Harlem Renaissance Overview

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Topics / The Twenties, 1920-1929 / Harlem Renaissance / Harlem

Renaissance (Overview)

In the early 20th century, African Americans fled poverty and persecution, moving from the Jim Crow South to the

North by the hundreds of thousands in what is known as the Great Migration. Between 1910 and 1929, nearly a

million African Americans moved from the South to the North. They left behind sharecropping, permanent debt, the

Southern Ku Klux Klan (there were groups in the North), and lynchings. As World War I began, factories desperately

needed workers. Black migrants filled the jobs, as well as the tenements in quickly segregated Northern cities.

Harlem, a neighborhood of New York City, was one such place where African Americans congregated. By the 1920s,

Harlem had become the geographical center for African Americans who had migrated North and a sort of haven for

African Americans to assert their African identity and heritage.

The Harlem Renaissance is known as a period of unprecedented artistic production by African Americans. As the

aesthetic counterpart to the social and political movement known as the New Negro Movement during the early 20th

century, the Harlem Renaissance represented a revolution in the ways African American artists perceived themselves

and their art and thus in the ways they would express themselves verbally, artistically, and musically. It celebrated

black culture and achievement with art and writing that focused on the lives of black people.

Literary Milieu

New organizations and publications were established to promote African American art. Harlem Renaissance artists

were largely inspired and enabled by black intellectuals and white patrons, such as Charles S. Johnson, editor of

Opportunity , white photographer Carl Van Vechten, and African American philosopher Alain Locke. The National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) funded the magazine the The Crisis and offered grants

to black writers, artists, and performers.

The writers of the Harlem Renaissance defied the simplified stereotypes assigned to them by

white culture by instead offering complex realistic renderings of African American life. Poet

Countee Cullen's work appeared in such mainstream publications as Vanity Fair , Bookman ,

and Harper's . Langston Hughes avoided traditional forms and brilliantly combined black dialect

and musical rhythms to protest various forms of racial injustice. Hughes was a living example

of the great potential African Americans possessed as writers.

Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) was recognized by some as a masterpiece of the Harlem

Renaissance. The work recalled the music and content of Negro spirituals even as it reflected

modernist principles of writing. Claude McKay, whose Home to Harlem (1928) celebrated the

cabaret life of Harlem and aroused controversy for its representation of male African American desire, overtly

protested racial inequality.

African American author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston explored the experience of African American women

She is best-known for her book Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and became one of the most published

women during the time period. Jessie Redmon Fauset and Georgia Douglas Johnson were part of a large group of

women poets, novelists, and playwrights to explore the complicated experience of African American female identity



during the Harlem Renaissance.

Visual Arts

The visual art of the Harlem Renaissance not only reflected the political, social, and cultural

awakening of what came to be known as the New Negro but also introduced new images of

African culture into American culture. Painter and muralist Aaron Douglas, who was called "the

father of African American art," created illustrations for The New Negro: An Interpretation

(1925), as well as for the writing of James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. Other

painters such as William Henry Johnson and Jacob Lawrence attempted to represent

realistically the experience of African Americans during the early 20th century. Sculptor

Sargeant Claude Johnson brought together images from African and Mexican culture.

Though sculptor Augusta Savage was turned away from an art school because of her race,

she would eventually establish her own school, the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts. Additionally, she began the

Harlem Community Art Center and aided in the organization of the Harlem Arts Guild. Also a sculptor, Meta Vaux

Warrick Fuller turned her experience of solitude as a black woman who experienced severe racial discrimination into

widely celebrated art that brought together the images of African folktales and the painful experience of being an

African American woman in the early 20th century.

Music and Entertainment

The Harlem Renaissance also encompassed the achievements and prominence of musicians and performing artists

generated during what is known as the Jazz Age. The success of black musicals such as Shuffle Along (1921)—the

first Broadway production that was written, produced, and performed by African Americans—and Runnin' Wild (1923)

which inspired the phenomenon of the dance known as The Charleston, announced a new era of American music.

Along with Louis Armstrong, who is known as one of the founding fathers of jazz, musicians such as pianist and

composer Duke Ellington, pianist and bandleader Count Basie, and singer and bandleader Cab Calloway showcased

their talent in musical venues such as the Apollo Theater and The Cotton Club, most of which denied access to

African American patrons.

Some of the most notable musical and theatrical performers during the Harlem Renaissance

were women. The most famous of these were blues singers such as Ma Rainey, commonly

recognized as one of the earliest blues singers, and Bessie Smith, who called herself the

"Empress of the Blues" and became a national phenomenon as one of the most successful

singers of the early 20th century. Other singers such as Marian Anderson, who was the first

African American opera singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House, lived as examples

that African American women could achieve great and lasting success as musicians. Singer

and dancer Josephine Baker was one of the most prominent African American female

entertainers and rose to international fame from complete poverty.

Many white New Yorkers flocked to Harlem to hear the newly fashionable black music and poetry, and funded African

American artists. The "New Negro" intellectual became popular in white society. But, despite the celebration of black

pride and culture of the Harlem Renaissance, racism and segregation continued in both the North and the South.

Select Citation Style: MLA

MLA



Beaulieu, Elizabeth. "Harlem Renaissance (Overview)." American History . ABC-CLIO, 2015. Web. 29 Nov. 2015.

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