Harlem Renaissance

By: Cary D. Wintz

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was the most important period in twentieth-century African American intellectual and cultural life. Most commonly known as a literary movement that occurred from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, it was much more than that. It also encompassed critical writing, music, theater, musical theater, and the visual arts, and it affected politics, social development, and almost every aspect of the African American experience from the early 1920s through the mid-1930s. The Harlem Renaissance was part of and deeply influenced by (as well as an influence on) two other sociopolitical developments in the African American community in the early twentieth century: the Great Migration, which altered the demographics of African Americans, and the concept of the “New Negro,” which was sometimes considered synonymous with the Harlem Renaissance but also stood alone as a reflection of new political awareness and racial pride that emerged in the early years of the century and became a dominant factor during and following World War I.

The Emergence of the Harlem Renaissance.

A number of events signaled the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance. The first took place in music, as the blues and jazz made their way from cities such as New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, and Chicago to New York City—particularly Harlem. Pioneered by W. C. Handy and other musicians, the blues emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and became popular during the second decade of the new century in Harlem clubs and through sales of phonograph records by blues singers Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith. Jazz moved north from New Orleans to Harlem, with James Reese Europe in 1905 one of the first to play jazz in the city. In 1921 Eubie Blake and Nobel Sissle carried the soul of this new music to standing-room-only audiences on Broadway in an all-black musical revue, Shuffle Along. Both the poet Langston Hughes and the influential poet and diplomat James Weldon Johnson saw the incredibly popular Shuffle Along as a sign of the emerging Harlem Renaissance.

The second event that marked the beginnings of the Renaissance was the 1924 Civic Club dinner, held to acknowledge the upsurge in black literary activities. In the early 1920s a series of unconnected literary events—including Claude McKay's volume of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922), Jean Toomer's novel Cane (1923), and the initial published works of other young black writers—contributed to Harlem's emerging cultural life. The Civic Club dinner, in addition to formally acknowledging the literary activity that was already underway, furthered the movement by bringing together the three major players in the literary renaissance: the black literary-political intelligentsia, white publishers and critics, and young black writers. Charles S. Johnson of the Urban League conceived the dinner to recognize Jessie Fauset on the occasion of the publication of her first novel, There Is Confusion. By the time the diners convened on 21 March 1924, however, the event had expanded to include recognition of the broad array of new literary talent in the black community and to present this talent to New York's white literary establishment. The impact was significant. At this dinner Alain Locke was offered the opportunity to guest-edit an issue of the Survey Graphic, a liberal journal of social issues. Locke devoted the resulting “Harlem issue,” published in March 1925, to defining the aesthetic of black literature and art. Other black writers made contacts at the dinner that resulted in published books in the coming months.

The third and most important sign of the Harlem Renaissance was the increase in the artistic accomplishments of the young African Americans whose literary and artistic talent was the basis of the renaissance. In both quantity and quality, and in terms of public awareness and acceptance, the black creative artists of this period achieved far more than their predecessors. For example, in the three years after Shuffle Along had taken black musical theater to Broadway, nine more musicals written by blacks and featuring black performers played on Broadway. In addition, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, white writers and producers turned to black themes and black performers for several significant productions. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein did so in 1927 for their hit Showboat; Irving Berlin cast blues singer Ethel Waters in As Thousands Cheer (1933); and George and Ira Gershwin brought their great opera, Porgy and Bess, to Broadway in 1935. Black writers achieved similar success in literature. Although no single work had the impact on literature that Shuffle Along had on musical theater, during the fifteen years beginning in 1922 the sixteen best-known black authors of the Harlem Renaissance published more than fifty books with mainstream commercial publishers. As with musical theater, their work stimulated white authors to produce works focusing on the African American experience. DuBose Heyward's best-selling 1925 novel, Porgy; Carl Van Vechten's controversial Nigger Heaven (1926); Julia Peterkin's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1928 novel, Scarlet Sister Mary; and Fannie Hurst's very successful Imitation of Life (1933) represent the most significant examples of this development.

The Singer and Actress Ethel Waters, 1938. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.

Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

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The Literature and Art of the Renaissance.

Efforts to define precisely the nature of the literary and artistic creativity of the Harlem Renaissance meet with frustration. There was no common literary style or political ideology associated with the movement; it was a reflection of identity far more than an ideology or a literary or artistic school. What united participants was their sense of taking part in a common endeavor and their commitment to giving artististic expression to the African American experience. This identity is much stronger among writers and poets than among musicians and performers. Perhaps the best statement defining perception of the movement among its practitioners was Hughes's essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published in The Nation, 23 June 1926. This essay was an artistic declaration of independence—from the stereotypes that whites held of African Americans and the expectations they had for their creative works, as well as independence from the expectations that black leaders and black critics had of black writers and the expectations black writers had for their own work. As Hughes concluded:

"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves."

The determination of black writers to follow their own artistic vision, and the diversity that this created, was the principal characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance. This diversity ranged from Hughes's weaving of the stylistic forms of African American music into his experimental poems of ghetto life, as in “The Weary Blues,” to McKay's adopting the sonnet as the vehicle for his militant attack on racial violence, “If We Must Die,” and for his glimpses of Harlem life in “The Harlem Dancer.” Countée Cullen in turn employed classical literary allusions as he explored the African roots of black life in “Heritage”; Nella Larsen presented a psychological study of an African American woman's loss of identity in her novel Quicksand; and Zora Neale Hurston drew on the folk life of the black rural south in her highly acclaimed Their Eyes Were Watching God. This diversity and experimentation were also demonstrated by the blues of Bessie Smith, the range of jazz from the early rhythms of Jelly Roll Morton to the instrumentation of Louis Armstrong and the sophisticated orchestration of Duke Ellington, and the primitivism and African images used by Aaron Douglas in his paintings and illustrations.

Within this diversity, several themes emerged that more clearly defined the nature of the Harlem Renaissance. No single black artist expressed all these themes, but each addressed one or more in his or her work. The first theme was the effort to recapture the African American past, both its African heritage and its rural southern roots. The poets Cullen and Hughes examined African heritage in their works, and Douglas used African motifs in his art. A number of musicians, from the classical composer William Grant Still to jazz great Armstrong, introduced African-inspired rhythms and themes in their compositions. In Cane Toomer provided a notable example of the use of southern black culture to convey the African American experience. Hurston used her background as a folklorist to create a rich depiction of rural southern black life in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Jacob Lawrence's series of paintings, especially The Life of Harriet Tubman and The Migration Series, portrayed southern experiences from black history.

Another theme in works by Harlem Renaissance writers was the exploration of life in Harlem and other urban centers. Both Hughes and McKay drew on Harlem images for their poetry, and McKay used the ghetto as the setting for his first novel, Home to Harlem. W. E. B. Du Bois and several other black critics accused some black writers, including McKay and Hughes as well as Rudolph Fisher and Wallace Thurman, of exploiting black urban life by overemphasizing crime, sexuality, and other less savory aspects of ghetto life. Other black writers, such as Fauset, wrote about the black urban experience but focused their work on the black middle class. The artists Jacob Lawrence and Archibald J. Motley Jr. used vivid colors in their depiction of urban scenes and urban life.

The third major theme addressed by the Harlem Renaissance was race. Virtually every novel and play, and most of the poetry, explored race in America, especially the impact of race and racism on African Americans. In their simplest form these works protested racial injustice. McKay's poem “If We Must Die” was one the best of this genre. Most Harlem Renaissance writers avoided overt protest or propaganda, focusing instead on the psychological and social impact of race. Among the finest of these studies were Larsen's two novels, Quicksand (1928) and, published a year later, Passing; both explored characters of mixed racial heritage who struggled to define their racial identity in a world of prejudice and racism. Hughes used a similar theme in his poem “Cross” and then expanded it in his 1931 play, Mulatto. The theme arises again in Fauset's 1929 novel Plum Bun. In that same year Thurman made color discrimination within the urban black community the focus of his novel The Blacker the Berry.

Finally, the Harlem Renaissance writers blended various aspects of African American culture in their work, for example, by using black music as an inspiration for poetry or drawing on black folklore for novels and short stories. Best known for this were Hughes, who used the rhythms and styles of jazz and the blues in much of his early poetry; James Weldon Johnson, who published two collections of black spirituals in 1927 and 1928; and Sterling Brown, who used the blues and southern work songs in many of the poems in his 1932 collection, Southern Road. Other writers looked to black religion as a literary source. Johnson made the black preacher and his sermons the basis for the poems in God's Trombones, and Hurston and Larsen used black religion and black preachers in their novels. Hurston's first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, describes the exploits of a southern black preacher, and in the last portion of Quicksand Larsen's heroine is ensnared by religion and a southern black preacher.

Through all these themes Harlem Renaissance writers were determined to express the African American experience in all its variety and complexity as realistically as possible. This commitment to realism ranged from the ghetto realism that created such controversy when writers exposed negative aspects of African American life to Hughes's beautifully crafted and detailed portrait of small-town black life in Not Without Laughter and the witty and biting satire of Harlem's black literati in Thurman's Infants of the Spring.

The Decline of the Harlem Renaissance.

A number of factors contributed to the decline of the Harlem Renaissance in the mid-1930s. Because the Great Depression increased the economic pressure on both writers and publishers, organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League, which had actively promoted the Renaissance in the early 1920s, shifted their interests to economic and social issues in the late 1920s and 1930s. This process was accelerated by Fauset's departure as literary editor of The Crisis in 1926 and Charles S. Johnson's resignation in 1927 from the Urban League—along with the editorship of its journal, Opportunity—ending that organization's focus on the arts and literature.

A second factor in the decline was the departure from Harlem of many key figures in the late 1920s and the early 1930s. Charles S. Johnson moved south in 1931, as did James Weldon Johnson, and Du Bois followed in 1934. Hughes left Harlem in 1931 and did not return permanently until World War II. Brown, Douglas, and the poet and author Arna Bontemps shifted their bases of operations to black universities in the 1930s. The writers Fisher and Thurman died in 1934, and James Weldon Johnson died four years later. Many of the rest stopped writing. Cullen took a full-time job teaching school in 1934; most of his writing after that time consisted of children's stories. Larsen dropped out of sight and never published her projected third novel. McKay, returning to Harlem in 1934 after an absence of about twelve years, noted the lack of literary activity. After his return he published only an autobiography and a history of Harlem. Hurston, in contrast, actually enjoyed her greatest period of literary output in the 1930s but fell silent and largely dropped out of sight after the 1940s. Only Hughes continued to support himself through writing after the 1930s, but he no longer considered himself part of a literary movement.

Langston Hughes. Portrait of the twenty-five-year-old Langston Hughes by Winold Reiss, 1926. Reiss was a German expatriate artist who was fascinated by African American life and mentored Aaron Douglas, one of the more prominent African American artists of the 1920s and 1930s.

Reiss Estate

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Any doubt that the era of the Harlem Renaissance had ended was put to rest by the Harlem Riots of 1935. This event shattered the illusion of Harlem as the “Mecca of the New Negro” that had figured so prominently in the folklore of the renaissance. Harlem was a ghetto, with all the problems associated with American urban ghettos: high rates of poverty and crime; poor and overcrowded housing; inadequate city services; job discrimination; and control of government, the police force, and employment by the dominant white power structure.

In spite of all these problems creative production did not cease overnight. Almost one-third of the major works published during the renaissance appeared after 1929, and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, arguably the best novel of the renaissance, came out in 1937. Black music continued in popularity through the 1930s and beyond, especially the increasingly sophisticated sounds of Armstrong and Ellington, and Lawrence produced his best paintings in the 1930s. In the final analysis the Harlem Renaissance ended when most of those associated with it left Harlem or stopped writing and the new young artists who emerged in the 1930s and 1940s chose not to associate with the movement.

[See also Africa, Idea of; Cotton Club; Crisis, The: A Record of the Darker Races; Fire!!; Great Migration; Harlem; Jazz; Literature; Music; Negro in Art Symposium; New Negro; Opportunity; Ragtime; Visual Arts; and biographical entries on figures mentioned in this article.]

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