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Harlem Renaissance

American Decades | Date: 2001

HARLEM RENAISSANCE

HARLEM RENAISSANCE HIGH SPOTS

1920

Brownie's Book —first issue of magazine for black children; edited by W. E. B. Du Bois and Jessie Redmon Fauset.

1921

Shuffle Along —first all-black Broadway show; score by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake includes "Love Will Find a Way" and "I'm Just Wild About Harry."

The Light —weekly black newspaper—begins publication; subsequently renamed Heebie Jeebies.

1922

The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson.

1923

Cotton Club nightclub opens.

Opportunity —first issue of magazine sponsored by the Urban League.

Runnin Wild —black musical produced on Broadway.

1924

Publication of Jean Toomer's Cane.

Publication of There Is Confusion by Jessie Redmon Fauset.

1925

The Book of American Ntgro Spirituals, edited by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson.

Small's Paradise nightclub opens.

Publication of The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke.

1926

Savoy Ballroom opens.

Fire!! —only one issue published, edited by Wallace Thurman.

Encore —first issue.

Publication of Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues.

Arthur Schomburg's collection of African American books is acquired by The New York Public Library.

1927

Plays of Negro Life, edited by Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory.

Publication of Langston Hughes's Fine Clothes to the Jew.

Publication of James Weldon Johnson's God's Trom-bones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse.

Death of Florence Mills; 57,000 people pay their respect.

1928

Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life —only one issue published, edited by Wallace Thurman.

Publication of Claude McKay's novel Home to Harlem.

Blackbirds of 1928 stars Florence Mills.

Fats Waller and Andy Razaf's Keep Sbufflin' produced at Connie's Inn.

1929

Wallace Thurman's play Harlem produced on Broadway.

Publication of Wallace Thurman's novel The Blacker the Berry.

Harlem

In 1925 a New York Herald Tribune article announced, "we are on the edge, if not in the midst, of what might not improperly be called a Negro Renaissance." The causes of this renaissance—as with all such movements—were financial and educational. Blacks participated in the postwar prosperity—although to a much lesser extent than did whites—and the young generation of literate and literary blacks made the best of it. Many of the most gifted gravitated to a center of black population north of 125th Street in Upper Manhattan that gave its name to the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem nightlife attracted white audiences, and black culture began to receive serious critical attention from white intellectuals.

Locke and Van Vechten

The movement was shaped significantly by the influence of Alain Locke, a Howard University philosopher, the first black Rhodes Scholar, and editor of The New Negro, in whose pages were published many of the best and most influential essays of the decade, and by Carl Van Vechten, a white editor and patron who became both literary patron and close friend to many of the best black writers of the period, including Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Desegregating the Arts

The Harlem Renaissance is generally considered to have begun in 1917, when two events marked a turning point for black literary and artistic achievement: Seven Arts became the first desegregated white magazine in the twentieth century by publishing three poems by Claude McKay, and for the first time there were plays with black casts on Broadway, with three by white dramatist Ridgely Torrence.

Writers

The brilliant achievements of black composers and musicians often deflected attention from the literary aspects of the movement. Nevertheless, literature became the focal point of the movement, and though, among the writers, only Langston Hughes became a familiar name, the fleet of young novelists and poets launched by the renaissance wrote a body of enduring works of American literature. The roll is stunning: biracial novelist and poet Jean Toomer; poet Hughes; poet Countee Cullen; novelist and poet McKay; writer and editor Jessie Fauset; novelist and folk anthropologist Hurston; novelist Nella Larson; poet and novelist Arna Bontemps; novelist and editor Wallace Thurman.

Hughes

Accomplished as a writer of fiction and drama, but known most extensively for his poetry, Hughes published his first great poem, and still perhaps his most anthologized, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," in 1921 at age nineteen. His two poetry collections published in the 1920s were The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).

Cullen

Cullen, sometimes called the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, was the most popular black poet of his time. His poetry frequently addressed issues relating to social marginality, such as race, religious hypocrisy, and homosexuality. He published his first, and many think his best, collection, Color, in 1925. Other collections published during the 1920s are Copper Sun (1927), The Ballad of the Brown Girl: An Old Ballad Retold '(1927), and The Black Christ, and Other Poems (1929).

McKay

McKay was second only to Langston Hughes in his influence on the Harlem Renaissance. He is principally remembered for his realistic novel Home to Harlem (1928), primarily because its portrayal of black life prompted sharp criticism from W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Praise for the novel was widespread; it was awarded the medal of the Institute of Arts and Sciences. McKay, who had immigrated to the United States in 1914 from Jamaica, returned to Jamaica in 1922. His poetry volumes published in the 1920s are Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920) and Harlem Shadows (1922). He was posthumously proclaimed national poet of Jamaica.

Toomer

Toomer, though not as influential as other participants in the movement, was a creative force with his remarkable first novel, Cane (1923). The work, generally considered the first novel of the Harlem Renaissance, was a series of stories and poems held together by thematic similarities and a poetic style.

Women Writers

The contributions of women writers, important in the movement during their time, have lately been rediscovered. Fauset was editor of The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP. In that role she published much of the earliest and best work by Harlem Renaissance writers. Her own 1920s novels—This is Confusion (1924) and Plum Bun (1928)—were influenced by realism. By the time of her death in 1961, she had published more novels than any other Harlem Renaissance writer. Hurston's best-known work and first novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937, but her flamboyant personality and impressive early works made her a memorable figure in Harlem during the renaissance. Larson, like Toomer of mixed racial heritage, frequently dealt with issues of identity. Her best-known works, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), led to her receiving the Harmon Medal in 1929 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930, the first black woman so honored in creative writing.

Bontemps and Thurman

Bontemps, like Hurston, was an emerging voice throughout the 1920s but is best known for his novels written in the 1930s. Thurman was influential in his promotion of black artists and is perhaps best remembered as the driving spirit behind (and editor of) Fire!! (1926), a remarkable literary journal, published only once.

Termination

The movement began to lose its energy with the Great Depression, when many of the black publications folded and as many as 25 percent of Harlem's residents were unemployed. Eventually artistic fervor gave way to social anger, and by the mid 1930s the level of artistic production among writers associated with the movement had dwindled significantly. Among the many talented writers of the period, only Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston enjoyed general readership into the 1940s.

Sources:

The Harlem Renaissance: An Historical Dictionary of the Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984);

Nathan Irving Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977);

Huggins, ed., Voices from the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Copyright 2001, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.