Harlem Renaissance

by Callie Hissam



“The Harlem Renaissance was a product of overlapping social and intellectual circles, parallel developments, intersecting groups, and competing visions—yet all loosely bound together by the desire for racial self-assertion and self-definition in the face of white supremacy”—George Hutchinson, editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance

Definition:

Time Period:

• Began around 1919 and continued until roughly the mid 1930s

Location:

• Harlem, in New York City
• Influence extended to the British West Indies, the Caribbean, Paris, and other places

Contributions that led to the Harlem Renaissance:

• The Great Migration to the north in order to escape the Jim Crow laws, lynching, and sharecropping to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and New York City.
• World War 1, which caused more blacks to migrate north in search of jobs as unskilled industrial workers.

Three things that launched the Harlem Renaissance:

1. Charles Johnson of the National Urban League hosted a dinner party to introduce young, talented black writers to New York’s white literary establishment that resulted in Survey Graphic, a social analysis and criticism magazine that was devoted to defining the aesthetic of black literature and art, to produce a Harlem issue that shed a new light on the black community and ultimately stimulated an interest in Harlem.
2. The publication of Nigger Heaven by white novelist Carl Van Vechten that covered the elite and the baser sides of Harlem, and drew sophisticated black and white New Yorkers to Harlem that stimulated the market for African American literature and music.
3. The production of the literary magazine, FIRE!!, in 1926 that gave birth to a new generation of young writers and artists including Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Influence on culture today:

• The writers that followed in the 1930s and 1940s were respected as African American writers enough for publishers and the public to be much more open to their literature than they had been at the beginning of the century.
• Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
• Richard Wright (Native Son)
• Alice Walker (The Color Purple)

A few writers and poets during the Harlem Renaissance:

• W.E.B. Du Bois, author—Black Folk, Then and Now (1939)
• Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
• Langston Hughes, poet and author—The Weary Blues (1926), Not Without Laughter (1930)
• Sterling Brown, poet—Southern Road (1932)
• Countee Cullen, poet—The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929)
• Claude McKay, poet—Harlem Shadows (1922)

Musicians and entertainment:

• Bessie Smith, singer/songwriter
• Louis Armstrong, trumpeter/singer
• Billie Holiday, singer
• Apollo Theater, launched careers of Billie Holiday, James Brown, and Michael Jackson
• Cotton Club, famous night club in New York City

Works Cited/Consulted