What Kind of Art Was Made in the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York Urban center equally a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and creative explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, phase performance and art.
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Great Migration
The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem was meant to be an upper-class white neighborhood in the 1880s, only rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and desperate landlords seeking to fill up them.
In the early on 1900s, a few middle-class Black families from another neighborhood known as Black Bohemia moved to Harlem, and other Blackness families followed. Some white residents initially fought to keep African Americans out of the area, but failing that many whites eventually fled.
Outside factors led to a population boom: From 1910 to 1920, African American populations migrated in large numbers from the Due south to the North, with prominent figures like Due west.Due east.B. Du Bois leading what became known as the Cracking Migration.
In 1915 and 1916, natural disasters in the south put Black workers and sharecroppers out of work. Additionally, during and after World War I, immigration to the United States roughshod, and northern recruiters headed due south to entice Black workers to their companies.
Past 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the South had moved north, and Harlem was one of the most pop destinations for these families.
Langston Hughes
This considerable population shift resulted in a Black Pride movement with leaders like Du Bois working to ensure that Black Americans got the credit they deserved for cultural areas of life. Ii of the earliest breakthroughs were in poesy, with Claude McKay's collection Harlem Shadows in 1922 and Jean Toomer's Cane in 1923. Civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man in 1912, followed by God's Trombones in 1927, left their marker on the earth of fiction.
Novelist and du Bois protege Jessie Redmon Fauset'due south 1924 novel There Is Defoliation explored the thought of Black Americans finding a cultural identity in a white-dominated Manhattan. Fauset was literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis and adult a magazine for Blackness children with Du Bois.
Sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, who was integral in shaping the Harlem literary scene, used the debut party for There Is Defoliation to organize resources to create Opportunity, the National Urban League magazine he founded and edited, a success that bolstered writers like Langston Hughes.
Hughes was at that party along with other promising Black writers and editors, also as powerful white New York publishing figures. Soon many writers found their work appearing in mainstream magazines similar Harper's.
Zora Neale Hurston
Anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston courted controversy through her involvement with a publication chosen Burn!!
Helmed by white author and Harlem writers' patron Carl Van Vechten and filled with works from prolific Black writers including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Aaron Douglas, the magazine exoticized the lives of Harlem residents. Van Vechten'south previous fiction stirred upwardly interest among whites to visit Harlem and accept advantage of the culture and nightlife there.
Though Van Vechten'southward work was condemned by older luminaries like DuBois, information technology was embraced by Hurston, Hughes and others.
Countee Cullen
Verse, too, flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. Countee Cullen was 15 when he moved into the Harlem home of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the pastor of Harlem's largest congregation, in 1918.
The neighborhood and its culture informed his poetry, and as a college pupil at New York University, he obtained prizes in a number of poetry contests before going onto Harvard's masters plan and publishing his outset book of poetry: Color. He followed it up with Copper Sun and The Carol of the Brown Girl, and went on to write plays likewise as children'due south books.
Cullen received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry in and married Nina Yolande, the girl of W.E.B. DuBois. Their wedding was a major social event in Harlem. Cullen's reviews for Opportunity mag, which ran nether the column "Dark Tower," focused on works from the African-American literati and covered some of the biggest names of the age.
Louis Armstrong
The music that percolated in and and then boomed out of Harlem in the 1920s was jazz, often played at speakeasies offering illegal liquor. Jazz became a great describe for not only Harlem residents, just outside white audiences also.
Some of the about celebrated names in American music regularly performed in Harlem—Louis Armstrong, Knuckles Ellington, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, often accompanied past elaborate flooring shows. Tap dancers like John Bubbles and Pecker "Bojangles" Robinson were also popular.
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Cotton Club
With the groundbreaking new music came a vibrant nightlife. The Savoy opened in 1927, an integrated ballroom with two bandstands that featured continuous jazz and dancing well past midnight, sometimes in the form of contesting bands helmed by Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford and Male monarch Oliver.
While it was fashionable to frequent Harlem nightlife, entrepreneurs realized that some white people wanted to experience black culture without having to socialize with African Americans and created clubs to cater to them.
The most successful of these was the Cotton Lodge, which featured frequent performances past Ellington and Calloway. Some in the community derided the existence of such clubs, while others believed they were a sign that Black culture was moving toward greater credence.
Paul Robeson
The cultural blast in Harlem gave Black actors opportunities for phase work that had previously been withheld. Traditionally, if Blackness actors appeared onstage, it was in a minstrel show musical and rarely in a serious drama with not-stereotypical roles.
At the middle of this stage revolution was the versatile Paul Robeson, an actor, vocalist, writer, activist and more. Robeson first moved to Harlem in 1919 while studying police force at Columbia University and continually maintained a social presence in the area, where he was considered an inspirational just approachable figure.
Robeson believed that arts and civilization were the best paths forward for Black Americans to overcome racism and make advances in a white-dominated civilization.
Josephine Baker
Black musical revues were staples in Harlem, and by the mid-1920s had moved south to Broadway, expanding into the white world. One of the earliest of these was Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle'southward Shuffle Along, which launched the career of Josephine Baker.
White patron Van Vechten helped bring more serious lack stage work to Broadway, though largely the work of white authors. Information technology wasn't until 1929 that a Black-authored play about Blackness lives, Wallace Thurman and William Rapp's Harlem, played Broadway.
Playwright Willis Richardson offered more serious opportunities for Blackness actors with a several comedy plays written in the 1920s, as well every bit articles in Opportunity magazine outlining his goals. Stock companies like the Krigwa Players and the Harlem Experimental Theater besides gave Black actors serious roles.
Aaron Douglas
The visual arts were never welcoming to Black artists, with art schools, galleries and museums shutting them out. Sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, a protégé of Auguste Rodin, explored African American themes in her work and influenced Du Bois to champion Black visual artists.
The most celebrated Harlem Renaissance artist is Aaron Douglas, often called "the Father of Black American Fine art," who adapted African techniques to realize paintings and murals, likewise as book illustration.
Sculptor Augusta Savage's 1923 bosom of Du Bois garnered considerable attention. She followed that upwardly with small, dirt portraits of everyday African Americans, and would later be pivotal to enlisting black artists into the Federal Fine art Project, a division of the Work Progress Administration (WPA).
James VanDerZee'southward photography captured Harlem daily life, too as by commissioned portraits in his studio that he worked to fill with optimism and divide philosophically from the horrors of the past.
Marcus Garvey
Blackness nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism movement Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica but moved to Harlem in 1916 and began publishing the influential paper Negro World in 1918. His shipping company, Blackness Star Line, established merchandise between Africans in America, the Caribbean, S and Primal America, Canada and Africa.
Garvey is perhaps all-time known for founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association, or UNIA, which advocated for "separate but equal" condition for persons of African beginnings with the goal of establishing Black states around the world. Garvey was famously at odds with W.E.B. DuBois, who chosen him "the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America." His outspoken views also made him a target of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.
Harlem Renaissance Ends
The terminate of Harlem's creative boom began with the stock market crash of 1929 and The Great Low. It wavered until Prohibition ended in 1933, which meant white patrons no longer sought out the illegal alcohol in uptown clubs.
Past 1935, many pivotal Harlem residents had moved on to seek work. They were replaced by the continuous flow of refugees from the Southward, many requiring public aid.
The Harlem Race Anarchism of 1935 broke out following the arrest of a young shoplifter, resulting in three dead, hundreds injured and millions of dollars in property damage. The anarchism was a death knell for the Harlem Renaissance.
Impact of the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a golden age for African American artists, writers and musicians. Information technology gave these artists pride in and control over how the Black experience was represented in American culture and set the stage for the civil rights movement.
Sources
Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance. Laban Carrick Hill.
The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Civilization, 1920-1930. Steven Watson.
The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary For The Era. Bruce Kellner, Editor.
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/harlem-renaissance
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