Errianna Washington HARLEM RENAISSANCE

What is the Harlem Renaissance??

• Harlem Renaissance• Served as a figurative investment of the intellectual

beginning, a vibrant of cultural cross-fertilization, and a extremely admired nightlife objective. Harlem was a moderately novel black neighborhood. The New Harlem, engrossed a significant concentration of intelligence and talent. The publishing resources and capital during this Ear, placed Harlem in a strategic pose for the emergent of black arts, musician, poets, writers, & entrepreneurs. Harlem produced many talents through the

Early Harlem

• In the 20th century, Harlem was the objective for migrants, attracting people seeking work after the War. The region was initially developed in the 19th century for the white middle and upper classes. Its prosperous early development led to houses, majestic avenues, and world-class facilities. During the vast amount of European settlers in the late 19th century, the once elite neighborhood was deserted by the white middle class, who moved further north.

•

HARLEM RENAISSANCE • The Harlem Renaissance created traditions of African American

culture. Modernist primitivism was influenced by Freudian psychology, but people enjoyed a more direct connection with the world and to essential human requests. The idea of an artistic revolution and authentic phrase, some intellectuals felt, would be found in the cultures of “primitive races,” and preeminent among these, in the stereotypical thinking of the day, were the cultures of sub-Saharan Africans and their offspring. In the 20th century, European artists had drawn stimulation from African masks because they barred from realistic figurative styles towards generalization in painting, as well as monuments. The reputation of such experiments caused African American intellectuals to reflect on their African heritage with the desire to reconnect with a legacy misunderstood by both whites and blacks.

HARLEM RENAISSANCCE

• Harlem became an African-American neighborhood in the early 1900sThe Harlem Renaissance also known as the “New Negro Movement, was implemented in the early 1920’s, as an a legendary, creative, and intellectual movement for black cultural.

• Cultural, social, and artistic movement took place in streets of Harlem at the end of World War I, following into the middle of the 1930s. Throughout this era Harlem was a intellectual center, producing black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars.

BLACK HERIATGE

• This significance of black heritage coincided with efforts to classify an American culture divergent from that of Europe. This heritage would characterized racial pluralism and as an independent culture. The concept of cultural pluralism, stimulated notions of the United States as a fresh nation with diverse cultures, developing together in harmony rather than be “melted” together or ranked on a scale of evolving “civilization.” W.E.B Dubious had advocated something like this position in his 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. As various forms of cultural-pluralist thought took hold, a fertile environment for the blossoming of African American arts developed. Moreover, the effort on the part of some American intellectuals to distinguish American and culture from European cultural forms dovetailed with African American intellectuals’ beliefs about their relationship to American national identity.

THE NEW NEGROThe New Negro was pioneered by a man name Alain Locke, also known as the father of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926 Alain Locke declared that through art, “Negro life is seizing its first chances for group expression and self determination.” Harlem became the center of a “spiritual coming of age” in which Locke’s “New Negro” transformed social disenchantment into racial pride. Locke created the first National book of African Americans. The New Negro, a anthology of writings by African Americans, landmarked black literature. Locke's beliefs of the New Negro was grounded with the notion of race-building. The most important component is awareness of the prospective black equality. Locke emphasized that the new negro, would no longer comply with irrational or unethical white demands. This idea was based on self-assurance and political understanding. Locke's theoretical proposal of The New Negro permitted fair treatment. Locke’s proposal was simply an idea, not a law, so its power was upheld within the people. If they wanted this idea to thrive, the people of Harlem would need to enforce this their demands through their actions.

Father of the Harlem Renaissance

THE NEW NEGRO

• In 1925 Howard University Professor of Philosophy Alain Locke published an essay entitled “The New Negro,” arguing that African Americans should reject their historical image as former slaves. Locke’s writing encompassed many of Marcus Garvey’s ideas about black pride as African Americans who migrated from the Jim Crow South began expressing their disdain openly for their secondary status in American society. Locke became known as the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance,” a movement that represented an outpouring of African American culture and entrepreneurship.

• Harlem became a Mecca for African Americans seeking to embrace their own cultural heritage. Expressions of African American culture encompassed literature, performance, and visual arts. It also produced new works in the areas of sociology, history and philosophy as an educated African American middle class emerged.

• The most notable figure from the Harlem Renaissance remains writer Langston Hughes. Hughes wrote novels, short stories, and plays, but is most remembered for his poetry. His personal views evolved over time from antagonism to frustration regarding the plight of African Americans. Hughes’ work is noted for its search for acceptance of African Americans within the large framework of American society, which was most evident in his famous short poem “Motto.” The poem’s last verse reads “My motto, As I live and learn is: Dig and be dug, in return.”

•

THE NEW NEGRO

HARLEM RENAISSANCE • Langston Hughes was first

recognized as an important literary figure during the 1920s, a period known as the "Harlem Renaissance" because of the number of emerging black writers. Du Bose Heyward wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in 1926: "Langston Hughes, although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life.

LANSTON HUGHES

NEW NEGRO MOVEMENT

NEW NEGRO MOVEMENT

• During the early 20th century, African-American poets, musicians, actors, artists and intellectuals moved to Harlem in New York City and brought new ideas that shifted the culture forever. From approximately 1918 to the mid 1930s, talent began to overflow within this newfound culture of the black community in Harlem, as prominent figures—Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, to name a few—pushed art to its limit as a form of expression and representation. These are some of the famous African Americans who shaped the influential movement known as the Harlem Renaissance

NEW NEGRO MOVEMENT

THE NEW NEGRO MOVEMENT

• With racism still rampant and economic opportunities scarce, creative expression was one of the few avenues available to African Americans in the early twentieth century. Chiefly literary —the birth of jazz is generally considered a separate movement—the Harlem Renaissance, according to Locke, transformed "social disillusionment to race pride."

•

Harlem Foundation

The Harmon Foundation, established by endowments in 1922, provided playgrounds throughout the country, tuition payments and vocational guidance for students, educational programs for nurses, and awards for "constructive achievements among Negroes." The areas of competition for monetary awards to African Americans included business, education, farming, fine arts, literature, music, race relations, religious service, and science. The nomination files for these awards provide a rich source of information about African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance period.

POETRY & HARLEM

• The urban setting of rapidly developing Harlem provided a venue for African Americans of all backgrounds to appreciate the variety of Black life and culture. Through this expression, the Harlem Renaissance encouraged the new appreciation of folk roots and culture. For instance, folk materials and spirituals provided a rich source for the artistic and intellectual imagination, which freed Blacks from the establishment of past condition. Through sharing in these cultural experiences, a consciousness sprung forth in the form of a united racial identity.

• African American poetry is the body of literacy produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers, before the high point of slave narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. African-American literature reached early high points with slave narratives of the 19th century. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a time of flowering of literature and the arts. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, slavery , & social impartiality.

• As African Americans' place in American society has changed over the centuries, so has the focus of African-American literature. Before the Civil war , the literature primarily consisted of memoirs by people who had escaped from slavery; the genre of slave narratives included accounts of life under slavery and the path of justice and redemption to freedom. There was an early distinction between the literature of freed slaves and the literature of free blacks who had been born in the North. Free blacks had to express their oppression in a different narrative form. Free blacks in the North often spoke out against slavery and racial injustices using the spiritual narrative. The spiritual addressed many of the same themes of slave narratives, but has been largely ignored in current scholarly conversation.

Zora Neale Hurston

• Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891. Hurston was always interested in writing, and during the Harlem Renaissance, she befriended some very famous writers, such as Langston Hughes. By 1935, she had published a handful of short stories, articles, as well as a novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Some of her most famous works were The Eyes Were Watching God, and Tell My Horse, which studied Caribbean Voodoo. Hurston wrote many pieces, using very distinct dialect to show African American culture (see quote below). One of her stories, “Spunk” was selected to be a part of The New Negro, which focused African and African American art and literature. Her main goal was merely to celebrate African American culture. She wrote to W.E.B Du Bois, who she gave the title “The Dean of American Negro Artists” to, and suggested to make a cemetery for the “illustrious Negro Dead”, on roughly 100 acres of land, in Florida, claiming that her people must be honored.

Wallace Thurman

• Within 10 years of arriving in Harlem he had many employments such as ghost writer, a publisher, an editor and a writer of novels, plays and articles. He became editor of The Messenger, a socialist journal aimed at blacks. He became the first to publish the adult-themed stories of Langston Hughes. Thurman left The Messenger to become editor of a white-owned magazine World tomorrow. He collaborated in publishing literary magazine Fire” a devotion to the younger negro artists.” It was a collaboration with Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas and Gwendolyn B. Bennett. With only one issue ever published , Fire challenged the ideas of W.E.B Du Bois and many African American bourgeoisie who believed that black art should serve as propaganda for social equality and racial integration.

HOW DID JAZZ INFLUENCE HARLEM

Jazz grew out of the era’s ragtime music, and its influence was not restricted to the musical arena. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald labeled the period from the end of the Great War to the Great Depression as the “Jazz Age” as much for the cultural change it brought about as the music that defined it. While much of the country found solace in the policies associated with Prohibition, Fitzgerald chronicled the hedonism found in the Jazz Age in many of his works, including The

Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tales from the Jazz Age. Speakeasies and night clubs abounded in urban areas as Prohibition was routinely circumvented or ignored outright.

Bigotry in American society remained a formidable obstacle, but jazz music and the culture it produced offered Americans an unprecedented opportunity to interact with one another regardless

of race. White patrons routinely frequented jazz clubs to listen to African American performers like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

COTTON CLUB

COTTON CLUB & HARLEM

• The Cotton Club was one of the most famous nightclubs in Harlem. It was in operation during Prohibition as well as during the Jazz Age. Many black entertainers including Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, amongst others, performed there, for the generally white audience. It was considered a swanky place to be on Sundays for "Celebrity Night" in which such white luminaries as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Mae West and Jimmy Durante, made appearances. The club at this location was originally opened in 1920 with the name Club De Luxe; it was renamed The Cotton Club in 1923. The club briefly closed in 1925 for selling alcohol, but re-opened soon after. The Cotton Club officially closed its doors in 1940.

THE COTTON CLUB

DUKE ELLINGTON

• Duke Ellington established commercial radio as a medium for music. Thousands of Americans tuned in weekly for Ellington’s performances from the famous Cotton Club. Located in Harlem, a Manhattan neighborhood famous as a refuge for African Americans, the Cotton Club nevertheless often denied admission to black patrons even as African American jazz performers headlined the establishment. Many famous Americans visited the music venue, including the mayor of New York. The Cotton Club’s policies regarding race highlighted the frustration of many African Americans at the time.

DUKE ELLINGTON

JAZZ IN HARLEM

LOUIS ARMSTROMG

• Louis Armstrong was a trumpeter, bandleader, singer, soloist, film star

and comedian. Considered one of the most influential artists in jazz

history, he is known for songs like "Star Dust," "La Via En Rose" and

"What a Wonderful World." During this period, Armstrong set a number

of African-American "firsts." In 1936, he became the first African-

American jazz musician to write an autobiography: Swing That Music.

That same year, he became the first African-American to get featured

billing in a major Hollywood movie with his turn in Pennies from

Heaven, starring Bing Crosby. Additionally, he became the first African-

American entertainer to host a nationally sponsored radio show in 1937.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

BILLIE HOLIDAY “LADY DAY”

• During the 1950’s Billie Holiday rose as a social phenomenon. Born Eleanora Fagan grew up in Baltimore. As a teenager she began singing in jazz clubs. At the age of 18 Billie was spotted by John Hammond and received her first record as part of a studio group led by Benny Goodman. She made big hits including “What a Little Moonlight can do” and “Miss Brown to You.” Holiday began working with Lester Young in 1936, who gave her the nick name “Lady Day”. She was one of the first black women to work with a white orchestra. A musical legend Billie Holiday died at the age of 44. She pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. She co wrote a few songs that became jazz standards. "God Bless the Child," "Don't Explain," "Fine and Mellow," and "lady Sings the Blues."

BILLIE HOLIDAY

THE NEW NEGRO

ART & LITERATURE IN HARLEM

Art was one of the areas in which the 1920s and 30s were distinct and the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance is as much expressed in the visual arts as it was in literature. The Harmon Foundation (an organization set up by wealthy people to support culture) discovered and gave prizes to many rising young Black artists who later became famous. Some went to Europe and some stayed in America.

Black painters began to portray Blacks as sensitive, dignified individuals rather than comic stereotypes. Pride in Africa and African origins arose and became widespread in the 1920s and especially the 30s. Afro-American artists began to use an African style and African visual devices to suggest themes such as the African past and liberation for African derived peoples in their work. The expression of African images and motifs as well as modernist themes in Black American art is one of the hallmarks of the Harlem Renaissance.

Many artists of various kinds contributed to the Harlem Renaissance but some of them are most representative of its art message. In painting, Aaron Douglas who used Black men and women (often in strong silhouettes) as central symbolic figures, was often chosen to illustrate key books (e.g. by James Weldon Johnson) and magazines (e.g. Opportunity) of the era. Palmer Hayden and Archibald Motley depicted, among other things, folklore, African American community-level social life and strongly African features.

In sculpture, Richmond Barthe and Meta Warrick Fuller excelled with themes related to Africa and the beauty of the common Black man. Their art consciously sought to express the "Black is beautiful" concept long before it arose as an identify principle and esthetic ideology many years later in the 1960s.

In photography, then just starting to secure its place as a fine art medium, photographers such as James Van Der Zee and others (e.g. James L. Allen and the Morgan brothers) visually documented Harlem's community life and prominent African American cultural and intellectual personalities.

Literature is one of the areas in which the Harlem Renaissance is best known and had its widest impact on many people living outside Harlem. The writers of the Harlem Renaissance produced ideas and an identity that has left a lasting influence on both Black and White America. There were many key writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Some of the major names include: Countee Cullen the poet

• Langston Hughes the novelist, poet, essayist and all around cultural activist

• James Weldon Johnson, a poet, novelist and head of the NAACP• Claude McKay a novelist and chronicler of Harlem• W.E.B. DuBois, a political activist, publisher, novelist and

organizer• There were many others (often novelists or poets) whose works

reflected the New Negro consciousness.In addition to novels and books written by single authors, there were also collaborative efforts. One very important one was the short-lived magazine "Fire!!" which featured the work of several writers and artists. Most of the copies were burned up in a real warehouse fire and the few surviving copies are rare and expensive treasures today

BUSINESS & ECONOMICS IN HARLEM

• Business people are a less discussed but key element in the Harlem Renaissance. They started the real estate boom early in the 20th century that produced the concentration of Blacks in one neighborhood (i.e. Harlem). They also put up much of the money for the glamour shown in Harlem. Stores, banks, funeral homes, photographers (such as James Van der Zee), theaters and other commercial establishments (not to speak of nightclubs) made Harlem an exciting and fun-filled place to live, work and visit. Business and professional people were active, entrepreneurs and family businesses flourished. People were often poor but the kind of long term hopeless "culture of poverty" that later became identified with Harlem was not yet in evidence. Though she died before the Harlem Renaissance really got going, one very important business figure of the early 20th century that deserves mention was Madame C.J. Walker. Madam walker was a highly successful entrepreneur who created a cosmetics and hair care empire drawing revenue from both products and salons. She was the first female African American millionaire. Her business provided employment and upward mobility for Black women for decades. Her daughter became one of the leading hostesses and patrons of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals.

THE END OF THE RENAISSANCE

• The Harlem Renaissance is usually thought to end when the stock market crashed in 1929, the great depression of the 1930s hit America and the prosperity of the 1920s ended for almost everyone.

CONCLUSION • The Harlem Renaissance celebrated, respected and explored the origins of African Americans in the south and in Africa. Rather than

looking to Europe and colonial America as the source of ideas, beauty and insight, many of its novels and other creative works were based on themes and issues in Africa and southern life. Previously, Africa and the south were seen as embarrassingly backward, primitive places that progressive Blacks tried not to be identified with but the Harlem Renaissance changed this feeling.

An interest in and identification with Africa had started earlier in the century (e.g. in the form of the Pan-African Congressesorganized by DuBois) and was reflected widely in literature, dance, music and the visual arts. Even in businesses the interest in Africa was reflected (for example in the names of companies and in advertising). Ethiopia was considered a symbol of all of Africa and members of the African race were often euphemistically called Ethiopian or Nubian. For example, one services business was named "The Ethiopian Life Insurance Company". European artists also were heavily influenced by the values and appearance of Africanart. Major sculptures with African themes started to appear in non-African settings. Artists such as Aaron Douglas began to use themes such as African Masks and the desire to relate to an African homeland in magazine illustrations, murals and paintings. It should be noted that not only was Africa seen and respected as the homeland of African Americans but the image of Africa began to be upgraded and redefined. Instead of seeing Africa as primitive, pagan and embarrassingly backward, Harlem Renaissance creativetypes redefined Africa as a worthwhile, beautiful homeland that had given much, had much to teach and should be celebrated with a sense of pride of origins.

Racial identity and self-acceptance: In the Harlem Renaissance, the acceptance of and fascination with African Americans themselves and their origins, culture, personalities and styles was highlighted. It was felt that African Americans should define themselves and be the expressers and interpreters of their own culture. This concentration on Blackness went beyond the quaint, homey and pleasant characters of Paul Laurence Dunbar and broke new ground to explore complex and sometimes unpleasant themes. In many ways this theme anticipated the ideas of the Black is Beautiful movement decades later in the 1960s and 70s.

Black vs. white mainstream culture: Though they were African Americans, Harlem Renaissance cultural activists were also intellectuals in general and they thus also felt a kinship with general artistic and literary trends. The tension between belonging to and being spokespersons for a specific group while also belonging to a general artistic tradition created a sense of divided andcompeting loyalties. Their racial identity made them Black but their profession placed them in what was then considered a European intellectual tradition. Some were concerned with proving to the world that African Americans could create and express European culture as well as any European could while others wanted to abandon Europe as a cultural model and base their work on African, Caribbean or southern Black models. Some artists, musicians and writers handled this conflict differently from others.

CREDITS

• 1Harlem Renaissance Multimedia resources: http://www.jcu.edu/harlem/index.htm • Burner, J. A. (2006). Stomping Grounds, 52(11), 49-50. • Burner, J. (2006). Focus On - Stomping Grounds - The Harlem Renaissance. School library journal : SLJ., 52(11), 49. • DRAKE, M. (2010). Beyond the Harlem Renaissance. New York Times, 29. • Drowne, K. M., & Huber, P. (2004). The 1920's. Greenwood Publishing Group. • Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. (2004). . New York: Routledge. • Harlem Renaissance. (2010). Vogue, 200(9), 574. • Hillstrom, K. (2008). The Harlem Renaissance. Defining moments. Detroit, MI: Omnigraphics. • Lewis, D. L. (1997). When Harlem was in vogue. Penguin Books. • Locke, A. (1997). The New negro (1st ed.). New York N.Y.: Simon & Schuster. • New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance: Essays on Race, Gender, and Literary Discourse. (2006). . Madison [N.J.]:

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. • Phelan, C. (2009). The Harlem Renaissance: An Explosion of African-American Culture.(Brief article)(Children's

review)(Book review). Booklist, 105(11). • Reitano, J. (2010). Moving Minds and Mountains: African Americans in New York City From 1919 to 1945. Afro-

Americans in New York Life & History, 34(1), 118-134. • Rochman, H. (2004). * Hill, Laban Carrick. Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance.(Brief

Article)(Young Adult Review)(Book Review). Booklist, 100(12). • Wall, C. A., & netLibrary, Inc. (1995). Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. • Wintz, C. (1988). Black culture and the Harlem Renaissance (1st ed.). Houston Tex.: Rice University Press. • Woodson, J., & NetLibrary, Inc. (1999). To Make a New Race Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance.

Jackson: University Press of Mississippi