Harlem Renaissance

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918–1935) was a blossoming of African American creative arts associated with the larger New Negro movement, a multifaceted phenomenon that helped set the directions African American writers and artists would pursue throughout the twentieth century. The social foundations of the movement included the Great Migration of African Americans from rural to urban spaces and from South to North, dramatically rising levels of literacy, and the development of national organizations dedicated to pressing African American civil rights (the NAACP), “uplifting” the race and opening up socioeconomic opportunities (the National Urban League), and developing race pride, including Pan-African sensibilities and programs (the United Negro Improvement Association and the Pan-African conferences). Black exiles and expatriates from the Caribbean and Africa crossed paths in metropoles like New York and Paris following World War I (1914–1918) and had an invigorating influence on each other that gave the broader “Negro renaissance” (as it was then known) a profoundly important international cast.

The term Harlem Renaissance, which became popular in later years, particularly after the term Negro lost currency, derives from the fact that Harlem served as a symbolic capital of the cultural awakening, a dynamic crucible of cultural cross-fertilization, and a highly popular nightlife destination. Harlem was a relatively new black neighborhood becoming virtually a black city just north of Central Park, and it attracted a remarkable concentration of intellect and talent. More “liberal” in matters of race than most American cities (although, of course, racism was rampant), New York had an extraordinarily diverse and decentered black social world in which no one group could monopolize cultural authority, making it a particularly fertile place for cultural experimentation. Moreover, being situated in New York—the publishing capital of the Western Hemisphere, one of the world’s great ports, and the financial as well as cultural capital of the United States—put Harlem in a strategic position for developing black arts and sending them out to the world. Few of the well-known black writers or artists were born in Harlem, but almost all of them passed through it, were inspired by it, or achieved their reputations in part because of what happened there.

The Harlem Renaissance took place at a time when European and white American writers and artists were particularly interested in African American artistic production, in part because of their interest in the “primitive.” Modernist primitivism was a multifaceted phenomenon partly inspired by Freudian psychology, but it tended to extol so-called “primitive” peoples as enjoying a more direct and authentic relationship to the natural world and to simple human feeling than so-called “over-civilized” whites. They therefore were presumed by some to hold the key to the renovation of the arts. Early in the twentieth century, European avant-garde artists including Pablo Picasso (1881–1974) had been inspired in part by African masks to break from earlier representational styles toward abstraction in painting and sculpture. The prestige of these revolutionary experiments caused African American intellectuals to look on African artistic traditions with new appreciation and to imagine new forms of self-representation, a desire reinforced by rising interest in black history. Black History Week, now Black History Month, was first celebrated in 1928 at the instigation of the historian Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950).

The interest in black heritage coincided with a general interest, among American intellectuals and artists generally, in defining an “American” culture distinct from that of Europe and characterized by ethnic pluralism as well as a democratic ethos. Thus the concept of cultural pluralism inspired notions of the United States as the first “transnational” nation, in which diverse heritages should develop side-by-side in harmony rather than be “melted” together or ranked on a scale of evolving “civilization.” W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), the dominant black intellectual of the day, had already advocated something like this position in his famous book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a defining text of the New Negro movement because of its profound effect on an entire generation that formed the core of the Harlem Renaissance.

According to Du Bois and his colleague at the NAACP, James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), the only uniquely “American” expressive traditions in the United States had been developed by African Americans because they, more than any other group, had been forced to remake themselves in the New World, while whites continued to look to Europe, or sacrificed artistic values to commercial ones. The very oppression that African Americans had suffered had made them the prophets and artistic vanguard of “American” culture. This judgment was reinforced by the immense popularity of African American music, especially jazz, worldwide. The popularity of jazz among whites was shaped in part by interest in the “primitive and exotic” and helped spark a “Negro Vogue” in cities like New York and Paris in the mid to late 1920s. Simultaneously, European dramatists extolled the body language of African American dance and stage humor (descended from blackface minstrelsy, America’s most popular and original form of theatrical comedy). The most well-known white man to bring attention to the “Harlem” Renaissance was undoubtedly Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964), whose music criticism extolled jazz and blues and whose provocatively titled novel Nigger Heaven (1926) helped spread the Negro Vogue, serving virtually as a tourist guide to Harlem and capitalizing on the supposed “exotic” aspects of black urban life, even while focusing, primarily, on the frustrations of black urban professionals and aspiring writers. Vilified by many but defended by the likes of Langston Hughes (1902–1967), James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen (1893–1963), Van Vechten became a key contact for several black artists and authors because of his interracial parties and publishing connections.

In addition to primitivism, the tendencies to press for “authentic” American art forms, and to find them in black America, led black writers to “the folk” at a time when American anthropologists led by Franz Boas (1858–1942) were revolutionizing their discipline with arguments against the racist paradigms of the past. The “folk”— people of the rural South particularly, but also the new migrants to northern cities—were presumed to carry the seeds of black artistic development with relative autonomy from “white” traditions. Thus James Weldon Johnson, in God’s Trombones (1927), set traditional African American sermons in free-verse poetic forms modeled on the techniques of black preachers. Jean Toomer (1894–1967) was inspired by southern folk songs and jazz to lyrical modifications of prose form. Most famously, Langston Hughes turned to the blues for a poetic form derived from and answering to the desires, needs, and aesthetic sensibilities of the black working class. Sterling Brown (1901–1989) followed Hughes in a similar spirit with ballads and other poetic forms, attempting to catch the spirit of the folk heritage without merely imitating “folk” performance.

The Jamaican-born author and radical socialist Claude McKay (1889–1948) produced “proletarian” novels extolling the primitive authenticity and vitality of the black working class in Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929), a Pan-Africanist novel set in Marseilles, France. More influentially, Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)— an anthropologist and folklorist partly trained by Franz Boas—developed a new language and approach to narrative fiction inspired by black “folk” expressive traditions, most famously and successfully in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

In a completely different register, Nella Larsen explored the psychology of urban sophisticates in her novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), analyzing the psychological intricacies of race consciousness, and exposing the massive pressures to subordinate women’s sexuality to the rules of “race” and class. The daughter of a white immigrant from Denmark and a black West Indian cook, Larsen knew intimately the price that color-line culture exacted of those who transgressed its most fundamental rules, and her fiction remains unequaled for the originality and incisiveness with which it exposes the contradictions of identities founded on the assertion of absolute difference between “black” and “white.” Hers was a unique achievement at a time when de facto and de jure segregation were becoming ever more entrenched features of American society.

By the mid-1930s, the optimism of the “renaissance” was wearing thin as the Great Depression clamped down and Marxist orientations (never absent from the renaissance) gained dominance. Black writers—above all, Langston Hughes, who had emerged as one of the stars of the “renaissance” and began working in numerous genres—began defining their new directions in contrast to the renaissance of the 1920s, describing the work of the earlier decade as too “racialist” in orientation (as opposed to Marxist and class-conscious) and as too dependent on wealthy white “patrons.” The characterization was reductive, as most such attempts at generational self-definition tend to be. Today it is clear that the Harlem Renaissance marked a turning point in black cultural history and helped establish the authority of black artists over the representation of black culture and experience, while creating a semiautonomous aesthetic field in the realm of “high culture” that has continuously expanded.

SEE ALSO Du Bois, W. E. B.; Hurston, Zora Neale; Pan–Africanism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2003. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin. 1971. Harlem Renaissance. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hutchinson, George. 1995. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lewis, David Levering. 1981. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Random House.

George Hutchinson

HARLEM RENAISSANCE

HARLEM RENAISSANCE. Known also by the names Black Renaissance or New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance represented a cultural movement among African Americans roughly between the end of World War I (1918) and the beginning of the Great Depression (1929). The names given to this movement reveal its essential features. Certainly the words "black" and "Negro" mean that this movement centered on African Americans, and the term "renaissance" indicates that something new was born or, more accurately, that a cultural spirit was reawakened in African American cultural life. Although most historians remember the Harlem Renaissance as a literary movement, in fact, African Americans during the 1920s also made great strides in musical and visual arts, as well as science. Finally, the focus on Harlem—an old Dutch-built neighborhood of New York City—indicates that this "renaissance" was something of an urban phenomenon. In fact, the exciting developments in African American cultural life of the 1920s were not limited to Harlem, but also had roots in other urban communities where black Americans migrated in great numbers: East St. Louis, Illinois; Chicago's south side; and Washington, D.C.

The artists of the Harlem Renaissance forwarded two goals. Like the journalists and other "crusaders" of the Progressive era, black authors tried to point out the injustices of racism in American life. Second, newspaper editors, activists, authors, and other artists began to promote a more unified and positive culture among African Americans. Early efforts to publicize a more unified consciousness among African Americans included two publications in 1919: Robert Kerlin's collection of editorial material in Voice of the Negro and Emmett Scott's Letters from Negro Migrants. On the political front, leaders such as Marcus Garvey began to put forth plans for black economic self-sufficiency, political separatism, and the creation of a cross-national African consciousness.

Several important developments during the World War I era gave rise to the Harlem Renaissance. First, black southerners since the turn of the century had been moving in large numbers to the North's industrial cities. As a result, southern blacks who had been denied their political rights and had resorted to sharecropping as a

means of livelihood came into contact with northern African Americans who were more often the descendants of free blacks and, therefore, had better access to education and employment. Additionally, black Americans moving to the cities had much to complain about. World War I, the so-called war to make the world safe for democracy, had been a bitter experience for most African Americans. The U.S. Army was rigidly segregated, race riots broke out in many American cities during or immediately after the war, and the North was residentially and economically segregated like the South, despite the absence of Jim Crow laws.

Not all of the forces driving the Harlem Renaissance were negative, however. An influential anthropologist of the time, Zora Neale Hurston, observed that many white American artists began to employ aspects of African American culture in their works; she called these people "Negrotarians." Significant among these were Frank Tannenbaum, author of Darker Phases of the South (1924), and Paul Green, whose 1926 production of In Abraham's Bosom with a mostly black cast won the Pulitzer Prize.

Literature

The literary works of the Harlem Renaissance were products of their writers' racial consciousness but also demonstrated

a profundity and beauty that placed many of these writers among the great literary figures of the century. An important originator of the movement, James Weldon Johnson, gave impetus to other black writers in 1922 by publishing the work of contemporary black poets in a volume entitled The Book of American Negro Poetry. Writing throughout the 1920s, Johnson published his re-flections on the decade of black artistic creation in his auto-biographical Black Manhattan (1930). Johnson was joined by another early and influential writer, Jamaican-born Claude McKay. McKay gained notoriety with awareness-raising poems such as "The Lynching." McKay, like fellow Caribbean native Marcus Garvey, displayed the defiance and anger felt by black Americans in the wake of World War I.

The most influential African American poet of the 1920s would prove to be the eloquent Langston Hughes, called the Poet Laureate of the Harlem Renaissance. Early Hughes's poetry such as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Mother to Son" reflected his roots in African American culture; these poems were published in The Weary Blues (1926). Later Hughes's work—four poems on the infamous (mis)trial of nine black men accused of rape in Alabama—revealed his heightened political consciousness and were published as Scottsboro Limited (1932). In the waning years of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes turned to satirical short stories on black life with a collection entitled The Ways of White Folks (1934).

Perhaps one of the best fiction writers of the Harlem Renaissance was Jessie Redmon Fauset. Well educated at Ivy League schools, Fauset represented the "talented tenth" of African Americans that W. E. B. Du Bois hoped would excel to the point of proving blacks' value to American society. Fittingly, Fauset represented blacks in her novels as mainstream Americans, choosing to weave race issues within her wider interest in cultural problems such as social status and economic well-being. Her most important works included There Is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1928), and Comedy: American Style (1933). Other writers—E. Franklin Frazier and Alain Locke, for example—hoped to advance the position of African Americans through scholarship by exposing the problems facing black Americans to induce change, as progressive journalists and novelists had done with health and safety issues before.

Music

Black Americans during the 1920s excelled in fields other than literature. We often remember jazz as the product of black migration to New Orleans, but the other cities that black artists called home—New York, Chicago, St. Louis, for example—witnessed the development of jazz music as well. Important jazz pianists such as the unofficial "mayor" of Harlem, Fats Waller, and Art Tatum played music at house parties and other gatherings in Manhattan, making music an integral part of the black experience in the urban North. African American band-leaders—Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Fletcher Henderson—and vaudeville blues singers—Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith—performed for black and white audiences, thereby influencing popular music in general.

Like Jessie Fauset, composer William Grant Still brought to the Harlem Renaissance a background in American higher education. Trained at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Still used traditional African American musical idioms to create European-style symphonic music. He was the first black composer to have a symphony played by a major orchestra, the first to conduct a major orchestra, and the first to have an opera produced by a major opera company. In 1931, Still legitimized Afro-inspired aesthetics in Western musical forms in premiering a tribute to the Harlem Renaissance aptly entitled the Afro-American Symphony.

Visual Art

In the world of visual art, the leading graphic artist, and illustrator for many of James Weldon Johnson's works, was Aaron Douglas. In northern cities, black artists such as Douglas wanted to capture their people's movement, energy, and soul as jazz musicians had. One of the most successful artists to do this was Archibald J. Motley Jr. Using vibrant color and flowing shapes, Motley reflected in his work the fast-paced urban life he observed in Chicago.

The Harlem Renaissance as a movement represented a rebirth of African American culture in the United States. As a product of black urban migration and black Americans' disappointment with racism in the United States, the renaissance was aimed at revitalizing black culture with pride. In political life, literature, music, visual art, and other cultural areas, African Americans in the 1920s put forth their individual and collective sense of dignity in the face of an American culture that often considered them second-class citizens.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. 8th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000. See chapter eighteen, 400–417. Classic, and still excellent, account of the Harlem Renaissance, balancing narrative with interpretation of primary evidence.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Standard monograph on the movement.

———, ed. Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Vast collection of primary documents from the period.

Kellner, Bruce, ed. The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. A useful reference tool on people, places, and a variety of other subjects pertaining to the movement.

Kramer, Victor. The Harlem Renaissance Re-Examined. New York: AMS, 1987. A large volume of scholarly essays on a wide range of topics within the movement.

Perry, Margaret. The Harlem Renaissance: An Annotated Bibliography and Commentary. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1982. A wonderful research tool on nineteen influential period authors, complete with citations of published works.

Singh, Amritjit. The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Writers, 1923–1933. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Literary study of wide cross-section of black authors.

Waldron, Edward E. Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1978. A mono-graph on the influential civic leader's role during the period.

R. A.Lawson

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).

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

Harlem Renaissance term used to describe a flowering of African-American literature and art in the 1920s, mainly in the Harlem district of New York City. During the mass migration of African Americans from the rural agricultural South to the urban industrial North (1914–18), many who came to New York settled in Harlem, as did a good number of black New Yorkers moved from other areas of the city. Meanwhile, Southern black musicians brought jazz with them to the North and to Harlem. The area soon became a sophisticated literary and artistic center. A number of periodicals were influential in creating this milieu, particularly the magazines Crisis, which was published by W. E. B. Du Bois and urged racial pride among African Americans, and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League. Also influential was the book The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), edited by Alain Locke.

Responding to the heady intellectual atmosphere of the time and place, writers and artists, many of whom lived in Harlem, began to produce a wide variety of fine and highly original works dealing with African-American life. These works attracted many black readers. New to the wider culture, they also attracted commercial publishers and a large white readership. Writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance include Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes , Claude McKay , Countee Cullen , James Weldon Johnson , Zora Neale Hurston , and Jean Toomer . Visual artists connected with the movement are less generally known. Among the painters are Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, Malvin G. Johnson, and William H. Johnson; the best-known sculptor is Augusta Savage. Photographers include James Van Der Zee and Roy De Carava. The Harlem Renaissance faded with the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Bibliography: See N. I. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (1971); B. Kellner, ed., The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era (1987); L. Harris, ed., The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (1989); H. Bloom, ed., Black American Prose Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1994); J. O. G. Ogbar, The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters (2010). In addition, many materials relating to the period can be found in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City.

Harlem Renaissance Period of creativity, particularly in literature, among African-Americans in the 1920s. Centred in Harlem, New York City, the Renaissance produced many fine writers, such as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay.