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Harlem Renaissance 795

Madhubuti, Haki R. One Sided Shoot-out (or Brothers Fred Hamp-ton & Mark Clark, Murdered 12/4/69 by Chicago Police at 4:30 AM While Tey Slept). Detroit: Broadside Press, 1969.

December 4th Committee. Fred Hampton 20th Commemoration.Chicago: Salsado Press, 1989.

Harlem Renaissance

For all its ailings, the Harlem Renaissance (1917–1934)

(originally called the “Negro Renaissance”), was a spectac-

ular success—spectacular because it was, in act, a specta-

cle, a public exhibition o Arican American poetry, prose,

drama, art, and music. Tis was not just “art or art’s sake,”

but art to redraw the public image o “colored” people in

America. Enjoying a “double audience” o black and white,

the Harlem Renaissance was the airest ruit o the NewNegro movement, whose mission it was to bring about ra-

cial renewal through cultural diplomacy. Te Harlem Re-

naissance was not only a golden age o Arican American

arts but a valiant eort to remove the masks o racial ste-

reotypes in order to put a new ace on Arican Americans.

o a certain degree, it not only improved race relations

somewhat (a nearly impossible task, given the entrenched

racial prejudices o the day), but instilled a racial pride and

nobility among Arican Americans whose lives the Harlem

Renaissance touched.

Te chie strategist and “voice” o this cultural move-

ment was philosopher Alain Locke (1885–1954), who

edited the premiere and pivotal anthology o the Harlem

Renaissance, Te New Negro: An Interpretation (1925),

which is described later. As the frst Arican American

Rhodes Scholar in 1907, Locke studied abroad in Oxord

(1907–1910) and the University o Berlin and the College

de France (1910–1911), beore receiving his PhD in phi-

losophy rom Harvard in 1918. Locke fgures prominently

in the Harlem Renaissance and served as its principal art

critic, promoter, and power broker.One can say that Alain Locke urther democratized

American democracy in paving the way or the Civil Rights

movement. During the Jim Crow era o American apart-

heid, when civil rights were white rights (under Plessy v.

Ferguson’s “separate-but-equal” doctrine), Locke was the

real genius behind the Harlem Renaissance, which David

Levering Lewis (Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer o

W. E. B. Du Bois) aptly characterized as a movement that

Johnson was uninjured, but our other members sustained

gunshot wounds. All o them were arrested and charged

with attempted murder.

Tousands o community members visited the crime

scene and were appalled by the apparent slaughter o these

young leaders. Many concerned citizens demanded an investigation. Te initial investigation, however, exonerated

the police. Although no law enorcement o cials were

ever convicted o the crimes, subsequent investigations

established that the raid was in act a successul assassina-

tion attempt that was approved and sanctioned by the FBI.

Eventually, 25,000 pages emerged that confrmed that FBI

involvement had been suppressed rom the evidence.

Te investigations also proved that FBI inormant

William O’ Neal was paid handsomely or his eorts and

avoided incarceration or prior criminal activity. O’Neal in-

fltrated the Chicago BPP and served as the chapter chie o security and Hampton’s bodyguard. O’Neal supplied the

FBI with a oor plan o the apartment that was critical in

the assassination plot because it indicated where members

slept. Many BPP members believed that O’Neal drugged

Hampton so that he would be unable to deend himsel

during the raid.

Ballistics evidence proved that the police shot at least

200 bullets into the apartment. BPP members were am-

bushed and thereore unable to successully deend them-

selves. As a result o the fndings, the murder charges against

the BPP members were dismissed. Te Clark and Hampton

amilies fled a multimillion dollar lawsuit that was eventu-

ally settled or $1.85 million.

Deborah Johnson, now know as Akua Njeri, and Fred

Hampton Jr. work together with the December 4th com-

mittee to keep Fred Hampton’s legacy alive.

See also: Black Panther Party; BPP, Chicago Branch;

COINELPRO; Hoover, J. Edgar

Claudette L. olson (Ayodele Shaihi)

BibliographyFred Hampton’s House: A Statement Provided December 26, 1970

by a Film-maker Present in Fred Hampton’s Apartment a FewHours afer the Killings o December 4, 1969: A Reminder. SanFrancisco: Hermes Free Press, 1970.

Hampton, Fred. We Don’t Want You Coming Here Clapping and Leaving Here Not Doing Nothing—You’ve Got to Make a Com-mitment! Chicago: Peoples Inormation Center, 1979.

Hampton, William E., and empleton, Rini. Te Essence o Fred Hampton. Chicago: Salsado Press, 1994.



796 Political Activity, Migration, and Urbanization

Walrond, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Gwendo-

lyn Bennett.

Evidence suggests that it was Alain Locke himsel

who originally used the term “Renaissance” to charac-

terize the Harlem cultural movement. In 1928, Locke

revealed that, in 1924–1925, “the present writer [Locke]articulated these trends as a movement toward racial sel-

expression and cultural autonomy, styling it as the New

Negro movement” (Te Critical emper of Alain Locke,

p. 446). Published in 1925, Harlem: Mecca of the New

Negro was an instant success. It sold an estimated 42,000

copies in two printings.

Capitalizing on this success, Locke expanded the spe-

cial issue and recast it as an anthology in book orm. Te

New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) was the inaugural and

the epochal centerpiece o the New Negro movement. Te

New Negro eatured 34 contributors, 4 o whom were white.Te volume showcased most o the stellar fgures o the

Harlem Renaissance who went on to pursue independent

literary and artistic careers in their own right. W. E. B. Du

Bois contributed the fnal essay. Locke proclaimed Te New

Negro to be “our spiritual Declaration o Independence”

(Te Critical emper of Alain Locke, p. 43).

Te prime movers o the Harlem Renaissance believed

that art held more promise than politics in bringing about

a sea change in American race relations. Although their

philosophies o art had shades o dierences, their overlap

intensifed their commonality. As the chie proponent o

the “talented tenth,” W. E. B. Du Bois was staunch in his

conviction that art should serve the interests o the race. In

“Criteria o Negro Art” (1926), Du Bois bluntly demands

that art should be used explicitly or propaganda. In Locke’s

view, the problem with propaganda is that it “harangues,

cajoles, threatens, or supplicates” (Te Critical emper of

Alain Locke, p. 27). It operates rom a deensive posture.

In his classic essay, “Te Legacy o the Ancestral Arts,” in

Te New Negro, Locke proclaims what the unction o art

must be: “Art must discover and reveal the beauty whichprejudice and caricature have overlaid. And all vital art

discovers beauty and opens our eyes to that which previ-

ously we could not see” (Te Critical emper of Alain Locke,

p. 258). Although it was true that the Harlem Renaissance

enjoyed a “double audience,” the primary audience was

white. In its purest orm, beauty will be the vehicle o

truth: “Aer Beauty, let ruth come into the Renaissance

picture” (Te Critical emper of Alain Locke, p. 28).

sought to achieve “Civil Rights by Copyright.” As the ac-

knowledged “dean” o the Harlem Renaissance, Locke

may well be regarded as the Martin Luther King o Ari-

can American culture. Locke’s anthology, Te New Negro,

has been hailed as the frst “national book” o Arican

Americans. He ingeniously used culture as a strategy orameliorating racism and or winning the respect o power-

ul white elites as potential agents or social and political

transormation.

Te arc o the rise and all o the Harlem Renaissance is

imprecise. Coexisting with the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renais-

sance was made possible in part by powerul social orces

that eected sweeping changes in America at this time,

beginning with the end o World War I in 1918. Foremost

among these orces was the Great Migration, a massive exo-

dus o an estimated 13 million Arican Americans rom the

rural South to the urban North in the period between 1910and 1930. Tese shis in American demography resulted

in the rise o a black middle class in major American cit-

ies, particularly in the Northeast. In the midst o this status

revolution, one place stood out in particular: Harlem. With

this sudden inux o blacks and capital, Harlem became the

race capital o black America.

Harlem is a large sector o upper Manhattan in New

York City. What was taking place in Harlem was the orma-

tion o a distinct racial consciousness. Locke characterized

this psychic event in that “American Negroes have been

a race more in name than in act” or “more in sentiment

than in experience,” reecting a “common condition rather

than a common consciousness.” In response to this “prob-

lem in common rather than a lie in common,” the Harlem

Renaissance oered Arican Americans their “frst chances

or group expression and sel-determination” (Te Critical

emper of Alain Locke, p. 6). Te Harlem Renaissance suc-

ceeded in the frst objective, but ailed in the latter.

Parties played a major role both in Harlem night lie

and in the Renaissance itsel, whose o cial inaugural

began with a ormal banquet. On March 21, 1924, Oppor-tunity editor and sociologist Charles S. Johnson had invited

a group o young writers and artists to a dinner party o

the Writers Guild held in the Civic Club, a restaurant on 14

West welh Street near Fih Avenue in Harlem. Te Civic

Club was the only “upper crust” New York nightclub ree o

color or sex restrictions. Te party was called to celebrate

Jessie Redmon Fauset’s frst novel, Tere is Confusion, and

to recognize a newer school o writers that included Eric



Harlem Renaissance 797

in the eyes o its critics, or Mason’s obsession with Arican

primitivism had to be satisfed. Nonetheless, Mason’s pa-

tronage was the lieblood o some o the key Renaissance

fgures.

“Negro poets and Negro poetry are two quite dier-

ent things,” Locke wrote in 1926. “O the one, since PhyllisWheatley, we have had a century and a hal; o the other,

since Dunbar, scarcely a generation” (Te Critical emper of

Alain Locke, p. 43). Te advent o a sel-conscious “Negro

poetry” by “Negro poets” helped cultivate the group con-

sciousness that Locke ound to be singularly lacking among

Arican Americans historically yet developing rather sud-

denly in his generation. As Locke predicted, the Harlem

Renaissance poets have entered into the canon o main-

stream American literature.

A West Indian and British citizen, Claude McKay con-

tributed the poem, “White House,” to Te New Negro an-thology. Because o its politically sensitive nature, Locke

changed the title to “White Houses.” In his social protest

poem, “o America,” McKay personifes the United States

as a tiger, racially terrible yet magnifcent in its awesome

power. McKay’s greatest claim to ame is his military son-

net, “I We Must Die,” which appeared in the July issue

o the Liberator during the Red Summer o 1919, when

race riots swept across 25 o the nation’s inner cities like

a frestorm. Te poem, McKay says, “exploded out o me”

and is now considered to be the inaugural address o the

Harlem Renaissance. Tis poem took on the power o an

anthem: it was reprinted by virtually every leading Arican

American magazine and newspaper. McKay’s sonnet sur-

passed his race when Winston Churchill used “I We Must

Die” to rally British soldiers in battles against the Nazis in

World War II.

Disinclined to identiy himsel as a Negro poet, Coun-

tee Cullen could not ignore the pain o the black experi-

ence. With Keats as his poetic idol, Cullen used white

poetic orms, such as the sonnet, to solemniy that angst.

Harper and Brothers published his frst volume o poems,Colors, in 1925, which won the frst Harmon Foundation

Award in Literature in 1926. In Harvard Graduate School

in 1926, Cullen took a course in versifcation rom Robert

Hillyer, who paid tribute to Cullen as the frst American

poet to publish a poem in rime royal. In 1926, Countee Cul-

len became assistant editor o Opportunity magazine, and

began to write a regular column, “Te Dark ower.” On

April 9, 1928, Cullen married Nina Yolande, daughter o

In 1926, Langston Hughes published his maniesto,

“Te Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in the Nation,

cited as a sacred text by the Black Arts Movement o the

1960s. Hughes takes a di dent, almost devil-may-care ap-

proach: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend

to express our individual dark-skinned selves without earor shame. I white people are pleased we are glad. I they are

not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiul. And ugly

too.” Locke praised the essay as a “declaration o cultural

independence” (Te Critical emper of Alain Locke, p. 446).

In his preace to Te Book of American Negro Poetry (1931),

editor James Weldon Johnson wrote that each people is

judged by the standard o its own culture. In his Novem-

ber 1928 Harper’s Magazine essay, “Race Prejudice and the

Negro Artist,” Johnson argues that, while racism was being

ought on educational, economic, political and sociological

ronts, it is the Arican American artist who was chargedwith undermining racial prejudice. Johnson’s philosophy

o art accords with and synthesizes those o Du Bois and

Locke in that producing “great” black art is a key to gaining

a reciprocity o respect.

Art is a surplus o creative energy. Art requires support.

Tus much o the creative work o black artists and writers

was dependent on white patrons and persons o inuence,

who were key protagonists o the Harlem Renaissance. Tis

is a remarkable act. Legally barred rom congregating so-

cially, it was practically illegal or blacks and whites to have

social relationships beyond the most impersonal kinds o

interactions. White patrons played a key role in publishing

or and marketing black arts to white consumers or their

mutual enrichment. Carl Van Vechten was probably the

pivotal white promoter o the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926,

he published Nigger Heaven, a controversial novel about

black lie in Harlem. Van Vechten was oen excoriated or

the title. Nigger Heaven was partly a collaborative black-

white eort: James Weldon Johnson and Walter White read

the galley proos, and poet Langston Hughes wrote verses

to replace song lyrics that Van Vechten had used withoutpermission, which prompted a lawsuit.

A patron o Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora

Neale Hurston, and others, Charlotte Osgood Mason was

a secret beneactor o major Harlem Renaissance artists

and writers. She eschewed publicity and orbade the very

mention o her name. Instructing her patrons to reer to

her aectionately as “Godmother,” her purse had strings

attached. Tis act has jaundiced Harlem Renaissance art



798 Political Activity, Migration, and Urbanization

a muralist, whose work appeared in Club Ebony in New

York, in the Sherman Hotel in Chicago, and in Fisk Uni-

versity. In developing his distinctive style, Douglas contrib-

uted the illustrations to God’s rombones (1927), by James

Weldon Johnson, which eatures cycles o sermon-poems.

Douglas drew on Egyptian and Arican art and was inu-enced by cubism, art deco, and art nouveau as well. Tese

illustrations are considered to be Douglas’s fnest work.

A bodybuilder as well as a writer, Jean oomer was a

biracial man, who could pass or white and ultimately did.

In 1923, he published Cane, a novel set in Georgia, which

Langston Hughes praised as the best prose ever written by

an Arican American, and which Locke hailed as “a bril-

liant perormance” (Te Critical emper o Alain Locke,

p. 447). oomer was a one-book author, whose career was

abortive or personal reasons. In spiritual pursuit o the

“our-conscinal” and “illuminant” Absolute, oomer sub-sequently became a ollower o the mystic Gurdjie and

married a wealthy white woman, Margery Latimer. When

James Weldon Johnson invited oomer to contribute to

a revised edition o Te Book o American Negro Poetry

(1931), oomer reused, no longer wishing to identiy

himsel as a Negro.

Born o a Danish mother and a West Indian ather,

Nella Larsen won the Harmon Foundation’s Bronze Medal

or Literature in 1929 or her novel Quicksand (1928),

which W. E. B. Du Bois acclaimed as comparable in quality

to the fctional works o Charles Chesnutt. Although le-

gally black, she had loyalties to both races, a theme o racial

usion and conusion explored in Quicksand, in which the

main character, Helga Crane, is a ull projection o Lar-

sen hersel. Locke describes Quicksand as a “study o the

cultural conict o mixed ancestry” and hails it as a “truly

social document o importance” illuminating “the problem

o divided social loyalties and . . . the conict o cultures”

(Te Critical emper o Alain Locke, p. 202–3). In 1930,

she became the frst black woman to win a Guggenheim

Fellowship.Tere are more than 130 published plays by 37 Har-

lem Renaissance authors. On May 22, 1921, Shuf e Along

opened on Broadway’s David Belasco Teater. With lyrics

written by Noble Sissle and music by Eubie Blake, Shuf e

Along became the frst musical revue scored and perormed

by Arican Americans. It launched the careers o Josephine

Baker and Florence Mills. Locke distinguished three plays as

“outstanding”: Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, Paul Green’s

W. E. B. Du Bois, in an event hailed as the social event o

the decade. But the marriage was short-lived.

Acclaimed by many as the poet-laureate o the Harlem

Renaissance, Langston Hughes was “discovered” in 1924

by poet Vachel Lindsay, who was Hughes’s literary idol.

Hughes was a busboy at the time and had seized the oppor-tunity to give Lindsay some poems when the latter dined

at the Washington, D.C. hotel where Hughes worked. At a

ormal banquet hosted by Opportunity: A Journal o Negro

Lie (organ o the National Urban League) to present awards

or its annual poetry contest, Langston Hughes won sec-

ond prize or “Te Weary Blues,” which became the title o

the collection o poems published by Knop in 1926 on the

recommendation o Van Vechten, who personally hand-de-

livered the manuscript to the publisher and wrote the ore-

word as well. Locke credits Hughes with bringing about, or

the frst time, a “revelation o the emotional color o Negrolie, and his brilliant discovery o the ow and rhythm o

the modern and especially the city Negro, substituting the

jazz fgure and personality or the older plantation stereo-

type” (Te Critical emper o Alain Locke, p. 53).

Locke recognized the contribution o visual artists to

the Harlem Renaissance: “Te Negro artist thus ound his

place beside the poets and writers o the ‘New Negro’ move-

ment, which in the late wenties and through the Tirties

galvanized Negro talent to strong and reshly creative ex-

pression” (Te Critical emper o Alain Locke, p. 192). Har-

lem Renaissance artists helped develop a visual vocabulary

and grammar o images representing Arican Americans.

In the 1925 Harlem issue o the Survey Graphic, Locke

published seven portraits o Harlem olk, sketched by Win-

old Reiss. Son o Fritz Reiss, a landscape painter, Winold

studied under Franz von Stuck o Munich. “Winold Reiss

has achieved,” Locke claims, “what amounts to a revealing

discovery o the signifcance, human and artistic, o one o

the great dialects o human physiognomy, o some o the

little understood but powerul idioms o nature’s speech”

(Te Critical emper o Alain Locke, p. 17). Locke praisesReiss or achieving, through painting locally in Harlem,

a “universality” o the human experience.

Acknowledged by some as the ather o Black American

visual art, Aaron Douglas was recognized by Locke as “the

pioneer o the Arican Style among the American Negro

artists” (Te Critical emper o Alain Locke, p. 177). In ad-

dition to being an illustrator, whose work frst appeared in

the Harlem issue and then in Te New Negro, Douglas was



Hayes, Rutherford B. 799

Favor, J. Martin, Authentic Blackness: Te Folk in the New Negro Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

Harris, Leonard, ed. Te Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Re-naissance and Beyond. Philadelphia: emple University Press, 1991.

Holmes, Eugene C. “Alain Locke and the New Negro Movement.”Negro American Literature Forum 2, no. 3 (Fall 1968):60–68.

Krasner, David. A Beautiful Pageant: African American Teatre,Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2002.

Locke, Alain, ed. Te New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Al-bert and Charles Boni, 1925 and 1927. Reprinted with a newpreace by Robert Hayden. New York: Atheneum, 1969.

Long, Richard A. “Te Genesis o Locke’s Te New Negro.” BlackWorld 25, no. 4 (1976):14–20.

Medina, José. “Pragmatism and Ethnicity: Critique, Reconstruc-tion, and the New Hispanic.” Metaphilosophy 35, no. 1/2(2004):115–46.

Nadell, Martha Jane. Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Scholz, Sally J. “Individual and Community: Artistic Representa-tion in Alain L. Locke’s Politics.” ransactions of the CharlesS. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 39, no. 3 (Summer 2003):491–502.

Spencer, Jon Michael. Te New Negroes and Teir Music: Te Suc-cess of the Harlem Renaissance. Knoxville: University o en-nessee Press, 1997.

Stewart, Jerey C., ed. Te Critical emper of Alain Locke: A Se-lection of His Essays on Art and Culture. New York: Garland

Publishing, 1983.Watts, Eric King. “Arican American Ethos and Hermeneutical

Rhetoric: An Exploration o Alain Locke’s Te New Negro.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 1 (2002):19–32.

Wintz, Cary D., and Paul Finkelman, eds. Encyclopedia of the Har-

lem Renaissance. London: Routledge, 2004.

Hayes, Rutherford B.

Rutherord Birchard Hayes (1822–1893) was the 19th pres-

ident o the United States rom 1877–1881. He was born in

Delaware County, Ohio, on October 4, 1822. Hayes gradu-

ated rom Kenyon College and Harvard Law in 1842 and

1845, respectively. He began practicing law in Lower San-dusky, Ohio in 1845. In 1849, Hayes moved to Cincinnati

where he built a lucrative law practice and worked in city

government.

Once the civil war began, Hayes became commander

o the Ohio Volunteer Army on the side o the Union

He ought on the side o the North throughout the en-

tire Civil War conict. Hayes served in the U.S. House as

a Republican representative rom 1865 to 1867. He had

Pulitzer Prize-winning In Abraham’s Bosom, and DuBose

Heyward’s Charleston olk-drama, Porgy.

Te year 1929 was a big one or Harlem renaissance

drama: the Negro Experimental Teatre ounded in Febru-

ary, the Negro Art Teatre ormed in June, and the National

Colored Players was created in September. Tat same year,Wallace Turman collaborated with white journalist and

playwright, William Jourdan Rapp to write a murder melo-

drama, Harlem. Produced with an all-black cast (except or

a white policeman), the Broadway perormances o Harlem

proved a signifcant milestone in the development o black

drama. It opened at the Apollo Teater on Broadway and

was a huge success.

Te Harlem Renaissance arose during the period o

American progressivism, with its aith in the reorm o

democracy. Ultimately, the Harlem Renaissance crashed

along with the stock market in the early years o the GreatDepression, and its ailure to eect any real social change

was dramatically underscored by the Harlem riot o 1935.

Without a uniying ideology, it was given over to exoticism

and exhibitionism and ailed in its stated mission to solve

the racial crisis through cultural diplomacy. It was not so

much that the Harlem Renaissance ailed; rather it was

America that ailed the Harlem Renaissance. Tis ailed

impact was the ate o modernist movements in general,

which sought to create a social conscience or the age o

modernity. Yet Houston A. Baker sees the publication o

Locke’s Te New Negro (1925) as a success in its own right.

Te Harlem Renaissance created a place in the national lit-

erary tradition, o cially recognized in the March 13, 2002

“White House Salute to America’s Authors” event, which

paid tribute to writers o the Harlem Renaissance who cre-

ated rich art and became agents o social change. Its cul-

tural diplomacy became a cultural legacy.

See also: Du Bois, W. E. B.; Father Divine; Garvey, Marcus;

Hughes, Langston; Hurston, Zora Neale; Locke, Alain; New

Negro Movement

Christopher Buck

BibliographyBaker, Houston A. Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance.

Chicago: Te University o Chicago Press, 1987.Balshaw, Maria. “ ‘Black Was White’: Urbanity, Passing and the

Spectacle o Harlem.” Journal of American Studies 33, no. 2(1999):307–22.

Buck, Christopher. Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy. Los Ange-les: Kalimat Press, 2005.

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Buck HarlemRenaissance 2010