Its representations of sex and drug dismayed critics like Du Bois, who declared that he felt like taking a bath after reading it. Although Sterling Brown was born on the campus of Howard University, his first book Southern Road is drawn from a careful study of rural black life. The title poem recreates the rhythmic meter of a work song. Its protagonist, Janie Crawford, achieves selfhood by rejecting outmoded definitions of race and gender and her story is told in a language rich in the metaphor and simile that Hurston argued was characteristic of Negro expression.
Cheryl A. In Focus. Ten key moments in the boom that changed African-American culture. One of the leaders of the Renaissance, Langston Hughes made his mark by using his art to show the universal experience of the Black community. The Missouri-born poet and writer lived all across America before spending a year at Columbia University and later finished his education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
His first book of poetry was published in at the height of the Harlem Renaissance , with his first novel following soon after. According to critic Donald B.
During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. Hughes died in of complications of prostate cancer at An author, playwright and filmmaker, Zora Neale Hurston celebrated the culture of the Black rural South like few others.
Her love of the South came from her own childhood growing up in the Orlando suburb or Eatonville, the first all-Black town in the country where she was never treated differently or inferior.
The two collaborated on a play together, published posthumously, and Hurston gained recognition for her novels and investigations of voodoo culture. She died in at 69, with her latest book, written in , finally published in Known as one of the founding fathers of jazz, Louis Armstrong revolutionized the genre with the work that came out of the Harlem Renaissance. Growing up in New Orleans, Armstrong was constantly exposed to some of the best jazz musicians in the country.
After he moved to New York City in to join the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, Armstrong's unique, soulful and lively solos changed the course of jazz to focus on individual musicians experimenting with sound.
His small group recordings from to , all during the Renaissance, made Armstrong the most influential musician in jazz, and his singing brought his work to world-wide stardom.
Few activists had the impact Marcus Garvey brought to the African American community in a short span of time — and all out of Harlem. The Jamaican-born leader took residence in Harlem and began a series of innovative projects and movements that focused on the Black working class. While Garvey was seen as a radical figure that advocated for the return to Africa of many dark-skinned African Americans, his motives were to install Black pride in a community oppressed by racism.
Introduction The Harlem Renaissance was a period in American history from the s and s. Digital Collections. Related Resources. Today in History. External Websites. Selected Bibliography. Originally established in the seventeenth century as a Dutch village, it evolved over time. Following its annexation by the city in , urban growth commenced. The resulting Harlem real estate boom lasted about twenty years during which developers erected most of the physical structures that defined Harlem as late as the mid-twentieth century.
They designed this new, urban Harlem primarily for the wealthy and the upper middle class; it contained broad avenues, a rail connection to the city on Eighth Avenue, and consisted of expensive homes and luxurious apartment buildings accompanied by commercial and retail structures, along with stately churches and synagogues, clubs, social organizations, and even the Harlem Philharmonic Orchestra.
By , Harlem's boom turned into a bust. Desperate white developers began to sell or rent to African Americans, often at greatly discounted prices, while black real estate firms provided the customers.
At this time, approximately sixty thousand blacks lived in New York, scattered through the five boroughs, including a small community in Harlem. The largest concentration inhabited the overcrowded and congested Tenderloin and San Juan Hill sections of the west side of Manhattan. When New York's black population swelled in the twentieth century as newcomers from the South moved north and as redevelopment destroyed existing black neighborhoods, pressure for additional and hopefully better housing pushed blacks northward up the west side of Manhattan into Harlem.
Harlem's transition, once it began, followed fairly traditional patterns. As soon as blacks started moving onto a block, property values dropped further as whites began to leave. This process was especially evident in the early s. Both black and white realtors took advantage of declining property values in Harlem—the panic selling that resulted when blacks moved in. Addressing the demand for housing generated by the city's rapidly growing black population, they acquired, subdivided, and leased Harlem property to black tenants.
Year by year, the boundaries of black Harlem expanded, as blacks streamed into Harlem as quickly as they could find affordable housing. By , they had become the majority group on the west side of Harlem north of th Street; by , the population of black Harlem was estimated to be fifty thousand. By black Harlem had expanded north ten blocks to th Street and south to th Street; it spread from the Harlem River to Amsterdam Avenue, and housed approximately , blacks.
The core of this community—bounded roughly by th Street on the south, th Street on the north, the Harlem River and Park Avenue on the east, and Eighth Avenue on the west—was more than 95 percent black.
By , Harlem, by virtue of the sheer size of its black population, had emerged as the virtual capital of black America; its name evoked a magic that lured all classes of blacks from all sections of the country to its streets. Impoverished southern farmers and sharecroppers made their way northward, where they were joined in Harlem by black intellectuals such as W.
Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. Although the old black social elites of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia were disdainful of Harlem's vulgar splendor, and while it housed no significant black university as did Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Nashville, Harlem still became the race's cultural center and a Mecca for its aspiring young. It housed the National Urban League, A. Marcus Garvey launched his ill-fated black nationalist movement among its masses, and Harlem became the geographical focal point of African American literature, art, music, and theater.
Its night clubs, music halls, and jazz joints became the center of New York nightlife in the mids. Harlem, in short, was where the action was in black America during the decade following World War I. Harlem and New York City also contained the infrastructure to support and sustain the arts. In the early twentieth century, New York had replaced Boston as the center of the book publishing industry.
Furthermore, new publishing houses in the city, such as Alfred A. Knopf, Harper Brothers, and Harcourt Brace, were open to adding greater diversity to their book lists by including works by African American writers. In the s, when recordings and broadcasting emerged, New York was again in the forefront. Broadway was the epicenter of American theater, and New York was the center of the American art world. In short, in the early twentieth century no other American city possessed the businesses and institutions to support literature and the arts that New York did.
In spite of its physical presence, size, and its literary and arts infrastructure, the nature of Harlem and its relation to the Renaissance are very complex.
The word "Harlem" evoked strong and conflicting images among African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Was it the Negro metropolis, black Manhattan, the political, cultural, and spiritual center of African America, a land of plenty, a city of refuge, or a black ghetto and emerging slum?
For some, the image of Harlem was more personal. Emerging out of the subway at th and Lennox Avenue, Gillis was transfixed:. Clean air, blue sky, bright sunlight. Gillis set down his tan-cardboard extension-case and wiped his black, shining brow. Then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; up and down Lenox Avenue, up and down One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street; big, lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; black ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping about the sidewalks; here and there a white face drifting along, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere.
There was assuredly no doubt of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem. Gillis then noticed the commotion in the street as trucks and autos crowded into the intersection at the command of the traffic cop—an African American traffic cop:. The Southern Negro's eyes opened wide; his mouth opened wider. For there stood a handsome, brass-buttoned giant directing the heaviest traffic Gillis had ever seen; halting unnumbered tons of automobiles and trucks and wagons and pushcarts and street-cars; holding them at bay with one hand while he swept similar tons peremptorily on with the other; ruling the wide crossing with supreme self-assurance; and he, too, was a Negro!
Yet most of the vehicles that leaped or crouched at his bidding carried white passengers. One of these overdrove bounds a few feet and Gillis heard the officer's shrill whistle and gruff reproof, saw the driver's face turn red and his car draw back like a threatened pup. It was beyond belief—impossible. Black might be white, but it couldn't be that white! Gillis was one of those who sought refuge in Harlem. He fled North Carolina after shooting a white man. Now, in Harlem, the policeman was black.
Not that this changed his fate. At the end of the story, one of these black policemen dragged Gillis away in handcuffs. The reality of Harlem often contradicted the myth. For poet Langston Hughes, Harlem was also something of a refuge. Following a mostly unhappy childhood living at one time or another with his mother or father, grandmother, or neighbors, Hughes convinced his stern and foreboding father to finance his education at Columbia University.
He recalled his arrival:. I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again. I registered at the Y. When college opened, I did not want to move into the dormitory at Columbia. I really did not want to go the college at all. I didn't want to do anything but live in Harlem, get a job and work there. After a less than happy year at Columbia, Hughes did exactly that. He dropped out of school and moved into Harlem. Hughes, though, never lost sight that poverty, overcrowded and dilapidated housing, and racial prejudice were part of the daily experience of most Harlem residents.
For Hughes, too, the desire to just "live in Harlem" was as much myth as reality. After dropping out of Columbia and moving to Harlem he actually spent little time there.
Until the late s, he was much more of a visitor or transient in Harlem than a resident. While Hughes spent many weekends and vacations in Harlem during his years at Lincoln University, during the height of the Renaissance, between and he was away from the city more than he was there, more a visitor than a full-time resident.
James Weldon Johnson saw a still different Harlem. In his book, Black Manhattan , he described the black metropolis in near utopian terms as the race's great hope and its grand social experiment: "So here we have Harlem—not merely a colony or a community or a settlement.
It strikes the uninformed observer as a phenomenon, a miracle straight out of the skies. It is a section of new-law apartment houses and handsome dwellings, with streets as well paved, as well lighted, and as well kept as in any other part of the city.
Without question Harlem was a rapidly growing black metropolis, but what kind of city was it becoming? Harlem historian Gilbert Osofsky argued, "the most profound change that Harlem experienced in the 's was its emergence as a slum.
Largely within the space of a single decade Harlem was transformed from a potentially ideal community to a neighborhood with manifold social and economic problems called 'deplorable,' 'unspeakable,' 'incredible. In short, the day-to-day realities that most Harlemites faced differed dramatically from the image of Harlem life presented by James Weldon Johnson.
Harlem was beset with contradictions. While it reflected the self-confidence, militancy, and pride of the New Negro in his or her demand for equality, and it reflected the aspirations and creative genius of the talented young people of the Harlem Renaissance along with the economic aspirations of the black migrants seeking a better life in the north, ultimately Harlem failed to resolve its problems and to fulfill these dreams.
The Harlem Race Riot put to rest the conflicting images of Harlem. On March 19, , a young Puerto Rican boy was caught stealing a ten-cent pocketknife from the counter of a th Street five-and-dime store. Following the arrest, rumors spread that police had beaten the youth to death. A large crowd gathered, shouting "police brutality" and "racial discrimination. The violence resulted in three blacks dead, two hundred stores trashed and burned, and more than two million dollars worth of destroyed property.
The Puerto Rican youth whose arrest precipitated the riot had been released the previous evening when the merchant chose not to press charges. Franklin Frazier, a professor of sociology at Howard University, to investigate the riot. They concluded the obvious: the riot resulted from a general frustration with racial discrimination and poverty.
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