Understanding & Avoiding Plagiarism Quiz

Read the paragraph about the Harlem Renaissance below and the source
material attached to this quiz. Each of the numbered sentences is a potential
example of plagiarism. On your answer sheet, mark the answer that best
corresponds to your diagnosis.

The Harlem Renaissance was a new movement of African American

musicians, writers, and artists who migrated from the southern United States
to the north. The movement took place in large cities around the country,
but it was located mainly in the New York neighborhood of Harlem. [1]
There were many factors that contributed to the movement, “the
most important historical factors that contributed to the emergence
of the Harlem Renaissance were World War I and the Great
Migration.” During World War I, many solders left to battle; the country had
high demand for jobs related to the manufacturing of weapons. Many African
Americans served in the military in the war or came from the South to fill
vital positions left open in the North as a result of the war effort. [2] Often
given one-way rail tickets by industrial recruiters to enable them to come and help end the
labor shortage in the North, African Americans arrived in cities by the thousands; by 1930,
the African American population in the North had increased by 60 percent. The new art
created during this movement expressed the deep feelings and culture of
the African Americans; they finally developed a new identity, a hope that
they never experienced in the south since they were repressed. [3] This
spiritual rebirth manifested itself in poetry, prose, drama, art, and music, in salons
attended by intellectuals and artists, in publishing concerns, and in successful periodicals
like The Crisis and Opportunity. Langston Hughes documents some of the rebirth
in his poem “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” [4] In this poem,
the speaker is an African American poet who wanted to not be
identified by his race. Hughes felt ashamed for him, stating, “so I
am ashamed for the black poet who says, ‘I want to be a poet, not a
Negro poet,’ as though his own racial world was not as interesting
as any other world.” The Harlem Renaissance not only included new
ideas, it also included new forms of art adapted from African American
culture. [5] According to “The Literature of the Harlem Renaissance,”
“many of the writers incorporated elements of folk culture, humor,
oral tradition, song and spirituals into their works.” Such happenings
and evolution of this movement make the Harlem Renaissance vital to
American history.

The Harlem Renaissance was a major cultural movement that took place in
Harlem, in New York City, mainly in the 1910s and 1920s. It was
characterized by racial consciousness and solidarity among African American
and Caribbean American writers, artists, and musicians, widespread

1
opportunities for publishing and performance, and a growing awareness in
the outside world of the "Negro Renaissance" or "New Negro" movement,
as it was also known. Perhaps the most important historical factors that
contributed to the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance were World War I
and the Great Migration. Many Black Americans served in the military in the
war, or came from the South to fill vital positions left open in the North as a
result of the war effort; they stayed on in such cities as New York, Chicago,
Detroit, and Philadelphia in the hope of more equality and opportunity. The
Great Migration refers to the shift in population in this same period from the
rural, agricultural South to the urban, industrial North. Often given one-way
rail tickets by industrial recruiters to enable them to come and alleviate the
labor shortage in the North, Blacks arrived in cities by the thousands; by
1930, the Black population in the North had increased by sixty percent.
There were, as a result, riots in the South protesting the decimation of the
labor force, as well as riots in many Northern cities to protest the
immigration of Blacks. The newly founded National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League
helped to build confidence in the new arrivals and also offered material
assistance. With the advent of the Great Depression and the 1930s,
however, the Harlem Renaissance was mostly over.

In 1925 Alain Locke published The New Negro: An Interpretation, announcing

that Black people of the era had achieved a new sense of identity,
consciousness, and pride, freed of the burden of enforced inferiority and self-
hatred. This spiritual rebirth manifested itself in poetry, prose, drama, art,
and music, in salons attended by intellectuals and artists, in publishing
concerns, and in successful periodicals like The Crisis and Opportunity. Many
of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance incorporated elements of folk
culture, humor, oral tradition, song, and spirituals into their works, but they
also participated in wider literary movements like realism and modernism.
Moreover, there were tensions and ideological disagreements among the
authors of the Harlem Renaissance themselves. For example, individual
interests sometimes conflicted with communal ones, and financial concerns
outweighed artistic goals. Countee Cullen insisted that the Black poet is part
of the universal community of all poets, while Langston Hughes asserted his
unique racial qualities. W. E. B. Du Bois favored melodramatic theatrical
plays used as a propaganda tool to show the "worthiness" of Blacks, while
other writers considered these demeaning and outmoded. Female writers
such as Marita Bonner, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesse Redmon Fauset, Nella
Larsen, and Georgia Douglas Johnson explored issues that pertained
specifically to the position of women within the Harlem Renaissance and
called attention to the fact that Locke's "New Negro" presented a mostly
male model.

Critical interest in the Harlem Renaissance has continued unabated over

the successive decades and has in the contemporary period taken new
approaches--ranging from Black diaspora studies, feminism, and queer
theory--to reassessments of the movement's authors and works. Charles

2
Scruggs discusses Nella Larsen's and Rudolph Fisher's treatments,
respectively, of human sexuality as a powerful force for both good or evil. In
the area of Harlem Renaissance poetry, Abu Shardow Abarry (see Further
Reading) points out how Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay
worked toward an Afrocentric aesthetic, while Hartmut Grandel traces the
influence of the Black folklore tradition on Hughes's poetry, and Keith D.
Leonard charts how contradictory social and individual aesthetic impulses
shaped Harlem Renaissance poetry. Debate about the place of women in
the Harlem Renaissance has remained a lively one and continues to be
examined by critics, including Patricia R. Schroeder, who reviews the
contributions of the female realist playwrights of the period.

3
Source: Harlem Renaissance entry on Wikipedia

Origins

The Harlem Renaissance grew out of the changes that had taken place in the African
American community since the abolition of slavery. These accelerated as a consequence of
World War I and the great social and cultural changes in early 20th century United States.
Industrialization was attracting people to cities from rural areas and gave rise to a new mass
culture. Contributing factors leading to the Harlem Renaissance were the Great Migration of
African Americans to northern cities, which concentrated ambitious people in places where
they could encourage each other, and the First World War, which had created new industrial
work opportunities for tens of thousands of people. Factors leading to the decline of this era
include the Great Depression.

Until the end of the Civil War, the majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived
in the South. Immediately after the end of slavery, the emancipated African Americans
began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural self-
determination. By the late 1870s, conservative whites managed to regain power in the
South. From 1890 to 1908 they proceeded to pass legislation that disenfranchised most
Negros and many poor whites, trapping them without representation. They established
white supremacist regimes of Jim Crow segregation in the South and one-party block voting
behind southern Democrats. The conservative whites denied African Americans their
exercise of civil and political rights. The region's reliance on an agricultural economy
continued to limit opportunities for most people. Negros were exploited as share croppers
and laborers. As life in the South became increasingly difficult, African Americans began to
migrate North in great number.

Most of the African-American literary movement arose from a generation that had lived
through the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. Sometimes
their parents or grandparents had been slaves. Their ancestors had sometimes benefited by
paternal investment in social capital, including better-than-average education. Many in the
Harlem Renaissance were part of the Great Migration out of the South into the Negro
neighborhoods of the North and Midwest. African Americans sought a better standard of
living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the South. Others were people of African
descent from racially stratified communities in the Caribbean who came to the United States
hoping for a better life. Uniting most of them was their convergence in Harlem, New York
City.

Despite the increasing popularity of Negro culture, virulent white racism, often by more
recent ethnic immigrants, continued to impact African-American communities, even in the
North. After the end of World War I, many African American soldiers—who fought in
segregated units like the Harlem Hellfighters—came home to a nation whose citizens often
did not respect their accomplishments. Race riots and other civil uprisings occurred
throughout the US during the Red Summer of 1919, reflecting economic competition over
jobs and housing in many cities, as well as tensions over social territories.

4
Source:"Literature of the Harlem Renaissance." Twentieth-Century
Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J.
Trudeau. Vol. 218. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center.
Web. 20 Dec. 2010.
Introduction

The Harlem Renaissance was a major cultural movement that took place in Harlem, in New
York City, mainly in the 1910s and 1920s. It was characterized by racial consciousness and
solidarity among African American and Caribbean American writers, artists, and musicians,
widespread opportunities for publishing and performance, and a growing awareness in the
outside world of the "Negro Renaissance" or "New Negro" movement, as it was also known.
Perhaps the most important historical factors that contributed to the emergence of the
Harlem Renaissance were World War I and the Great Migration. Many Black Americans
served in the military in the war, or came from the South to fill vital positions left open in the
North as a result of the war effort; they stayed on in such cities as New York, Chicago,
Detroit, and Philadelphia in the hope of more equality and opportunity. The Great Migration
refers to the shift in population in this same period from the rural, agricultural South to the
urban, industrial North. Often given one-way rail tickets by industrial recruiters to enable
them to come and alleviate the labor shortage in the North, Blacks arrived in cities by the
thousands; by 1930, the Black population in the North had increased by sixty percent. There
were, as a result, riots in the South protesting the decimation of the labor force, as well as
riots in many Northern cities to protest the immigration of Blacks. The newly founded
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban
League helped to build confidence in the new arrivals and also offered material assistance.
With the advent of the Great Depression and the 1930s, however, the Harlem Renaissance
was mostly over.

In 1925 Alain Locke published The New Negro: An Interpretation, announcing that Black
people of the era had achieved a new sense of identity, consciousness, and pride, freed of
the burden of enforced inferiority and self-hatred. This spiritual rebirth manifested itself in
poetry, prose, drama, art, and music, in salons attended by intellectuals and artists, in
publishing concerns, and in successful periodicals like The Crisis and Opportunity. Many of
the writers of the Harlem Renaissance incorporated elements of folk culture, humor, oral
tradition, song, and spirituals into their works, but they also participated in wider literary
movements like realism and modernism. Moreover, there were tensions and ideological
disagreements among the authors of the Harlem Renaissance themselves. For example,
individual interests sometimes conflicted with communal ones, and financial concerns
outweighed artistic goals. Countee Cullen insisted that the Black poet is part of the universal
community of all poets, while Langston Hughes asserted his unique racial qualities. W. E. B.
Du Bois favored melodramatic theatrical plays used as a propaganda tool to show the
"worthiness" of Blacks, while other writers considered these demeaning and outmoded.
Female writers such as Marita Bonner, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesse Redmon Fauset, Nella
Larsen, and Georgia Douglas Johnson explored issues that pertained specifically to the
position of women within the Harlem Renaissance and called attention to the fact that
Locke's "New Negro" presented a mostly male model.

Critical interest in the Harlem Renaissance has continued unabated over the successive
decades and has in the contemporary period taken new approaches--ranging from Black
diaspora studies, feminism, and queer theory--to reassessments of the movement's authors
and works. Charles Scruggs discusses Nella Larsen's and Rudolph Fisher's treatments,
respectively, of human sexuality as a powerful force for both good or evil. In the area of
Harlem Renaissance poetry, Abu Shardow Abarry (see Further Reading) points out how
Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay worked toward an Afrocentric aesthetic,
while Hartmut Grandel traces the influence of the Black folklore tradition on Hughes's
poetry, and Keith D. Leonard charts how contradictory social and individual aesthetic
5
impulses shaped Harlem Renaissance poetry. Debate about the place of women in the
Harlem Renaissance has remained a lively one and continues to be examined by critics,
including Patricia R. Schroeder, who reviews the contributions of the female realist
playwrights of the period.

6
NAME_______________________________________________________________________
_____

Answer Sheet

Choose the statement that best describes the corresponding

sentence in the paragraph on page 1.

1. A. This sentence contains plagiarism because the author used ideas

that were not her own.

B. This sentence contains plagiarism because the source of the

information is not identified.

C. This sentence contains plagiarism because the author quoted the

source and did not put the information in her own words.

D. There is no plagiarism in this sentence because source material is

properly quoted.

2. A. This sentence contains plagiarism because the author quoted the

source and did not put the information in her own words.

B. This sentence contains plagiarism because the source of the

information is not identified.

C. This sentence contains plagiarism because the author used nearly

identical wording to the source and did not quote it, paraphrase it, or
give credit to it.

D. There is no plagiarism in this sentence because the author was told

to use the article for research, and the author paraphrased the
material.

3. A. This sentence contains plagiarism because the author quoted the

source and did not put the information in her own words.

B. There is no plagiarism in this sentence because the author was told

to use the article for research, and the author paraphrased the
material.

C. This sentence contains plagiarism because the author used ideas

that were not her own.

7
D. This sentence contains plagiarism because the author used nearly
identical wording to the source and did not quote it, paraphrase it, or
give credit to it.

8
4. A. There is no plagiarism in this sentence because source material is
properly quoted and attribution is given to the author.

B. This sentence contains plagiarism because the author used ideas

that were not her own.

C. This sentence contains plagiarism because the author quoted the

source and did not put the information in her own words.

D. This sentence contains plagiarism because the source of the

information is not identified.

5. A. This sentence contains plagiarism because the author used ideas

that were not her own.

B. There is no plagiarism in this sentence because source material is

properly quoted and attribution is given to the source.

C. This sentence contains plagiarism because the author quoted the

source and did not put the information in her own words.

D. This sentence contains plagiarism because the source of the

information is not identified.