Harlem Renaissance

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Harlem Renaissance

Post-World War I Harlem was the undisputed center of a complex cultural movement out of which emerged a proliferation of black intellectuals, writers, musicians, actors, and visual artists. Variously called the Harlem Renaissance, the Negro Renaissance, and the New Negro Movement, it was an artistic flowering that coincided with socio-political expressions of black pride—the rise of the "New Negro" and Garveyism—in much the same way as the Black Arts and Black Power Movements emerged simultaneously in the 1960s. Although scholars posit differing views on when it began and ended, most agree that the movement was at its height between the dawning of the Jazz Age in 1919 and the stock market crash in 1929.

Harlem, the area James Weldon Johnson dubbed the Black "culture capital," was appropriately the center of this outpouring of black creativity, in part because it held one of the largest settlements of blacks in any area outside the south and, in part, because of the prevailing zeitgeist of racial affirmation. Intellectuals such as Johnson and Alain Locke saw Harlem as a place of great opportunity where blacks could, according to Locke, shed the "chrysalis of the Negro problem." Locke's 1925 landmark essay "The New Negro" announced the demise of the "Old Negro" and became a kind of cultural manifesto for artists then and for, at least, the next generation.

The creation of a "Negro" Harlem was indeed remarkable, a curious admixture of affluence and poverty, of black creativity and black exploitation. On the one hand, music, literature, plays, and paintings depicting black life flourished; black entrepreneurship thrived; on the political front, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909) continued its work as the largest civil rights organization in the United States, alongside the National Urban League (1911) and the more controversial politics of Marcus Garvey, who was laying the groundwork for his project of African colonization. On the other hand, even well-intentioned white patrons helped to perpetuate stereotypes of black life that resulted in the paradoxical "Negro vogue" of the 1920s when white spectators went "slumming" in Harlem to see blacks perform in Jim Crow night clubs. They patronized small bars and cabarets formerly frequented only by blacks and, according to Langston Hughes in his autobiography The Big Sea, were given "ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers—like amusing animals in the zoo."

Yet these very contradictions helped to make Harlem the exciting city within a city that it was then and the cultural icon it has since become, in terms of both the place itself and the artists associated with it. It was a place and a time of burgeoning African American music—notably the blues and jazz—and a long list of black performers were recording their own compositions and appearing in black musicals, in concerts, and on radio programs. Classic jazz composers and performers all over the United States were increasingly drawn to New York as the nation's music center. Articles and books devoted exclusively to jazz were being published, and recording companies specializing in jazz were established. Black female blues and jazz singers, while held in high regard by their fans, were often considered "unrespectable" and their music "low culture" by some members of the black bourgeoisie. The blues revivals of the 1960s and 1980s reflected a major shift in that thinking. Both popular and lesser-known performers of the 1920s were rediscovered through new releases of their recordings that reached broader audiences. Angela Davis, in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, notes that "with the globalization of music distribution … the scope of black music and its historically broad cultural implications can no longer be confined to African American communities." Indeed, in 1987, Congress passed a resolution declaring jazz "a rare and valuable national treasure."

Writers such as Hughes, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer appeared on the literary scene, forming a kind of literati that they themselves jokingly referred to as the "Niggerati." Publishers clamored for anything "Negro," as Nella Larsen observed, and white patrons such as Carl Van Vechten and Charlotte Osgood Mason (self-proclaimed the "Godmother" because of her financial support of artists) saw to it that they got what they wanted. Indeed, the overwhelming popularity of Van Vechten's own controversial novel Nigger Heaven (1926), depicting a seamy side of black life in Harlem, epitomized what publishers believed "Negro" actually meant. Similarly, early productions of work by white playwrights Eugene O'Neill and Frederick Ridgely Torrence were instrumental in creating interest in the plays of black writers, and also in bringing talented young black actors, singers, and dancers to the stage. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's 1921 musical comedy Shuffle Along was the first black Broadway show of the decade, and Hughes cites it as the show that gave a "scintillating send-off to the Negro vogue." At various points during its first run, it showcased the talents of Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, and the exotic, controversial entertainer Josephine Baker. Aaron Douglas designed posters advertising the work of various writers and entertainers but is best known for his contributions to major periodicals, including The Crisis and Opportunity, official publications of the NAACP and The National Urban League, respectively. The simultaneity of art and politics is vividly represented in the use of these two magazines, devoted in part to socio-political reporting of black experience but also to the artistic endeavors of the young black literati.

Clearly, a black cultural flowering was taking place in other major cities at the same time. However, despite the ongoing debates about whether or not the Harlem Renaissance is a misnomer, whether or not it was a successful movement or any kind of movement at all, black Harlem of the 1920s has become a symbolic "figure" that resonates across time and space, as well as across gender, racial, and cultural boundaries. According to James De Jongh, in the epilogue of Vicious Modernisms: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination, "many writers of European and Asian as well as African descent have found the idea of Harlem to be relevant to their preoccupations and employed the figure of black Harlem in significant ways." Striking examples are the "blaxploitation" films of the 1970s where Harlem is seen as a haven for drug dealing and other illicit operations, teeming with violence. Black filmmakers of the 1980s and 1990s, especially males, have modeled their notions of the "Hood"—any black poor and working-class urban community—on a symbolic figuration of Harlem. Some of the most popular films, although not necessarily set in Harlem, for example Boyz N the Hood (1991), attempt to reinterpret the concept of the black urban environment promulgated by earlier popular movies such as Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972) with images of racially self-aware men who are connected to, rather than alienated from, family and community. Harlem, reinterpreted, provides the actual setting for one of Spike Lee's major films, Jungle Fever (1991); and the opening of She's Gotta Have It (1986) pays homage to Zora Neale Hurston, a writer rediscovered, indeed reclaimed, by black feminists and co-opted by a host of academicians in a wide range of disciplines. Similarly, novels and short stories set in Harlem continued to be published into the 1990s, and The Music of Black Americans: A History cites Quincy Jones' Back on the Block as the album that "took his listeners back to the old inner-city neighborhood" to learn the history of black music.

In many ways, this idea of Harlem has shaped later generations' views of individual Renaissance artists, thereby determining who emerges as most representative of the place and the period. At the time, however, the issue of representation was hotly debated. Many of the black intelligentsia believed that the cultural arts were a means to correct the distorted images of blacks and to advance their political agendas. Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity, set strict guidelines for literary submissions to the magazine. Marcus Garvey was critical of those he believed "prostituted" their intelligence and art by succumbing to the demands of white audiences. W. E. B. Du Bois espoused the idea that "all Art is propaganda and ever must be." While some tried in various ways to escape the stigma of "blackness," others, such as Langston Hughes, one of the chief poets of the period, turned to the folk as a source of material for their work. Hughes proclaimed that the younger black artists were determined to portray their "dark-skinned selves without fear or shame" regardless of what audiences, black or white, thought. This is the attitude that has had the most profound effect on a hip-hop generation of youths who have both reclaimed and reinvented black cultural traditions in their language, music, and dress.

With the stock market crash came the end of an era and, as Hughes put it, the end of the gay times. By then, some of its most enthusiastic proponents were growing disillusioned with the concept of the "New Negro." Some had simply moved on to take up their careers elsewhere. Garvey had been convicted of mail fraud, spent two years in an Atlanta prison, and been deported in 1927. However, though the "Negro vogue" ended, art and activism did not. Renewed interest in the Harlem Renaissance and in individual artists has prompted a plethora of scholarship, biographies, docu-dramas, plays, and personal sojourns into the past, such as Alice Walker's search for Zora Neale Hurston's resting place. Black American music has helped to lessen the gap between "high" and "low" culture. A shift in views about paintings depicting black life might best be exempli-fied by the current respect for Palmer Hayden, whose work was dismissed during his own day as simplistic and naive, but who notable black artists such as Romare Bearden later extolled as the "leading folklorist" among them. This revival of interest focuses on the Renaissance as a pivotal period in African American culture that intersects with a rich cultural past and a promising future. Through their music, drama, art, and literature, blacks in Harlem's heyday confronted blackness head-on in a profound desire for self-discovery and, in so doing, left Harlem its most enduring cultural legacy.

—Jacquelyn Y. McLendon