THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE.

The Harlem Renaissance is a period in American history marked by an explosion of

expression by African-American and Caribbean writers, visual artists and musicians. This
period was an artistic movement that lasted roughly from 1918 to 1937 and centred in the
Harlem neighbourhood of Manhattan in New York City. The movement led to the
development of Harlem as the heart of an explosive revival of African American arts and
culture, including but not limited to, literature, art, music, theatre, politics and fashion.

Black writers, artists and scholars sought to redefine 'the Negro' in the cultural
consciousness, moving away from racial stereotypes created by a white-dominant society.
The Harlem Renaissance formed an invaluable foundation for developing African American
literature and consciousness through to the Civil Rights movement that happened decades
later.

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express 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. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.”

('The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' (1926), Langston Hughes)

Established and supported by organisations such as the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL), Harlem
Renaissance artists explored themes such as legacy, racism, oppression, alienation, rage,
hope and pride through the creation of novels, essays, plays, and poetry.

In its 20-year span, Harlem Renaissance writers created an authentic voice for African-
Americans that showed their humanity and desire for equality in the United States' society.

BACKGROUND

Until the end of the Civil War, the majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived
in the South. During the Reconstruction Era, the emancipated African Americans began to
strive for civic participation, political equality, and economic and cultural self-determination.
Soon after the end of the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 gave rise to speeches by
African-American Congressmen addressing this Bill. By 1875, sixteen African Americans
had been elected and served in Congress and gave numerous speeches with their
newfound civil empowerment
The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 was followed by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875,
part of Reconstruction legislation by Republicans. During the mid-to-late 1870s, racist whites
organised in the Democratic Party launched a murderous campaign of racist terrorism to
regain political power throughout the South. From 1890 to 1908, they proceeded to pass
legislation that disenfranchised most African Americans 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.
Democratic Party politicians conspired to deny African Americans their exercise of civil and
political rights by terrorizing black communities with lynch mobs and other forms of vigilante
violence as well as by instituting a convict labor system that forced many thousands of
African Americans back into unpaid labor in mines, plantations and on public works projects
such as roads and levees. Convict labourers were typically subject to brutal forms of
corporal punishment, overwork and disease from unsanitary conditions. Death rates were
extraordinarily high. While a small number of African Americans were able to acquire land
shortly after the Civil War, most were exploited as sharecroppers. Whether sharecropping or
on their own acreage, most of the black population was closely financially dependent on
agriculture. This added another impetus for the Migration: The arrival of the boll weevil. The
beetle eventually came to waste 8% of the country's cotton yield annually and thus
disproportionately impacted this part of America's citizenry. As life in the South became
increasingly difficult, African Americans began to migrate north in great numbers.

HARLEM
During the early portion of the 20th century, Harlem was the destination for migrants from
around the country, attracting both people from the South seeking work and an educated
class who made the area a center of culture, as well as a growing "Negro" middle class.
These people were looking for a fresh start in life and this was a good place to go. The
district had originally been developed in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for the
white middle and upper middle classes; its affluent beginnings led to the development of
stately houses, grand avenues, and world-class amenities such as the Polo Grounds and the
Harlem Opera House. During the enormous influx of European immigrants in the late 19th
century, the once exclusive district was abandoned by the white middle class, who moved
farther north.
Harlem became an African-American neighbourhood in the early 1900s. In 1910, a large
block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various African-American realtors
and a church group. Many more African Americans arrived during the First World War. The
Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans to cities such as
Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and New York.
Despite the increasing popularity of Negro culture, virulent white racism, often by more
recent ethnic immigrants, continued to affect African-American communities, even in the
North. After the end of World War I, many African-American soldiers—who fought in
segregated units such as the Harlem Hellfighters—came home to a nation whose citizens
often did not respect their accomplishments. Race riots and other civil uprisings occurred
throughout the United States during the Red Summer of 1919, reflecting economic
competition over jobs and housing in many cities, as well as tensions over social territories.

Leaders of the Harlem Renaissance

● Musicians and Performers — Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith

● Artists — Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, Augusta Savage

● Writers — Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston

● Philosophers and Activists — Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B.

Du Bois

CHARACTERISTICS

Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride that came to be
represented in the idea of the New Negro, who through intellect and production of literature,
art and music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes to promote progressive
or socialist politics, and racial and social integration. The creation of art and literature would
serve to "uplift" the race.
There would be no uniting form singularly characterising the art that emerged from the
Harlem Renaissance. Rather, it encompassed a wide variety of cultural elements and styles,
including a Pan-African perspective, "high-culture" and "low-culture" or "low-life", from the
traditional form of music to the blues and jazz, traditional and new experimental forms in
literature such as modernism and the new form of jazz poetry. This duality meant that
numerous African-American artists came into conflict with conservatives in the black
intelligentsia, who took issue with certain depictions of black life.
Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of
the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk traditions on black identity, the
effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for elite white
audiences, and the question of how to convey the experience of modern black life in the
urban North.
The Harlem Renaissance was one of primarily African-American involvement. It rested on a
support system of black patrons and black-owned businesses and publications. However, it
also depended on the patronage of white Americans, such as Carl Van Vechten and
Charlotte Osgood Mason, who provided various forms of assistance, opening doors which
otherwise might have remained closed to the publication of work outside the black American
community. This support often took the form of patronage or publication. Carl Van Vechten
was one of the most noteworthy white Americans involved with the Harlem Renaissance. He
allowed for assistance to the black American community because he wanted racial
sameness.
Interest in African-American lives also generated experimental but lasting collaborative work,
such as the all-black productions of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess, and Virgil
Thomson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts. In both productions the choral
conductor Eva Jessye was part of the creative team. The music world also found white band
leaders defying racist attitudes to include the best and the brightest African-American stars
of music and song in their productions.
The African Americans used art to prove their humanity and demand for equality. The
Harlem Renaissance led to more opportunities for blacks to be published by mainstream
houses. Many authors began to publish novels, magazines and newspapers during this time.
The new fiction attracted a great amount of attention from the nation at large.
Richard Bruce Nugent (1906–1987), who wrote "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade", made an
important contribution, especially in relation to experimental form and LGBT themes in the
period.
The Harlem Renaissance helped lay the foundation for the post-World War II protest
movement of the Civil Rights movement. Moreover, many black artists who rose to creative
maturity afterward were inspired by this literary movement.
The Renaissance was more than a literary or artistic movement, as it possessed a certain
sociological development—particularly through a new racial consciousness—through ethnic
pride, as seen in the Back to Africa movement led by Jamaican Marcus Garvey.

https://exhibitions.lib.udel.edu/issues-and-debates-in-african-american-literature/home/the-
harlem-renaissance/
https://www.thoughtco.com/literary-timeline-of-harlem-renaissance-45420
https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/2961769/edit