Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance. Known also as the Negro Renaissance or the New Negro movement, this artistic and sociocultural awakening among African‐Americans was a national phenomenon, reverberating through many urban centers. Viewed by some scholars as a distinctly African‐American experiment in modernism and/or cultural pluralism, it found many outlets, from literature, painting, and sculpture to jazz, dance, and Broadway shows.

Though it peaked in 1923–1929, the movement can be dated from the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, the outbreak of World War I in 1914, or the publication of Claude McKay's poem Harlem Dancer in 1917 to as late as 1937, when Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God, or 1940, when Richard Wright's Native Son introduced a harsh new realism into black writing. Politically, it was part of a continuing response—which included the 1905 Niagara Movement and the NAACP—to the failure of Booker T. Washington's accommodationism to reverse the black disfranchisement that began after Reconstruction and extended through the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision and beyond.

The issues the renaissance addressed had been confronted by earlier writers such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles W. Chesnutt. But Jazz Age Harlem, the capital of black America and “the greatest Negro city in the world” (Alain Locke), came to epitomize the larger changes transforming African‐American life and art. blacks from throughout the United States, the West Indies, and even Africa interacted to produce a race‐conscious community of unprecedented sophistication in this northern Manhattan neighborhood. Harlem‐based civil rights organizations included the NAACP; the National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph's all‐black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids; and, perhaps most important, Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).

While UNIA's celebration of blackness and of Africa stirred race pride and self‐assertion among the demoralized urban black masses, the Harlem Renaissance represented the educated, middle‐class blacks' response to the same realities that drew the poor to Garvey. Extending the racial, cultural, and political thinking of the New Negro movement to art, music, and literature, the renaissance found outlets in such periodicals as the NAACP's Crisis, the Urban League's Opportunity, and Randolph's Messenger, as well as such general‐circulation magazines as the Nation, New Republic, and Saturday Review. It gained great visibility through the New Negro (1925), an anthology edited by the Howard University philosophy professor Alain Locke (1886–1954), who also helped young writers secure contracts and in general acted as “midwife” to the movement. W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White of the NAACP, and the Marxist editor Victor F. Calverton provided mentoring and support. Jessie Redmon Fauset, literary editor of the Crisis, modulated and broadened Du Bois's genteel and propagandistic approach to the arts. The urban sociologist Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity, stressed the importance of the great migration from rural South to urban North and encouraged black writing “which shakes itself free of deliberate propaganda and protest.” A'Lelia Walker's elegant Dark Towers;—satirized as Niggerati Manor in Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring (1935)—proved a popular meeting place. The white writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) helped young black writers find publishers, but the success of his novel about Harlem, Nigger Heaven (1926), demonstrating the commercial possibilities of the primitivistic formula, arguably made it harder for some black writers to find their distinctive voice. Wealthy and well‐meaning white patrons could prove stifling as well, as Langston Hughes recalled in his memoir The Big Sea (1940).

But writers as diverse as McKay, Hughes, Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, Nella Larsen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, George Schuyler, Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Dorothy West did achieve a measure of artistic freedom. Inspired by little magazines such as Fire!! and by works like Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), Marita Bonner's On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored (1925), Hughes's Weary Blues and The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (both 1926), and McKay's Home to Harlem (1928), these and other writers helped define the Harlem Renaissance. So, too, did musicians, artists, and performers such as the actor Paul Robeson, the sculptor Aaron Douglas, the tenor Roland Hayes, the jazz artist Duke Ellington, the blues singer Bessie Smith (1894–1937), and scores of others.

The Harlem Renaissance stimulated fruitful controversy over basic aesthetic issues, the racial matrix of artistic expression, and such latter‐day concepts as “Black Aesthetic” and cultural nationalism. Even if its participants felt ambivalent about their endeavors, and conflicted in their feelings about race and art, the movement they created remains a vitally important landmark in African American—and American—cultural history.
See also Modernist Culture; New York City; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Nathan Huggins , Harlem Renaissance, 1971.
Amritjit Singh , The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance, 1976.
David Levering Lewis , When Harlem Was in Vogue, 1987.
Houston A. Baker , Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 987.
Amritjit Singh et al., eds. The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, 1989.
Cheryl A. Wall , Women of the Harlem Renaissance, 1995.
George Hutchinson , The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 1995.
Mark Helbling , The Harlem Renaissance: The One and the Many, 1999.

Amritjit Singh