Visual Shock a History of Art Controversies in American Culture Pdf

April 25, 2022 Post a Comment

On Feb 28, 2014, Humanities Texas held a i-twenty-four hours teacher professional evolution workshop in Austin focusing on the history and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Professor Cary D. Wintz, Distinguished Professor of History at Texas Southern Academy, opened the workshop with the post-obit lecture titled "The Harlem Renaissance: What Was It, and Why Does It Affair?" In his remarks, Wintz addresses the origins and nature of the movement—a task, he says, that is far more circuitous than it may seem.

Wintz is a specialist in the Harlem Renaissance and in African American political thought. Wintz is an author or editor of numerous books including Harlem Speaks; Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance; African American Political Idea, 1890–1930; African Americans and the Presidency: The Road to the White House; and The Harlem Renaissance in the West. He served as an editor of the Oxford University Press five-volume Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present, and the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Routledge). He has too written extensively on Texas history and is an author of one of the standard Texas history texts, Texas: The Lone Star State. He is a native Houstonian and a graduate of Rice University and Kansas State University.

What was the Harlem Renaissance and when did it begin?

This seemingly simple question reveals the complexities of the motion we know varyingly every bit the New Negro Renaissance, the New Negro Movement, the Negro Renaissance, the Jazz Age, or the Harlem Renaissance. To answer the question it is necessary to identify the movement inside time and space, and and so to ascertain its nature. This task is much more than complex than it might seem.

Traditionally the Harlem Renaissance was viewed primarily as a literary motion centered in Harlem and growing out of the black migration and the emergence of Harlem as the premier black metropolis in the U.s.. Music and theater were mentioned briefly, more than as background and local color, as providing inspiration for poetry and local color for fiction. However, in that location was no assay of the developments in these fields. Likewise, art was discussed by and large in terms of Aaron Douglas and his association with Langston Hughes and other young writers who produced Fire!! in 1926, but there was lilliputian or no analysis of the piece of work of African American artists. And there was fifty-fifty less discussion or assay of the work of women in the fields of art, music, and theater.

Fortunately, this narrow view has changed. The Harlem Renaissance is increasingly viewed through a broader lens that recognizes it equally a national motility with connections to international developments in art and civilisation that places increasing emphasis on the non-literary aspects of the motion.

Fourth dimension

First, to know when the Harlem Renaissance began, we must determine its origins. Agreement the origins depends on how we perceive the nature of the Renaissance. For those who view the Renaissance as primarily a literary movement, the Civic Club Dinner of March 21, 1924, signaled its emergence. This event did not occur in Harlem, but was held nearly one hundred blocks south in Manhattan at the Civic Lodge on Twelfth Street off Fifth Avenue. Charles S. Johnson, the young editor of Opportunity, the National Urban League'due south monthly magazine, conceived the effect to honor writer Jessie Fauset on the occasion of the publication of her novel, There Is Confusion. Johnson planned a small dinner party with about 20 guests—a mix of white publishers, editors, and literary critics, black intellectuals, and young black writers. But, when he asked Alain Locke to preside over the event, Locke agreed only if the dinner honored African American writers in general rather than one novelist.

Then the elementary celebratory dinner morphed into a transformative event with over 1 hundred attendees. African Americans were represented past W. Eastward. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others of the black intelligentsia, along with Fauset and a representative grouping of poets and authors. White guests predominately were publishers and critics; Carl Van Doren, editor of Century magazine, spoke for this group calling upon the young writers in the audience to make their contribution to the "new literary age" emerging in America.ⁱ

The Civic Club dinner significantly accelerated the literary stage of the Harlem Renaissance. Frederick Allen, editor of Harper's, approached Countee Cullen, securing his poems for his mag as soon equally the poet finished reading them. As the dinner ended Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic, hung effectually talking to Cullen, Fauset, and several other immature writers, then offered Charles S. Johnson a unique opportunity: an unabridged issue of Survey Graphic devoted to the Harlem literary movement. Nether the editorship of Alain Locke the "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro" number of Survey Graphic hit the newsstands March 1, 1925.² It was an overnight sensation. Subsequently that year Locke published a book-length version of the "Harlem" edition, expanded and re-titled The New Negro: An Estimation.³ In the album Locke laid down his vision of the aesthetic and the parameters for the emerging Harlem Renaissance; he also included a collection of poetry, fiction, graphic arts, and critical essays on art, literature, and music.

For those who viewed the Harlem Renaissance in terms of musical theater and entertainment, the birth occurred three years earlier when Shuffle Along opened at the 63rd Street Musical Hall. Shuffle Along was a musical play written by a pair of veteran Vaudeville acts—comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, and composers/singers Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Most of its bandage featured unknowns, but some, like Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, who had only minor roles in the product, were on their way to international fame. Eubie Blake recalled the significance of the product, when he pointed out that he and Sissle and Lyles and Miller accomplished something that the other great African American performers—Bob Cole and J. Rosamund Johnson, Bert Williams and George Walker—had tried, just failed to attain. "We did it, that's the story," he exclaimed, "We put Negroes back on Broadway!"⁴

Poet Langston Hughes also saw Shuffle Along as a seminal issue in the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. It introduced him to the creative globe of New York, and it helped to redefine and energize music and nightlife in Harlem. In the process, information technology introduced white New Yorkers to black music, theater, and entertainment and helped generated the white fascination with Harlem and the African American arts that was and so much a part of the Harlem Renaissance. For the young Hughes, just arrived in the city, the long-range touch on of Shuffle Forth was not on his heed. In 1921, it was all virtually the show, and, as he wrote in his autobiography, information technology was "a honey of a show:"

Swift, bright, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes. Likewise, wait who were in it: The now famous choir director, Hall Johnson, and the composer, William Grant Yet, were a function of the orchestra. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle wrote the music and played and acted in the show. Miller and Lyles were the comics. Florence Mills skyrocketed to fame in the 2d act. Trixie Smith sang "He May Exist Your Man Simply He Comes to See Me Sometimes." And Caterina Jarboro, now a European prima donna, and the internationally historic Josephine Baker were merely in the chorus. Everybody was in the audition—including me. People came to see it innumerable times. Information technology was always packed.^v

Shuffle Along also brought jazz to Broadway. It combined jazz music with very creatively choreographed jazz dance to transform musical theater into something new, exciting, and daring. And the testify was a critical and financial success. It ran 474 performances on Broadway and spawned three touring companies. It was a hit prove written, performed, and produced by blacks, and it generated a demand for more. Within three years, nine other African American shows appeared on Broadway, and white writers and composers rushed to produce their versions of black musical comedies.

Music was also a prominent characteristic of African American culture during the Harlem Renaissance. The term "Jazz Age" was used by many who saw African American music, especially the dejection and jazz, as the defining features of the Renaissance. However, both jazz and the dejection were imports to Harlem. They emerged out of the African American experience around the turn of the century in southern towns and cities, like New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis. From these origins these musical forms spread across the country, north to Chicago earlier arriving in New York a few years earlier World War I.

Blues and blackness blues performers such as musician Westward. C. Handy and vocalist Ma Rainey were pop on the Vaudeville circuit in the belatedly nineteenth century. The publication of W. C. Handy'southward "Memphis Dejection" in 1912 and the first recordings a few years after brought this genre into the mainstream of American popular culture. Jazz reportedly originated amidst the musicians who played in the bars and brothels of the infamous Storyville district of New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have invented jazz there in 1902, but it is doubtful that any i person holds that honor.

According to James Weldon Johnson, jazz reached New York in 1905 at Proctor's 20-Third Street Theater. Johnson described the band there as "a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making ascendant utilise of banjos, mandolins, guitars, saxophones, and drums in combination, and [it] was chosen the Memphis Students—a very good proper noun, overlooking the fact that the performers were non students and were not from Memphis. There was likewise a violin, a couple of brass instruments, and a double-bass." Vii years afterward, composer and band leader James Reese Europe, i of the "Memphis Students," took his Clef Guild Orchestra to Carnegie Hall. During World War I, while serving equally an officer for a machine-gun company in the famed 369th U.S. Infantry Division, James Europe, fellow officer Noble Sissel, and the regimental band introduced the sounds of ragtime, jazz, and the blues to European audiences.

Following the war, blackness music, especially the blues and jazz, became increasingly popular with both black and white audiences. Europe continued his career as a successful bandleader until his untimely death in 1919. Ma Rainey and other jazz artists and blues singers began to sign recording contracts, initially with African American record companies like Black Swan Records, but very rapidly with Paramount, Columbia, and other mainstream recording outlets. In Harlem, one society opened after another, each featuring jazz orchestras or blues singers. Noble Sissle, of course, was 1 of the team backside the production of Shuffle Along, which opened Broadway upwards to Chocolate Dandies and a series of other black musical comedies, featuring these new musical styles.

The visual arts, particularly painting, prints, and sculpture, emerged somewhat afterwards in Harlem than did music, musical theater, and literature. Ane of the virtually notable visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, arrived in Harlem from Kansas Urban center in 1925. Later that year his offset pieces appeared in Opportunity, and ten Douglas pieces appeared as "Ten Decorative Designs" illustrating Locke's The New Negro. Early the side by side year W. East. B. Du Bois published Douglas's kickoff illustrations in The Crisis. Due to his personal association with Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and other African American writers, his collaboration with them in the publication of their literary magazine Fire!! and his role designing book jackets and illustrating literary works, Douglas was the near high-contour artist clearly connected to the Harlem Renaissance in the mid- to tardily-1920s. And while these connections to the literary role of the Renaissance were notable, they were not typical of the feel of other African American artists of this period.

More significant in launching the fine art stage of the Harlem Renaissance were the exhibits of African American art in Harlem and the funding and exhibits that the Harmon Foundation provided. The early on stirrings of the African American art movement in Harlem followed a 1919 showroom on the work of Henry Ossawa Tanner at a midtown gallery in New York, and an showroom of African American artists two years later at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library. Even more of import to the nurturing and promotion of African American art were the activities of the Harmon Foundation. Beginning in 1926 the Foundation awarded cash prizes for outstanding achievement by African Americans in 8 fields, including fine arts. Additionally, from 1928 through 1933, the Harmon Foundation organized an annual exhibit of African American fine art.

Place

Situating the Harlem Renaissance in infinite is almost as complex every bit defining its origins and time span. Certainly Harlem is cardinal to the Harlem Renaissance, but it serves more as an anchor for the movement than as its sole location. In reality, the Harlem Renaissance both drew from and spread its influence beyond the United States, the Caribbean, and the world. Only a handful of the writers, artists, musicians, and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance were native to Harlem or New York, and merely a relatively small number lived in Harlem throughout the Renaissance period. And nevertheless, Harlem impacted the art, music, and writing of virtually all of the participants in the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem refers to that part of Manhattan Isle due north of Central Park and generally east of 8th Avenue or St. Nicholas Artery. Originally established in the seventeenth century equally a Dutch hamlet, it evolved over time. Following its looting by the city in 1873, urban growth commenced. The resulting Harlem real estate boom lasted virtually twenty years during which developers erected most of the physical structures that divers Harlem as late as the mid-twentieth century. They designed this new, urban Harlem primarily for the wealthy and the upper middle class; it contained wide avenues, a rail connectedness to the metropolis on Eighth Avenue, and consisted of expensive homes and luxurious apartment buildings accompanied past commercial and retail structures, along with stately churches and synagogues, clubs, social organizations, and even the Harlem Philharmonic Orchestra.

By 1905, Harlem's boom turned into a bust. Desperate white developers began to sell or rent to African Americans, often at greatly discounted prices, while blackness real estate firms provided the customers. At this time, approximately sixty k blacks lived in New York, scattered through the 5 boroughs, including a small community in Harlem. The largest concentration inhabited the overcrowded and congested Tenderloin and San Juan Hill sections of the west side of Manhattan. When New York's black population swelled in the twentieth century as newcomers from the South moved due north and as redevelopment destroyed existing black neighborhoods, pressure for boosted and hopefully better housing pushed blacks northward up the w side of Manhattan into Harlem.

Harlem's transition, in one case information technology began, followed fairly traditional patterns. As presently as blacks started moving onto a cake, property values dropped farther as whites began to leave. This process was especially evident in the early 1920s. Both black and white realtors took reward of declining property values in Harlem—the panic selling that resulted when blacks moved in. Addressing the demand for housing generated past the city'southward apace growing black population, they caused, subdivided, and leased Harlem holding to black tenants.

Year by year, the boundaries of black Harlem expanded, as blacks streamed into Harlem every bit speedily as they could observe affordable housing. By 1910, they had become the majority group on the west side of Harlem n of 130th Street; by 1914, the population of black Harlem was estimated to exist 50 m. By 1930 black Harlem had expanded north ten blocks to 155th Street and due south to 115th Street; it spread from the Harlem River to Amsterdam Avenue, and housed approximately 164,000 blacks. The core of this customs—divisional roughly by 126th Street on the south, 159th Street on the north, the Harlem River and Park Avenue on the east, and Eighth Avenue on the west—was more than than 95 percentage blackness.

By 1920, Harlem, past virtue of the sheer size of its black population, had emerged as the virtual capital letter of blackness America; its proper noun evoked a magic that lured all classes of blacks from all sections of the country to its streets. Impoverished southern farmers and sharecroppers made their way northward, where they were joined in Harlem by black intellectuals such as Due west. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. Although the quondam black social elites of Washington, DC, and Philadelphia were disdainful of Harlem's vulgar splendor, and while information technology housed no significant black academy every bit did Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Nashville, Harlem still became the race's cultural heart and a Mecca for its aspiring young. Information technology housed the National Urban League, A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Automobile Porters, and the black leadership of the NAACP. Marcus Garvey launched his ill-fated blackness nationalist movement among its masses, and Harlem became the geographical focal point of African American literature, art, music, and theater. Its night clubs, music halls, and jazz joints became the center of New York nightlife in the mid-1920s. Harlem, in short, was where the action was in black America during the decade post-obit Earth War I.

Harlem and New York City as well contained the infrastructure to support and sustain the arts. In the early on twentieth century, New York had replaced Boston as the center of the book publishing industry. Furthermore, new publishing houses in the urban center, such as Alfred A. Knopf, Harper Brothers, and Harcourt Brace, were open to adding greater diverseness to their volume lists by including works past African American writers. By the late nineteenth century, New York City housed Can Pan Alley, the center of the music publishing industry. In the 1920s, when recordings and broadcasting emerged, New York was again in the forefront. Broadway was the epicenter of American theater, and New York was the centre of the American art earth. In curt, in the early twentieth century no other American city possessed the businesses and institutions to support literature and the arts that New York did.

In spite of its physical presence, size, and its literary and arts infrastructure, the nature of Harlem and its relation to the Renaissance are very circuitous. The discussion "Harlem" evoked strong and alien images amid African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Was information technology the Negro metropolis, black Manhattan, the political, cultural, and spiritual center of African America, a land of plenty, a city of refuge, or a black ghetto and emerging slum? For some, the epitome of Harlem was more than personal. King Solomon Gillis, the chief character in Rudolph Fisher's "The City of Refuge," was 1 of these. Emerging out of the subway at 135th and Lennox Avenue, Gillis was transfixed:

Make clean air, bluish sky, vivid sunlight. Gillis set downward his tan-cardboard extension-example and wiped his black, shining brow. And then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; up and down Lenox Artery, up and down One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street; big, lanky Negroes, brusk, squat Negroes; blackness ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping about the sidewalks; here and there a white face drifting forth, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. There was convincingly no doubt of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem.⁷

Gillis then noticed the commotion in the street as trucks and autos crowded into the intersection at the command of the traffic cop—an African American traffic cop:

The Southern Negro's eyes opened wide; his rima oris opened wider. . . . For there stood a handsome, brass-buttoned giant directing the heaviest traffic Gillis had ever seen; halting unnumbered tons of automobiles and trucks and wagons and pushcarts and street-cars; belongings them at bay with 1 mitt while he swept similar tons peremptorily on with the other; ruling the wide crossing with supreme self-assurance; and he, besides, was a Negro!

Notwithstanding most of the vehicles that leaped or crouched at his behest carried white passengers. 1 of these overdrove bounds a few feet and Gillis heard the officeholder's shrill whistle and gruff reproof, saw the commuter'due south face up plough ruby-red and his car draw back similar a threatened pup. Information technology was beyond belief—incommunicable. Black might exist white, but information technology couldn't be that white!

"Done died an' woke up in Heaven," thought King Solomon, watching, fascinated; and after a while, every bit if the wonder of it were too swell to believe simply by seeing, "Cullud policemans!" he said, half aloud; so repeated over and over, with greater and greater confidence, "Even got cullud policemans…"⁸

Gillis was one of those who sought refuge in Harlem. He fled Due north Carolina after shooting a white human. At present, in Harlem, the policeman was blackness. Not that this changed his fate. At the end of the story, ane of these black policemen dragged Gillis away in handcuffs. The reality of Harlem often contradicted the myth.

For poet Langston Hughes, Harlem was also something of a refuge. Following a by and large unhappy childhood living at one time or another with his mother or father, grandmother, or neighbors, Hughes convinced his stern and foreboding father to finance his instruction at Columbia University. He recalled his 1921 arrival:

"I went up the steps and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again. I registered at the Y. When college opened, I did not want to motility into the dormitory at Columbia. I really did not want to go the college at all. I didn't want to do anything but live in Harlem, get a job and work there."⁹

Later a less than happy year at Columbia, Hughes did exactly that. He dropped out of school and moved into Harlem. Hughes, though, never lost sight that poverty, overcrowded and dilapidated housing, and racial prejudice were part of the daily experience of virtually Harlem residents.

For Hughes, too, the desire to only "live in Harlem" was as much myth as reality. Subsequently dropping out of Columbia and moving to Harlem he actually spent footling time there. Until the tardily 1930s, he was much more of a visitor or transient in Harlem than a resident. While Hughes spent many weekends and vacations in Harlem during his years at Lincoln University, during the superlative of the Renaissance, between 1923 and 1938 he was away from the city more he was there, more a visitor than a total-time resident.

James Weldon Johnson saw a withal unlike Harlem. In his 1930 volume, Blackness Manhattan, he described the black metropolis in near utopian terms as the race'south great hope and its grand social experiment: "And then here we have Harlem—not merely a colony or a community or a settlement . . . but a black city, located in the center of white Manhattan, and containing more Negroes to the foursquare mile than any other spot on earth. It strikes the uninformed observer as a phenomenon, a miracle straight out of the skies."¹⁰ When Johnson looked at Harlem he did non see an emerging slum or a ghetto, but a black neighborhood north of Central Park that was "one of the most cute and healthful" in the city. "It is non a fringe, information technology is not a slum, nor is it a 'quarter' consisting of dilapidated tenements. It is a section of new-police apartment houses and handsome dwellings, with streets as well paved, likewise lighted, and every bit well kept as in any other part of the city."¹¹

Without question Harlem was a rapidly growing black urban center, only what kind of city was information technology becoming? Harlem historian Gilbert Osofsky argued, "the near profound change that Harlem experienced in the 1920'southward was its emergence as a slum. Largely within the infinite of a single decade Harlem was transformed from a potentially platonic community to a neighborhood with manifold social and economical problems called 'pitiful,' 'unspeakable,' 'incredible.'"¹² As a event, most of Harlem's residents lived in poor housing, either in poverty or on the verge of poverty, in a neighborhood experiencing the typical results of poverty and discrimination: growing vice, criminal offense, juvenile delinquency, and drug habit.

In short, the day-to-day realities that most Harlemites faced differed dramatically from the image of Harlem life presented by James Weldon Johnson. Harlem was beset with contradictions. While information technology reflected the self-confidence, militancy, and pride of the New Negro in his or her demand for equality, and it reflected the aspirations and creative genius of the talented immature people of the Harlem Renaissance along with the economic aspirations of the black migrants seeking a better life in the north, ultimately Harlem failed to resolve its problems and to fulfill these dreams.

The 1935 Harlem Race Anarchism put to rest the conflicting images of Harlem. On March nineteen, 1935, a young Puerto Rican boy was caught stealing a 10-cent pocketknife from the counter of a 135th Street v-and-dime shop. Post-obit the arrest, rumors spread that police had browbeaten the youth to expiry. A large crowd gathered, shouting "constabulary brutality" and "racial discrimination." A window was smashed, looting began, and the riot spread throughout the night. The violence resulted in three blacks dead, 2 hundred stores trashed and burned, and more than than two one thousand thousand dollars worth of destroyed property. The Puerto Rican youth whose abort precipitated the riot had been released the previous evening when the merchant chose not to press charges. Shocked by the uprising, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia established an interracial committee headed by E. Franklin Frazier, a professor of folklore at Howard University, to investigate the anarchism. They concluded the obvious: the riot resulted from a general frustration with racial bigotry and poverty.

What the commission failed to written report was that the riot shattered once and for all James Weldon Johnson'south paradigm of Harlem as the African American urban utopia. In spite of the presence of artists and writers, nightclubs, music, and entertainment, Harlem was a slum, a black ghetto characterized past poverty and discrimination. Burned-out storefronts might be fertile ground for political activeness, just not for art, literature, and culture. Harlem would come across new black writers in the years to come. Musicians, poets, and artists would proceed to brand their home there, but it never over again served as the focal point of a creative move with the national and international affect of the Harlem Renaissance.

Johnson did non personally witness the 1935 Riot. He had left the urban center in 1931, the twelvemonth after he published Black Manhattan, to take the Spence Chair in Creative Literature at Fisk University in Nashville. He lived in that location until his death in 1938.

Renaissance

So, what was the Harlem Renaissance? The simple answer is that the Harlem Renaissance (or the New Negro Motility, or whatever name is preferred) was the most important issue in twentieth-century African American intellectual and cultural life. While best known for its literature, it touched every aspect of African American literary and artistic inventiveness from the end of World War I through the Swell Depression. Literature, critical writing, music, theater, musical theater, and the visual arts were transformed by this movement; it as well afflicted politics, social evolution, and almost every aspect of the African American feel from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s.

Just in that location was as well something ephemeral about the Harlem Renaissance, something vague and hard to ascertain. The Harlem Renaissance, and then, was an African American literary and artistic movement anchored in Harlem, but drawing from, extending to, and influencing African American communities across the country and across. As we have seen, it also had no precise kickoff; nor did information technology have a precise ending. Rather, it emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American community that followed World War I, blossomed in the 1920s, and and so faded away in the mid-to-tardily 1930s and early 1940s.

Likewise the Harlem Renaissance has no unmarried defined ideological or stylistic standard that unified its participants and defined the movement. Instead, most participants in the motility resisted black or white efforts to define or narrowly categorize their art. For example, in 1926, a group of writers, spearheaded by writer Wallace Thurman and including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and artist Aaron Douglas, among others, produced their own literary mag, Fire!! 1 purpose of this venture was the proclamation of their intent to presume ownership of the literary Renaissance. In the process, they turned their backs on Alain Locke and West. East. B. Du Bois and others who sought to channel black creativity into what they considered to be the proper aesthetic and political directions. Despite the efforts of Thurman and his young colleagues, Fire!! fizzled out after only ane event and the motion remained sick defined. In fact, this was its most distinguishing characteristic. There would be no common literary fashion or political ideology associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Information technology was far more an identity than an credo or a literary or artistic school. What united participants was their sense of taking role in a common try and their commitment to giving artistic expression to the African American experience.

If there was a argument that defined the philosophy of the new literary movement it was Langston Hughes's essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," published in The Nation, June 16, 1926:

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to limited our individual night-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. Nosotros know we are cute. 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 volition build our temples for tomorrow, strong as nosotros know how, and we will stand on meridian of the mountain, free within ourselves.¹³

Like Burn!!, this essay was the movement's declaration of independence, both from the stereotypes that whites held near African Americans and the expectations that they had for their literary works, and from the expectations that black leaders and black critics had for black writers, and the expectations that they placed on their work.

At that place was, not surprisingly, resistance to this independence, peculiarly among those concerned with the political costs that the realistic expressions of blackness life could engender—feeding white prejudice by exposing the less savory elements of the blackness customs. Du Bois responded to Hughes a few weeks subsequently in a Chicago speech that was later published in The Crunch as "The Criteria of Negro Fine art" (October 1926): "Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that any art I take for writing has been used ever for propaganda for gaining the correct of black folk to beloved and enjoy. I do not intendance a damn for whatsoever art that is not used for propaganda. Only I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent."

The determination of black writers to follow their own creative vision led to the creative multifariousness that was the principal characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance. This diversity is clearly evident in the poetry of the menstruation where subject thing, style, and tone ranged from the traditional to the more inventive. Langston Hughes, for example, captured the life and language of the working class, and the rhythm and manner of the dejection in a number of his poems, none more so than "The Weary Dejection." In contrast to Hughes's appropriation of the class of black music, especially jazz and the blues, and his use of the black vernacular, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen utilized more traditional and classical forms for their verse. McKay used sonnets for much of his protest poetry, while Cullen'southward poems relied both on classical literary allusions and symbols and standard poetic forms.

This diverseness and experimentation also characterized music. This was evidenced in the blues of Bessie Smith and the range of jazz from the early on rhythms of Jelly Curlicue Morton to the instrumentation of Louis Armstrong or the sophisticated orchestration of Duke Ellington. In painting, the soft colors and pastels that Aaron Douglas used to create a veiled view for the African-inspired images in his paintings and murals contrast sharply with Jacob Lawrence's employ of brilliant colors and sharply defined images.

Within this diversity, several themes emerged which set up the character of the Harlem Renaissance. No black author, musician, or artist expressed all of these themes, simply each did accost one or more in his or her piece of work. The outset of these themes was the endeavour to recapture the African American past—its rural southern roots, urban experience, and African heritage. Interest in the African by corresponded with the ascension of Pan-Africanism in African American politics, which was at the center of Marcus Garvey'southward ideology and also a concern of West. E. B. Du Bois in the 1920s.

It also reflected the general fascination with ancient African history that followed the discovery of King Tut's tomb in 1922. Poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes addressed their African heritage in their works, while artist Aaron Douglas used African motifs in his fine art. A number of musicians, from the classical composer William Grant Still to jazz bully Louis Armstrong, introduced African inspired rhythms and themes in their compositions.

The exploration of black southern heritage was reflected in novels by Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as in Jacob Lawrence's art. Zora Neale Hurston used her experience as a folklorist as the basis for her extensive study of rural southern black life in her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Jacob Lawrence turned to African American history for much of his work including two of his multi-sail serial' of paintings, the Harriett Tubman series and the one on the Blackness Migration.

Harlem Renaissance writers and artists also explored 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 kickoff novel, Home to Harlem. Some blackness writers, including McKay and Hughes, as well every bit Rudolph Fisher and Wallace Thurman, were accused of overemphasizing crime, sexuality, and other less-savory aspects of ghetto life in gild to feed the voyeuristic desires of white readers and publishers, in imitation of white novelist Carl Van Vechten's controversial Harlem novel, Nigger Heaven.

A 3rd major theme addressed past the literature of the Harlem Renaissance was race. Virtually every novel and play, and about of the poetry, explored race in America, especially the touch on of race and racism on African Americans. In their simplest form these works protested racial injustice. Claude McKay's sonnet, "If Nosotros Must Die," was among the all-time of this genre. Langston Hughes also wrote protestation pieces, as did almost every black author at one time or another.

Amid the visual artists, Lawrence'southward historical series emphasized the racial struggle that dominated African American history, while Romare Bearden's early illustrative work often focused on racial politics. The struggle against lynching in the mid-1920s stimulated anti-lynching poetry, too as Walter White'south advisedly researched written report of the subject, Rope and Faggot. In the early 1930s, the Scottsboro incident stimulated considerable protest writing, likewise as a 1934 anthology, Negro, which addressed race in an international context. Nearly of the literary efforts of the Harlem Renaissance avoided overt protest or propaganda, focusing instead on the psychological and social impact of race. Amongst the best of these studies were Nella Larsen's 2 novels, Quicksand in 1928 and, a year afterwards, Passing. Both explored characters of mixed racial heritage who struggled to define their racial identity in a world of prejudice and racism. Langston Hughes addressed like themes in his poem "Cross," and in his 1931 play, Mulatto, as did Jessie Fauset in her 1929 novel, Plum Bun. That aforementioned yr Wallace Thurman made color discrimination inside the urban black community the focus of his novel, The Blacker the Berry.

Finally, the Harlem Renaissance incorporated all aspects of African American culture in its artistic work. This ranged from the apply of black music every bit an inspiration for poetry or black folklore as an inspiration for novels and brusk stories. Best known for this was Langston Hughes who used the rhythms and styles of jazz and the blues in much of his early verse. James Weldon Johnson, who published two collections of blackness spirituals in 1927 and 1928, and Sterling Brown, who used the blues and southern work songs in many of the poems in his 1932 book of poetry, Southern Road, continued the practice that Hughes had initiated. Other writers exploited black religion equally a literary source. Johnson made the blackness preacher and his sermons the footing for the poems in God'south Trombones, while Hurston and Larsen used black organized religion and black preachers in their novels. Hurston'due south first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), described the exploits of a southern black preacher, while in the concluding portion of Quicksand, Larsen's heroine was ensnared past religion and a southern blackness preacher.

Through all of these themes, Harlem Renaissance writers, musicians, and artists were determined to express the African American experience in all of its diversity and complication 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 beautifully crafted and detailed portraits of black life in small towns such as in Hughes's novel, Not Without Laughter, or the witty and biting depiction of Harlem'south blackness literati in Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring.

The Harlem Renaissance appealed to and relied on a mixed audience—the African American middle grade and white consumers of the arts. African American magazines such as The Crunch (the NAACP monthly journal) and Opportunity (the monthly publication of the Urban League) employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staff, published their poetry and short stories, and promoted African American literature through articles, reviews, and annual literary prizes. They also printed illustrations by black artists and used blackness artists in the layout pattern of their periodicals. Also, blacks attempted to produce their own literary and artistic venues. In addition to the short-lived Fire!!, Wallace Thurman spearheaded some other single-issue literary magazine, Harlem, in 1927, while poet Countee Cullen edited a "Negro Poets" effect of the advanced poesy magazine Palms in 1926, and brought out an anthology of African American poetry, Caroling Dusk, in 1927.

As important as these literary outlets were, they were not sufficient to support a literary move. Consequently, the Harlem Renaissance relied heavily on white-endemic enterprises for its creative works. Publishing houses, magazines, recording companies, theaters, and fine art galleries were primarily white-endemic, and fiscal support through grants, prizes, and awards generally involved white money. In fact, 1 of the major accomplishments of the Renaissance was to push button open the door to mainstream periodicals, publishing houses, and funding sources. African American music too played to mixed audiences. Harlem'south cabarets attracted both Harlem residents and white New Yorkers seeking out Harlem nightlife. The famous Cotton Gild carried this to a bizarre extreme past providing black entertainment for exclusively white audiences. Ultimately, the more successful blackness musicians and entertainers moved their performances downtown.

The relationship of the Harlem Renaissance to white venues and white audiences created controversy. While most African American critics strongly supported the movement, others like Benjamin Brawley and fifty-fifty W. E. B. Du Bois were sharply critical and accused Renaissance writers of reinforcing negative African American stereotypes. Langston Hughes'southward assertion that black artists intended to limited themselves freely, no matter what the black public or white public thought, accurately reflected the attitude of most writers and artists.

Slow fade to black

The cease of the Harlem Renaissance is as hard to define as its ancestry. It varies somewhat from i artistic field to another. In musical theater, the popularity of blackness musical reviews died out by the early 1930s, although there were occasional efforts, by and large unsuccessful, to revive the genre. Nonetheless, black performers and musicians continued to work, although non so oft in all blackness shows. Blackness music connected into the World War II era, although the popularity of blues singers waned somewhat, and jazz changed equally the big band style became popular. Literature also changed, and a new generation of black writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison emerged with little interest in or connection with the Harlem Renaissance. In fine art, a number of artists who had emerged in the 1930s connected to work, but once more, with no connectedness to a broader African American movement. Also, a number of Harlem Renaissance literary figures went silent, left Harlem, or died. Some, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, connected to write and publish into the 1940s and beyond, although there was no longer any sense that they were connected to a literary motion. And Harlem lost some of its magic following the 1935 race anarchism. In any case, few, if whatsoever, people were talking about a Harlem Renaissance by 1940.

The Harlem Renaissance flourished in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but its antecedents and legacy spread many years earlier 1920 and after 1930. It had no universally recognized name, but was known variously equally the New Negro Movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, too every bit the Harlem Renaissance. It had no conspicuously defined beginning or end, but emerged out of the social and intellectual upheaval in the African American community that followed Globe War I, blossomed in the mid- to belatedly-1920s, and and then faded away in the mid-1930s.

What was the Harlem Renaissance and why was it important?

While at its cadre it was primarily a literary motion, the Harlem Renaissance touched all of the African American artistic arts. While its participants were determined to truthfully stand for the African American experience and believed in racial pride and equality, they shared no mutual political philosophy, social belief, artistic style, or artful principle. This was a move of individuals gratis of any overriding manifesto. While central to African American artistic and intellectual life, by no means did information technology savour the full support of the blackness or white intelligentsia; it generated every bit much hostility and criticism as it did back up and praise. From the moment of its birth, its legitimacy was debated. Nevertheless, by at least i mensurate, its success was clear: the Harlem Renaissance was the first time that a considerable number of mainstream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously, and information technology was the first time that African American literature and the arts attracted pregnant attention from the nation at large.

^oneCarl Van Doren, "The Younger Generation of Negro Writers," Opportunity 2 (1924): 144–45. Van Doren's Borough Social club Dinner accost was reprinted in Opportunity.

^two Survey Graphic, Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, 6 (March 1925).

³Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Atheneum, 1969).

⁴Run into Terry Waldo, "Eubie Blake," in Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Cary D. Wintz (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2007), 151–65.

^vLangston Hughes, The Big Bounding main (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), 223–24.

^viJames Weldon Johnson, Blackness Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 120–21.

^sevenRudolph Fisher, "The City of Refuge," in The New Negro, 57–8. The Metropolis of Refuge was first published in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1925.

⁸Ibid. 58–9.

⁹Hughes, Big Sea, 81–2.

¹⁰Johnson, Black Manhattan, three–4.

¹¹Ibid, 146. Johnson besides expresses this view of Harlem in "The Making of Harlem," Survey Graphic, 6 (March 1925), 635–39.

¹²Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930, (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 135.

^thirteenLangston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, The Nation. June 16, 1926, 694.

Vocal of the Towers by Aaron Douglas for the mural series Aspects of Negro Life, commissioned in 1934 by the WPA for the Harlem Branch of the New York City Public Library. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Civilisation, Art and Artifacts Division, New York Public Library.

Online Educational Resources: The Harlem Renaissance

Humanities Texas has assembled a list of online educational resources related to the Harlem Renaissance and its history, literature, and civilisation. These websites include primary source documents, lesson plans, photographs, and other interactive elements that will enhance classroom instruction and student comprehension.

Portrait of Charles S. Johnson. Johnson was founder of Opportunity, the National Urban League's monthly magazine, and organizer of the Civic Club Dinner that marked the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance as a literary move. U.Due south. Farm Security Assistants/Office of War Information Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Photo past Gordon Parks.

The cover of the "Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro" result of Survey Graphic, featuring an illustration of lyric tenor and composer Roland Hayes by Winold Reiss, 1925. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Civilisation, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library.

The cast of Shuffle Along, 1921.

Sheet music for "I'm Just Wild About Harry" from Shuffle Along, the first Broadway musical written, produced, and performed by African Americans, by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Music Division, Library of Congress. Copyright deposit, 1921 (155.3b).

Blues composer and musician W. C. Handy (left) with bandleader and composer Knuckles Ellington (right), ca. 1940s. Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Civilization, Photographs and Prints Segmentation, New York Public Library.

Sheet music for "Goodnight Angeline" by James Reese Europe, 1919. The photographs on the cover show Europe with the 369th U.S. Infantry Division "Hell Fighters" Band. Performing Arts Encyclopedia, Library of Congress.

The Prodigal Son by Aaron Douglas in God'south Trombones: 7 Negro Sermons in Poesy by James Weldon Johnson. New York: The Viking Printing, 1927. Douglas'south painting was inspired by Johnson'due south poem of the same name. Courtesy of Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

The Seine by Henry Ossawa Tanner, c. 1902. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Tanner moved to Paris in 1891 and achieved international recognition for his work. Gift of the Avalon Foundation. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Department of a map of New York City showing Central Park, Yorkville, and the southern part of Harlem, 1870. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, New York Public Library.

Directors of the Afro-American Investment and Building Company, Brooklyn, New York, organized September 1892. Photograph from The Negro in Business organisation by Booker T. Washington. Boston: Hartel, Jenkins & Co., 1907. openlibrary.org

Within thirty seconds walk of the 135th Street Branch (New York Public Library), Harlem, 1919. Photo by F. F. Hopper. Schomburg Center for Research in Blackness Culture, Photographs and Prints Sectionalization, New York Public Library.

In Black Manhattan (1930), James Weldon Johnson's history of African Americans in New York, two demographic maps of Harlem prove its quick flourishing in the early decades of the twentieth century. Harry Ransom Center.

From left to correct: Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, East. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher, and Hubert T. Delany, on the roof of 580 St. Nicholas Avenue, Harlem, on the occasion of a political party in Hughes' laurels, 1924. Schomburg Center for Enquiry in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.

Lenox Avenue in Harlem, ca. 1920s.

Policemen in Harlem, 1929. Schomburg Center for Research in Blackness Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Enquiry and Reference Partitioning, New York Public Library.

Portrait of Langston Hughes equally a swain. Photo past James 50. Allen. Schomburg Heart for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.

Portrait of James Weldon Johnson, December 3, 1932. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Report to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia past the interracial committee headed by Due east. Franklin Frazier assigned to investigate the March xix, 1935, riot in Harlem. Library of Congress.

Harlem Smashing by Miguel Covarrubias, 1927. Covarrubias, a Mexican painter, caricaturist, illustrator, ethnologist, and art historian, had a deep appreciation for the people of Harlem. His 1927 book, Negro Drawings, reflected his interest in Harlem performers and people on the street. Harry Ransom Center.

Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston, ca. belatedly 1930s. Hurston was an author, anthropologist, and among the publishers of Fire!! Prints and Photographs Sectionalisation, Library of Congress.

The front and back covers of the first and only issue of Burn down!!, published in 1926, with artwork by Aaron Douglas. Harry Ransom Center.

Portrait of W. E. B. Du Bois, May 31, 1919. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

The Weary Blues past Langston Hughes, published in 1926, grit comprehend artwork past Miguel Covarrubias. Harry Ransom Heart.

Portrait of Countee Cullen in Central Park, June 20, 1941. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Dust cover for Passing by Nella Larsen, published in 1928. Harry Ransom Center.

Portrait of Jessie Redmon Fauset, northward.d. Harmon Foundation Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

Due west. E. B. Du Bois (dorsum correct) and staff in the Crisis magazine function, n.d. Schomburg Center for Inquiry in Blackness Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library.

Advertisement for the Cotton Social club featuring Cab Calloway and his Cotton Gild Orchestra, 1925. Schomburg Heart for Research in Blackness Culture, Photographs and Prints Sectionalisation, New York Public Library.

Portrait of author Richard Wright, June 23, 1939. Ralph Ellison served every bit best human at Wright's wedding this same yr. Photo past Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten Drove, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Cover of the October 1928 event of The Negro American with photograph of Miss Erma Sweatt, sister of ceremonious-rights activist Heman Sweatt. The Negro American was a Harlem Renaissance era magazine published in San Antonio, Texas, that alleged itself to be "the only mag in the Southward devoted to Negro life and civilization." This detail issue includes a review of Rudolph Fisher's novel The Walls of Jericho (page 13). Courtesy of Michael L. Gillette.