Harlem Renaissance

I

Introduction

Harlem Renaissance, an African-American cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s that was centred on the Harlem district of New York. Variously known as the New Negro movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, the movement emerged towards the end of World War I in 1918, blossomed in the mid- to late 1920s, and then faded in the mid-1930s. The Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics took African-American literature seriously and that African American literature and arts attracted significant attention in the United States. Although it was primarily a literary movement, it was closely related to developments in African-American music, dance, theatre, art, and politics.

II

Origins

The Harlem Renaissance emerged amid the social and intellectual upheaval within the African-American community in the early 20th century. Several factors laid the groundwork for the movement. A black middle class had developed, fostered by increased educational and employment opportunities following the American Civil War. During a phenomenon known as the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of black Americans moved from the economically depressed rural Southern United States to the industrial cities in the Northern United States to take advantage of the employment opportunities created by World War I. As more and more educated and socially conscious blacks settled in New York’s Harlem district, it developed into the political and cultural centre of black America. Equally importantly, a new political agenda advocating racial equality arose in the African-American community, particularly within its growing middle class. Championing the agenda were black historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909 to advance the rights of blacks. This agenda was also seen in the efforts of Jamaican-born black nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose “Back to Africa” movement inspired racial pride among blacks in the United States.

African-American literature and arts had already begun a steady development. In the performing arts, black musical theatre featured such accomplished artists as songwriter Bob Cole and composer J. Rosamond Johnson, brother of writer James Weldon Johnson. Jazz and blues music moved with black populations from the South and Midwest of the country into the bars and cabaret venues of Harlem. In literature, the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt in the late 1890s were among the earliest African-American works to receive national recognition. By the end of World War I the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and the poetry of Claude McKay anticipated the literature that would follow in the 1920s by describing the reality of black life in America and the struggle for racial identity.

In the early 1920s three pieces of work signalled the new creative energy in African-American literature. McKay’s volume of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922), became one of the first works by a black writer to be published by a mainstream, national publisher (Harcourt, Brace and Company). Cane (1923), by Jean Toomer, was an experimental novel that combined poetry and prose in documenting the life of American blacks in the rural South and urban North. Finally, There Is Confusion (1924), the first novel by writer and editor Jessie Fauset, depicted middle-class life among black Americans from a woman’s perspective.

With these early works as the foundation, three events between 1924 and 1926 launched the Harlem Renaissance. Firstly, on March 21, 1924, Charles S. Johnson of the National Urban League hosted a dinner to recognize the new literary talent in the black community and to introduce the young writers to New York’s white literary establishment. (The National Urban League was founded in 1910 to help black Americans address the economic and social problems they encountered as they resettled in the urban North.) As a result of this dinner, The Survey Graphic, a magazine of social analysis and criticism that was interested in cultural pluralism, produced a Harlem issue in March 1925. Devoted to defining the aesthetic of black literature and art, the Harlem issue featured work by black writers and was edited by black philosopher and literary scholar Alain LeRoy Locke. The second event was the publication of Nigger Heaven (1926) by white novelist Carl Van Vechten. The book was a spectacularly popular exposé of Harlem life. Although the book offended some members of the black community, its coverage of both the elite and the baser side of Harlem helped create a “Negro vogue” that drew thousands of sophisticated New Yorkers, black and white, to Harlem’s exotic and exciting nightlife and stimulated a national market for African-American literature and music. Finally, in the autumn of 1926 a group of young black writers produced Fire!!, their own literary magazine. With Fire!! a new generation of young writers and artists, including Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston, took ownership of the literary Renaissance.

III

Characteristics

No common literary style or political ideology defined the Harlem Renaissance. What united participants was their sense of taking part in a common endeavour and their commitment to giving artistic expression to the African-American experience. Some common themes existed, such as an interest in the roots of the 20th-century African-American experience in Africa and the American South, and a strong sense of racial pride and desire for social and political equality. But the most characteristic aspect of the Harlem Renaissance was the diversity of its expression. From the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, some 16 black writers published more than 50 volumes of poetry and fiction, while dozens of other African-American artists made their mark in painting, music, and theatre.

The diverse literary expression of the Harlem Renaissance ranged from Langston Hughes’s weaving of the rhythms of African-American music into his poems of ghetto life, as in The Weary Blues (1926), to Claude McKay’s use of the sonnet form as the vehicle for his impassioned poems attacking racial violence, as in “If We Must Die” (1919). McKay also presented glimpses of the glamour and the grit of Harlem life in Harlem Shadows. Countee Cullen used both African and European images to explore the African roots of black American life. In the poem “Heritage” (1925), for example, Cullen discusses being both a Christian and an African, yet not belonging fully to either tradition. Quicksand (1928), by novelist Nella Larsen, offered a powerful psychological study of an African-American woman’s loss of identity, while Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) used folk life of the black rural South to create a brilliant study of race and gender in which a woman finds her true identity.

Diversity and experimentation also flourished in the performing arts and were reflected in the blues singing of Bessie Smith and in jazz music. Jazz ranged from the marriage of blues and ragtime by pianist Jelly Roll Morton to the instrumentation of bandleader Louis Armstrong and the orchestration of composer Duke Ellington. Artist Aaron Douglas adopted a deliberately “primitive” style and incorporated African images in his paintings and illustrations.

The Harlem Renaissance appealed to a mixed audience. The literature appealed to the African-American middle class and to the white book-buying public. Magazines such as The Crisis, a monthly journal of the NAACP, and Opportunity, an official publication of the Urban League, employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staff; published poetry and short stories by black writers; and promoted African-American literature in articles, reviews, and annual literary prizes. As important as these literary outlets were, however, the Renaissance relied heavily on white publishing houses and white-owned magazines. In fact, a major accomplishment of the Renaissance was to push open the door to mainstream white periodicals and publishing houses, although the relationship between the Renaissance writers and white publishers and audiences created some controversy. While most African-American critics strongly supported the relationship, Du Bois and others were sharply critical and accused Renaissance writers of reinforcing negative African-American stereotypes. Langston Hughes spoke for most of the writers and artists when he wrote in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) that black artists intended to express themselves freely, no matter what the black public or white public thought.

African-American musicians and other performers also played to mixed audiences. Harlem’s cabaret venues attracted both Harlem residents and white New Yorkers seeking out Harlem nightlife. Harlem’s famous Cotton Club carried this to an extreme, by providing black entertainment for exclusively white audiences. Ultimately, the more successful black musicians and entertainers, who appealed to a mainstream audience, moved their performances out of Harlem into downtown Manhattan.

IV

Decline

A number of factors contributed to the decline of the Harlem Renaissance in the mid-1930s. The Great Depression of the 1930s increased the economic pressure on all sections of life. Organizations such as the NAACP and Urban League, which had actively promoted the Renaissance in the 1920s, shifted their interests to economic and social issues in the 1930s. Many influential black writers and literary promoters, including Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Charles S. Johnson, and Du Bois, left New York in the early 1930s. Finally, a riot in Harlem in 1935—set off in part by the growing economic hardship of the Depression and mounting tension between the black community and the white shopowners in Harlem who profited from that community—shattered the notion of Harlem as the “Mecca” of the New Negro. In spite of these problems the Renaissance did not disappear overnight. Almost one third of the books published during the Renaissance appeared after 1929. In the last analysis, the Harlem Renaissance ended when most of those associated with it either left Harlem or stopped writing, while new young artists who started to make their name in the 1930s and 1940s never associated themselves with the movement.