1926, just there was lilliputian or no analysis of the work of African American artists. And at that place was even less discussion or assay of the work of women in the fields of art, music, and theater.

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

Time

First, to know when the Harlem Renaissance began, we must determine its origins. Understanding the origins depends on how we perceive the nature of the Renaissance. For those who view the Renaissance as primarily a literary movement, the Civic Social club Dinner of March 21, 1924, signaled its emergence. This issue did not occur in Harlem, just was held most i hundred blocks south in Manhattan at the Borough Club on Twelfth Street off Fifth Avenue. Charles S. Johnson, the immature editor of Opportunity, the National Urban League's monthly magazine, conceived the event to laurels writer Jessie Fauset on the occasion of the publication of her novel, At that place Is Confusion. Johnson planned a pocket-sized dinner party with nigh twenty guests—a mix of white publishers, editors, and literary critics, black intellectuals, and young black writers. But, when he asked Alain Locke to preside over the event, Locke agreed only if the dinner honored African American writers in general rather than 1 novelist.

Then the simple celebratory dinner morphed into a transformative event with over ane hundred attendees. African Americans were represented by West. East. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others of the black intelligentsia, along with Fauset and a representative group of poets and authors. White guests predominately were publishers and critics; Carl Van Doren, editor of Century magazine, spoke for this group calling upon the young writers in the audition to brand their contribution to the "new literary historic period" emerging in America.¹

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 magazine as soon every bit the poet finished reading them. As the dinner concluded Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic, hung effectually talking to Cullen, Fauset, and several other young writers, then offered Charles Southward. Johnson a unique opportunity: an entire issue 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. After that year Locke published a book-length version of the "Harlem" edition, expanded and re-titled The New Negro: An Estimation.³ In the anthology Locke laid down his vision of the aesthetic and the parameters for the emerging Harlem Renaissance; he as well included a collection of verse, fiction, graphic arts, and critical essays on fine art, literature, and music.

For those who viewed the Harlem Renaissance in terms of musical theater and entertainment, the nascency occurred iii years before 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. Most of its bandage featured unknowns, but some, like Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, who had only minor roles in the production, were on their fashion to international fame. Eubie Blake recalled the significance of the production, when he pointed out that he and Sissle and Lyles and Miller accomplished something that the other bully African American performers—Bob Cole and J. Rosamund Johnson, Bert Williams and George Walker—had tried, merely failed to achieve. "We did it, that's the story," he exclaimed, "We put Negroes back on Broadway!"⁴

Poet Langston Hughes also saw Shuffle Along as a seminal event in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. It introduced him to the creative earth of New York, and information technology helped to redefine and energize music and nightlife in Harlem. In the procedure, it introduced white New Yorkers to black music, theater, and amusement and helped generated the white fascination with Harlem and the African American arts that was and so much a part of the Harlem Renaissance. For the young Hughes, but arrived in the urban center, the long-range impact of Shuffle Along was not on his heed. In 1921, information technology was all about the show, and, as he wrote in his autobiography, it was "a dearest of a show:"

Swift, bright, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes. Besides, look who were in it: The now famous choir director, Hall Johnson, and the composer, William Grant Still, were a role of the orchestra. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle wrote the music and played and acted in the show. Miller and Lyles were the comics. Florence Mills skyrocketed to fame in the 2d act. Trixie Smith sang "He May Exist Your Human being Merely He Comes to See Me Sometimes." And Caterina Jarboro, now a European prima donna, and the internationally historic Josephine Baker were merely in the chorus. Everybody was in the audience—including me. People came to see information technology innumerable times. Information technology was ever packed.^v

Shuffle Along also brought jazz to Broadway. It combined jazz music with very creatively choreographed jazz trip the light fantastic to transform musical theater into something new, heady, and daring. And the show was a critical and financial success. It ran 474 performances on Broadway and spawned iii touring companies. It was a hit prove 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 too a prominent feature of African American culture during the Harlem Renaissance. The term "Jazz Age" was used by many who saw African American music, especially the blues and jazz, equally the defining features of the Renaissance. Yet, both jazz and the blues were imports to Harlem. They emerged out of the African American feel effectually the turn of the century in southern towns and cities, like New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis. From these origins these musical forms spread beyond the state, n to Chicago earlier arriving in New York a few years earlier World War I.

Blues and black blues performers such as musician Due west. C. Handy and vocalist Ma Rainey were pop on the Vaudeville circuit in the late nineteenth century. The publication of W. C. Handy's "Memphis Blues" in 1912 and the kickoff 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 Roll Morton claimed to have invented jazz there in 1902, but it is doubtful that any ane person holds that honor.

According to James Weldon Johnson, jazz reached New York in 1905 at Proctor'due south Twenty-Third Street Theater. Johnson described the band there every bit "a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making ascendant use of banjos, mandolins, guitars, saxophones, and drums in combination, and [information technology] was called the Memphis Students—a very good name, overlooking the fact that the performers were not students and were not from Memphis. There was besides a violin, a couple of contumely instruments, and a double-bass." 7 years later, composer and band leader James Reese Europe, one of the "Memphis Students," took his Clef Club Orchestra to Carnegie Hall. During Earth War I, while serving as an officer for a machine-gun company in the famed 369th U.S. Infantry Partitioning, James Europe, fellow officeholder Noble Sissel, and the regimental band introduced the sounds of ragtime, jazz, and the dejection to European audiences.

Following the war, blackness music, specially the blues and jazz, became increasingly popular with both blackness and white audiences. Europe connected his career every bit a successful bandleader until his untimely death in 1919. Ma Rainey and other jazz artists and blues singers began to sign recording contracts, initially with African American record companies like Black Swan Records, simply very speedily with Paramount, Columbia, and other mainstream recording outlets. In Harlem, one guild opened later another, each featuring jazz orchestras or blues singers. Noble Sissle, of grade, was one of the team behind the production of Shuffle Along, which opened Broadway up 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 later in Harlem than did music, musical theater, and literature. 1 of the most notable visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, arrived in Harlem from Kansas City in 1925. After that year his beginning pieces appeared in Opportunity, and ten Douglas pieces appeared equally "Ten Decorative Designs" illustrating Locke's The New Negro. Early on the adjacent year W. E. B. Du Bois published Douglas'due south first illustrations in The Crisis. Due to his personal association with Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and other African American writers, his collaboration with them in the publication of their literary magazine Burn!! and his role designing volume jackets and illustrating literary works, Douglas was the most high-profile artist clearly connected to the Harlem Renaissance in the mid- to late-1920s. And while these connections to the literary part of the Renaissance were notable, they were not typical of the experience of other African American artists of this menstruation.

More significant 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 art movement in Harlem followed a 1919 showroom on the work of Henry Ossawa Tanner at a midtown gallery in New York, and an showroom of African American artists ii years subsequently 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. First in 1926 the Foundation awarded greenbacks prizes for outstanding achievement by African Americans in eight fields, including fine arts. Additionally, from 1928 through 1933, the Harmon Foundation organized an almanac exhibit of African American art.

Place

Situating the Harlem Renaissance in space is almost as circuitous as defining its origins and fourth dimension span. Certainly Harlem is cardinal to the Harlem Renaissance, but it 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 The states, the Caribbean, and the world. Only a scattering 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 period. And yet, Harlem impacted the fine art, music, and writing of nearly all of the participants in the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem refers to that part of Manhattan Island north of Cardinal Park and generally e of Eighth Avenue or St. Nicholas Avenue. Originally established in the seventeenth century as a Dutch hamlet, it evolved over time. Following its looting past the city in 1873, urban growth commenced. The resulting Harlem real estate boom lasted about twenty years during which developers erected near of the physical structures that defined Harlem every bit late as the mid-twentieth century. They designed this new, urban Harlem primarily for the wealthy and the upper heart class; it independent broad avenues, a rail connection to the city on Eighth Avenue, and consisted of expensive homes and luxurious apartment buildings accompanied by commercial and retail structures, along with stately churches and synagogues, clubs, social organizations, and even the Harlem Combo Orchestra.

By 1905, Harlem'due south boom turned into a bosom. Desperate white developers began to sell or rent to African Americans, often at greatly discounted prices, while blackness existent manor firms provided the customers. At this fourth dimension, approximately sixty chiliad 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 blackness population swelled in the twentieth century every bit newcomers from the Southward moved north and every bit redevelopment destroyed existing black neighborhoods, pressure for boosted and hopefully meliorate housing pushed blacks northward up the westward side of Manhattan into Harlem.

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

Twelvemonth by year, the boundaries of black Harlem expanded, equally blacks streamed into Harlem as quickly as they could notice affordable housing. Past 1910, they had get 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 yard. By 1930 black Harlem had expanded n ten blocks to 155th Street and southward to 115th Street; it spread from the Harlem River to Amsterdam Avenue, and housed approximately 164,000 blacks. The core of this customs—divisional roughly by 126th Street on the south, 159th Street on the north, the Harlem River and Park Avenue on the east, and Eighth Avenue on the west—was more than 95 pct blackness.

By 1920, Harlem, by virtue of the sheer size of its black population, had emerged as the virtual capital of black America; its name evoked a magic that lured all classes of blacks from all sections of the land to its streets. Impoverished southern farmers and sharecroppers made their way n, where they were joined in Harlem past black intellectuals such as West. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. Although the quondam blackness social elites of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia were disdainful of Harlem'south vulgar splendor, and while information technology housed no significant black academy as did Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Nashville, Harlem all the same became the race's cultural center and a Mecca for its aspiring immature. It housed the National Urban League, A. Philip Randolph'south Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the black leadership of the NAACP. Marcus Garvey launched his ill-fated black nationalist move among 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 eye 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 also 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 city, such as Alfred A. Knopf, Harper Brothers, and Harcourt Brace, were open up to adding greater diversity to their book lists by including works by African American writers. Past the late nineteenth century, New York City housed Can Pan Alley, the middle of the music publishing manufacture. In the 1920s, when recordings and broadcasting emerged, New York was again in the forefront. Broadway was the epicenter of American theater, and New York was the center of the American art earth. In short, in the early on twentieth century no other American metropolis 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 complex. The give-and-take "Harlem" evoked strong and conflicting images among African Americans during the first one-half of the twentieth century. Was it the Negro metropolis, black Manhattan, the political, cultural, and spiritual center of African America, a country of enough, a city of refuge, or a black ghetto and emerging slum? For some, the image of Harlem was more personal. Male monarch Solomon Gillis, the main character in Rudolph Fisher's "The City of Refuge," was one of these. Emerging out of the subway at 135th and Lennox Avenue, Gillis was transfixed:

Clean air, blueish heaven, vivid sunlight. Gillis ready downwardly his tan-paper-thin extension-instance and wiped his black, shining brow. And then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; up and down Lenox Artery, up and down Ane Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street; large, lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; black ones, 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 up drifting along, simply Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. There was assuredly no dubiousness of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem.⁷

Gillis and so 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'south eyes opened wide; his mouth opened wider. . . . For at that place stood a handsome, brass-buttoned giant directing the heaviest traffic Gillis had e'er seen; halting unnumbered tons of automobiles and trucks and wagons and pushcarts and street-cars; holding them at bay with one manus while he swept like tons peremptorily on with the other; ruling the wide crossing with supreme self-balls; and he, too, was a Negro!

Yet virtually 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 officer's shrill whistle and gruff reproof, saw the commuter'south face turn ruddy and his car draw back like a threatened pup. It was beyond conventionalities—impossible. Black might exist white, but it couldn't be that white!

"Washed died an' woke upward in Heaven," idea King Solomon, watching, fascinated; and after a while, as if the wonder of it were too cracking to believe merely by seeing, "Cullud policemans!" he said, half aloud; then repeated over and over, with greater and greater conviction, "Even got cullud policemans…"^eight

Gillis was i of those who sought refuge in Harlem. He fled Northward Carolina after shooting a white human. Now, in Harlem, the policeman was black. Not that this changed his fate. At the end 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 also something of a refuge. Post-obit a by and large unhappy childhood living at one time or another with his female parent or father, grandmother, or neighbors, Hughes convinced his stern and foreboding male parent to finance his teaching at Columbia University. He recalled his 1921 inflow:

"I went up the steps and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood in that location, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again. I registered at the Y. When college opened, I did not want to motion into the dormitory at Columbia. I really did not want to get the college at all. I didn't want to do anything just live in Harlem, go a job and work there."⁹

Afterward a less than happy year 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 office of the daily experience of almost Harlem residents.

For Hughes, too, the desire to but "live in Harlem" was as much myth every bit reality. Subsequently dropping out of Columbia and moving to Harlem he actually spent little fourth dimension there. Until the belatedly 1930s, he was much more of a visitor or transient in Harlem than a resident. While Hughes spent many weekends and vacations in Harlem during his years at Lincoln Academy, during the summit of the Renaissance, between 1923 and 1938 he was away from the urban center more than he was in that location, more a visitor than a full-time resident.

James Weldon Johnson saw a still different Harlem. In his 1930 book, Black Manhattan, he described the black metropolis in near utopian terms as the race's nifty promise and its grand social experiment: "So hither we take Harlem—non only a colony or a customs or a settlement . . . only a black urban center, located in the eye of white Manhattan, and containing more than Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on earth. It strikes the uninformed observer as a phenomenon, a miracle straight out of the skies."¹⁰ When Johnson looked at Harlem he did not see an emerging slum or a ghetto, but a black neighborhood due north of Primal Park that was "i of the almost cute and healthful" in the city. "Information technology is non a fringe, it is non a slum, nor is it a 'quarter' consisting of dilapidated tenements. It is a section of new-constabulary apartment houses and handsome dwellings, with streets too paved, as well lighted, and besides kept every bit in any other office of the city."¹¹

Without question Harlem was a rapidly growing blackness metropolis, but what kind of city was it becoming? Harlem historian Gilbert Osofsky argued, "the virtually profound change that Harlem experienced in the 1920's was its emergence as a slum. Largely within the infinite of a single decade Harlem was transformed from a potentially ideal community to a neighborhood with manifold social and economic problems called 'deplorable,' 'unspeakable,' 'incredible.'"¹² As a result, most of Harlem's 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, criminal offense, juvenile delinquency, and drug habit.

In short, the 24-hour interval-to-day realities that nigh Harlemites faced differed dramatically from the image of Harlem life presented by James Weldon Johnson. Harlem was aggress with contradictions. While it reflected the self-confidence, militancy, and pride of the New Negro in his or her demand for equality, and it reflected the aspirations and artistic genius of the talented young people of the Harlem Renaissance forth with the economic aspirations of the black migrants seeking a better life in the north, ultimately Harlem failed to resolve its bug and to fulfill these dreams.

The 1935 Harlem Race Riot put to rest the alien images of Harlem. On March 19, 1935, a young Puerto Rican boy was caught stealing a x-cent pocketknife from the counter of a 135th Street five-and-dime shop. Following the arrest, rumors spread that constabulary had browbeaten the youth to decease. A large crowd gathered, shouting "police brutality" and "racial discrimination." A window was smashed, looting began, and the riot spread throughout the night. The violence resulted in three blacks dead, two hundred stores trashed and burned, and more than than two million dollars worth of destroyed property. The Puerto Rican youth whose abort precipitated the riot had been released the previous evening when the merchant chose not to press charges. Shocked by the insurgence, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia established an interracial commission headed by East. Franklin Frazier, a professor of sociology at Howard University, to investigate the anarchism. They concluded the obvious: the riot resulted from a general frustration with racial bigotry and poverty.

What the commission failed to report was that the riot shattered in one case and for all James Weldon Johnson's 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 ground for political action, merely not for art, literature, and culture. Harlem would come across new black writers in the years to come up. Musicians, poets, and artists would continue to make their abode there, but it never again served as the focal indicate of a creative motion with the national and international touch of the Harlem Renaissance.

Johnson did not personally witness the 1935 Riot. He had left the urban center in 1931, the twelvemonth later he published Black Manhattan, to take the Spence Chair in Creative Literature at Fisk University in Nashville. He lived in that location until his death in 1938.

Renaissance

And then, what was the Harlem Renaissance? The simple answer is that the Harlem Renaissance (or the New Negro Movement, or any name is preferred) was the almost important event in twentieth-century African American intellectual and cultural life. While all-time known for its literature, it touched every aspect of African American literary and creative creativity from the finish of World War I through the Great Depression. Literature, critical writing, music, theater, musical theater, and the visual arts were transformed by this movement; it too afflicted politics, social development, and almost every aspect of the African American experience from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s.

But at that place was also something imperceptible about the Harlem Renaissance, something vague and hard to ascertain. The Harlem Renaissance, then, was an African American literary and creative movement anchored in Harlem, merely drawing from, extending to, and influencing African American communities across the country and across. Every bit nosotros have seen, it also had no precise beginning; nor did it have a precise catastrophe. Rather, information technology emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American community that followed World War I, blossomed in the 1920s, and so faded away in the mid-to-late 1930s and early on 1940s.

Likewise the Harlem Renaissance has no single divers ideological or stylistic standard that unified its participants and divers the motility. Instead, virtually participants in the movement resisted black or white efforts to define or narrowly categorize their art. For example, in 1926, a group of writers, spearheaded by writer Wallace Thurman and including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and artist Aaron Douglas, amid others, produced their own literary mag, Burn down!! One purpose of this venture was the declaration of their intent to assume ownership of the literary Renaissance. In the process, they turned their backs on Alain Locke and Westward. E. B. Du Bois and others who sought to channel blackness creativity into what they considered to be the proper aesthetic and political directions. Despite the efforts of Thurman and his young colleagues, Fire!! fizzled out after only ane issue and the movement remained ill defined. In fact, this was its most distinguishing feature. In that location would be no common literary manner or political ideology associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It was far more an identity than an ideology or a literary or artistic school. What united participants was their sense of taking part in a mutual effort and their commitment to giving creative expression to the African American feel.

If in that location was a argument that divers the philosophy of the new literary movement information technology was Langston Hughes's essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," published in The Nation, June 16, 1926:

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to limited 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. Nosotros know nosotros are cute. And ugly likewise. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not their displeasure doesn't matter either. We will build our temples for tomorrow, strong as nosotros know how, and we volition stand on peak of the mount, free within ourselves.¹³

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

There was, not surprisingly, resistance to this independence, specially among those concerned with the political costs that the realistic expressions of black life could engender—feeding white prejudice by exposing the less savory elements of the black community. Du Bois responded to Hughes a few weeks after in a Chicago speech that was later on published in The Crisis every bit "The Criteria of Negro Art" (October 1926): "Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever fine art I take for writing has been used ever for propaganda for gaining the right of blackness folk to love and savor. I do non care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. Simply I exercise intendance when propaganda is confined to ane side while the other is stripped and silent."

The decision of black writers to follow their own artistic vision led to the creative multifariousness that was the chief characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance. This diversity is conspicuously evident in the poetry of the period where subject field matter, fashion, and tone ranged from the traditional to the more inventive. Langston Hughes, for example, captured the life and linguistic communication of the working course, and the rhythm and style of the dejection in a number of his poems, none more than so than "The Weary Blues." In contrast to Hughes's cribbing of the form of blackness music, especially jazz and the blues, and his utilise of the black vernacular, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen utilized more traditional and classical forms for their verse. McKay used sonnets for much of his protest verse, while Cullen's poems relied both on classical literary allusions and symbols and standard poetic forms.

This diverseness and experimentation also characterized music. This was evidenced in the dejection of Bessie Smith and the range of jazz from the early rhythms of Jelly Gyre Morton to the instrumentation of Louis Armstrong or the sophisticated orchestration of Knuckles 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 utilize of bright colors and sharply defined images.

Inside this diversity, several themes emerged which ready the character of the Harlem Renaissance. No blackness writer, musician, or artist expressed all of these themes, only each did address one or more in his or her work. The first of these themes was the effort to recapture the African American by—its rural southern roots, urban experience, and African heritage. Interest in the African past corresponded with the rise of Pan-Africanism in African American politics, which was at the center of Marcus Garvey'due south ideology and too a concern of W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1920s.

It likewise reflected the general fascination with aboriginal African history that followed the discovery of Rex Tut'due 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 fine art. A number of musicians, from the classical composer William Grant Even so to jazz dandy 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, also every bit in Jacob Lawrence'due south art. Zora Neale Hurston used her experience every bit a folklorist as the basis for her extensive study of rural southern blackness life in her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Jacob Lawrence turned to African American history for much of his piece of work including ii of his multi-canvas series' of paintings, the Harriett Tubman series and the ane on the Black Migration.

Harlem Renaissance writers and artists as well explored life in Harlem and other urban centers. Both Hughes and McKay drew on Harlem images for their verse, and McKay used the ghetto as the setting for his commencement novel, Dwelling to Harlem. Some black writers, including McKay and Hughes, as well as Rudolph Fisher and Wallace Thurman, were accused 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 fake of white novelist Carl Van Vechten's controversial Harlem novel, Nigger Sky.

A 3rd major theme addressed by the literature of the Harlem Renaissance was race. Virtually every novel and play, and most of the poetry, explored race in America, especially the impact of race and racism on African Americans. In their simplest class these works protested racial injustice. Claude McKay's sonnet, "If We Must Dice," was among the best of this genre. Langston Hughes as well wrote protest pieces, as did well-nigh every black writer at one time or another.

Among the visual artists, Lawrence's historical series emphasized the racial struggle that dominated African American history, while Romare Bearden's early on illustrative work often focused on racial politics. The struggle against lynching in the mid-1920s stimulated anti-lynching poetry, every bit well equally Walter White'south carefully researched report of the bailiwick, Rope and Faggot. In the early 1930s, the Scottsboro incident stimulated considerable protest writing, too equally a 1934 anthology, Negro, which addressed race in an international context. Most of the literary efforts of the Harlem Renaissance avoided overt protestation or propaganda, focusing instead on the psychological and social bear on of race. Among the best of these studies were Nella Larsen's two novels, Quicksand in 1928 and, a year afterward, 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 like themes in his verse form "Cross," and in his 1931 play, Mulatto, as did Jessie Fauset in her 1929 novel, Plum Bun. That same year Wallace Thurman made color discrimination within the urban black community the focus of his novel, The Blacker the Drupe.

Finally, the Harlem Renaissance incorporated all aspects of African American culture in its creative work. This ranged from the use of black music equally an inspiration for poetry or black folklore as an inspiration for novels and brusque 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 2 collections of black spirituals in 1927 and 1928, and Sterling Dark-brown, who used the dejection and southern piece of work songs in many of the poems in his 1932 book of poesy, Southern Route, connected the exercise that Hughes had initiated. Other writers exploited black organized religion as a literary source. Johnson made the blackness preacher and his sermons the basis for the poems in God's Trombones, while Hurston and Larsen used black religion and black preachers in their novels. Hurston'southward first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), described the exploits of a southern black preacher, while in the last portion of Quicksand, Larsen's heroine was ensnared by faith and a southern black preacher.

Through all of these themes, Harlem Renaissance writers, musicians, and artists were determined to express the African American experience in all of its diverseness and complexity as realistically as possible. This delivery 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 small towns such as in Hughes'south novel, Not Without Laughter, or the witty and biting depiction of Harlem's blackness literati in Wallace Thurman'southward Infants of the Leap.

The Harlem Renaissance appealed to and relied on a mixed audience—the African American middle grade and white consumers of the arts. African American magazines such as The Crunch (the NAACP monthly journal) and Opportunity (the monthly publication of the Urban League) employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staff, published their verse and short stories, and promoted African American literature through articles, reviews, and annual literary prizes. They also printed illustrations past black artists and used black artists in the layout design of their periodicals. Also, blacks attempted to produce their own literary and artistic venues. In addition to the brusk-lived Fire!!, Wallace Thurman spearheaded another unmarried-result literary magazine, Harlem, in 1927, while poet Countee Cullen edited a "Negro Poets" effect of the avant-garde poetry magazine Palms in 1926, and brought out an anthology of African American poetry, Caroling Dusk, in 1927.

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

The relationship of the Harlem Renaissance to white venues and white audiences created controversy. While virtually African American critics strongly supported the movement, others similar Benjamin Brawley and even W. E. B. Du Bois were sharply critical and defendant Renaissance writers of reinforcing negative African American stereotypes. Langston Hughes's assertion that blackness artists intended to express themselves freely, no thing what the black public or white public idea, accurately reflected the attitude of well-nigh writers and artists.

Deadening fade to black

The stop of the Harlem Renaissance is every bit difficult to ascertain as its beginnings. It varies somewhat from one artistic field to another. In musical theater, the popularity of blackness musical reviews died out past the early 1930s, although there were occasional efforts, mostly unsuccessful, to revive the genre. Nevertheless, black performers and musicians continued to work, although not then often in all black shows. Black music connected into the World War Ii era, although the popularity of blues singers waned somewhat, and jazz changed as the big band way became pop. Literature also changed, and a new generation of blackness writers similar 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 continued to work, only once again, with no connectedness to a broader African American motility. Besides, 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 movement. And Harlem lost some of its magic post-obit the 1935 race riot. In whatever case, few, if whatsoever, people were talking near a Harlem Renaissance past 1940.

The Harlem Renaissance flourished in the tardily 1920s and early on 1930s, simply its antecedents and legacy spread many years before 1920 and afterwards 1930. Information technology had no universally recognized proper name, but was known variously as the New Negro Movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, likewise every bit the Harlem Renaissance. Information technology had no conspicuously defined beginning 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, then faded abroad in the mid-1930s.

What was the Harlem Renaissance and why was it of import?

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 determined to truthfully represent the African American experience and believed in racial pride and equality, they shared no mutual political philosophy, social belief, creative style, or aesthetic principle. This was a movement of individuals free of whatsoever overriding manifesto. While central to African American creative and intellectual life, by no ways did information technology savor the full support of the black or white intelligentsia; it generated as much hostility and criticism every bit information technology did support and praise. From the moment of its birth, its legitimacy was debated. Nevertheless, past at least one measure, its success was clear: the Harlem Renaissance was the first fourth dimension that a considerable number of mainstream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously, and it was the first time that African American literature and the arts attracted significant attention from the nation at large.

ⁱCarl Van Doren, "The Younger Generation of Negro Writers," Opportunity 2 (1924): 144–45. Van Doren's Civic Club Dinner accost was reprinted in Opportunity.

² Survey Graphic, Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, 6 (March 1925).

³Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Atheneum, 1969).

^fourRun across 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 Large Sea (New York: Hill 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–viii. The City of Refuge was outset published in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1925.

^eightIbid. 58–9.

⁹Hughes, Large Sea, 81–2.

^xJohnson, Black Manhattan, 3–iv.

^elevenIbid, 146. Johnson also expresses this view of Harlem in "The Making of Harlem," Survey Graphic, half dozen (March 1925), 635–39.

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

¹³Langston Hughes, "The Negro Creative person and the Racial Mountain, The Nation. June 16, 1926, 694.

Song of the Towers by Aaron Douglas for the mural serial Aspects of Negro Life, commissioned in 1934 past the WPA for the Harlem Branch of the New York City Public Library. Schomburg Center for Inquiry in Blackness Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, 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 culture. These websites include primary source documents, lesson plans, photographs, and other interactive elements that will enhance classroom instruction and pupil comprehension.

Portrait of Charles S. Johnson. Johnson was founder of Opportunity, the National Urban League's monthly magazine, and organizer of the Civic Lodge Dinner that marked the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance as a literary motion. U.South. Subcontract Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Prints and Photographs Segmentation, Library of Congress. Photograph by Gordon Parks.

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

The bandage of Shuffle Forth, 1921.

Canvas music for "I'yard Merely Wild About Harry" from Shuffle Along, the beginning Broadway musical written, produced, and performed past African Americans, by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Music Sectionalization, Library of Congress. Copyright deposit, 1921 (155.3b).

Blues composer and musician W. C. Handy (left) with bandleader and composer Duke Ellington (correct), ca. 1940s. Schomburg Center for Research in Blackness Civilization, Photographs and Prints Segmentation, New York Public Library.

Sheet music for "Goodnight Angeline" by James Reese Europe, 1919. The photographs on the embrace show Europe with the 369th U.South. Infantry Segmentation "Hell Fighters" Ring. Performing Arts Encyclopedia, Library of Congress.

The Prodigal Son past Aaron Douglas in God's Trombones: Seven 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 Fine 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 work. Gift of the Avalon Foundation. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

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

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

Within thirty seconds walk of the 135th Street Branch (New York Public Library), Harlem, 1919. Photo by F. F. Hopper. Schomburg Eye for Research in Blackness Civilisation, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.

In Black Manhattan (1930), James Weldon Johnson's history of African Americans in New York, two demographic maps of Harlem testify its quick flourishing in the early on decades of the twentieth century. Harry Ransom Eye.

From left to right: Langston Hughes, Charles South. Johnson, Eastward. 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' laurels, 1924. Schomburg Center for Research in Blackness Culture, Photographs and Prints Partitioning, New York Public Library.

Lenox Avenue in Harlem, ca. 1920s.

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

Portrait of Langston Hughes as a young human. Photograph by James L. Allen. Schomburg Heart for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.

Portrait of James Weldon Johnson, Dec iii, 1932. Photo past Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Drove, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Report to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia by the interracial committee headed by Due east. Franklin Frazier assigned to investigate the March 19, 1935, anarchism in Harlem. Library of Congress.

Harlem Bang-up by Miguel Covarrubias, 1927. Covarrubias, a Mexican painter, caricaturist, illustrator, ethnologist, and art historian, had a deep appreciation for the people of Harlem. His 1927 volume, Negro Drawings, reflected his involvement in Harlem performers and people on the street. Harry Ransom Center.

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

The front end and back covers of the first and only issue of Fire!!, published in 1926, with artwork by Aaron Douglas. Harry Ransom Center.

Portrait of Due west. E. B. Du Bois, May 31, 1919. Prints and Photographs Partitioning, Library of Congress.

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

Portrait of Countee Cullen in Central Park, June twenty, 1941. Photo past Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Grit cover for Passing by Nella Larsen, published in 1928. Harry Ransom Eye.

Portrait of Jessie Redmon Fauset, n.d. Harmon Foundation Records, Manuscript Sectionalisation, Library of Congress.

W. E. B. Du Bois (back right) and staff in the Crunch magazine office, due north.d. Schomburg Heart for Enquiry in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.

Advertisement for the Cotton wool Gild featuring Cab Calloway and his Cotton wool Social club Orchestra, 1925. Schomburg Centre for Research in Blackness Civilization, Photographs and Prints Sectionalisation, New York Public Library.

Portrait of writer Richard Wright, June 23, 1939. Ralph Ellison served as all-time man at Wright'southward wedding this aforementioned yr. Photograph past Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Cover of the October 1928 issue of The Negro American with photo of Miss Erma Sweatt, sister of ceremonious-rights activist Heman Sweatt. The Negro American was a Harlem Renaissance era mag published in San Antonio, Texas, that declared itself to exist "the only magazine in the South devoted to Negro life and culture." This particular issue includes a review of Rudolph Fisher'south novel The Walls of Jericho (page 13). Courtesy of Michael L. Gillette.