Harlem Renaissance

The roots of the Harlem Renaissance reach back to the end of the American Civil War in 1865, when most African Americans had been enslaved in the South; in the Reconstruction era the emancipated began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural self-determination. Many of the movement’s leading figures came from a generation that remembered the gains and losses of Reconstruction, and their parents or grandparents, or they themselves, had sometimes been enslaved. In the early 20th century the Great Migration carried African Americans out of the Jim Crow South to the cities of the Northeast and Midwest, in search of a better life and relief from institutionalised racism, while people of African descent came from the racially stratified communities of the Caribbean.

Harlem, developed in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for the white middle classes, became an African-American neighbourhood in the early 1900s; in 1910 African-American realtors and a church group bought a large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue. Many more arrived during World War I, when migration from Europe virtually ceased and the war effort demanded unskilled industrial labour. Yet racism followed them north: Black soldiers of segregated units such as the Harlem Hellfighters came home to a nation that often did not respect their accomplishments, and race riots broke out across the country in the Red Summer of 1919.

At its centre stood the idea of the New Negro, an overt racial pride: through intellect and the making of literature, art and music, Black Americans would challenge pervading racism and stereotypes, promote progressive or socialist politics and racial and social integration, and “uplift” the race. The movement was prompted by a renewed militancy in the struggle for civil rights, and it sought to redefine African-American identity free from degrading stereotypes. Langston Hughes wrote that Harlem gave the courage “to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame”, and in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) he spoke for most of its artists in claiming the freedom to express themselves whatever Black or white readers thought.

No single form defined its art. It took in a Pan-African perspective, “high” and “low” culture, spirituals, blues and jazz, and traditional as well as experimental forms such as modernism and jazz poetry. Its themes included the influence of slavery and of emerging folk traditions on Black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas of writing and performing for elite white audiences, and how to convey modern Black life in the urban North. W. E. B. Du Bois’s ideas of the “talented tenth” and of “double consciousness” were part of its debates, as was an open critique of Christianity.

A first stage began in the late 1910s. In 1917 Ridgely Torrence’s Plays for a Negro Theater, whose African-American actors rejected the stereotypes of blackface and the minstrel show, were called by James Weldon Johnson “the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American Theater”. The same year Hubert Harrison founded the Liberty League and The Voice. In 1919 Claude McKay published his militant sonnet “If We Must Die”, in which Black readers heard defiance amid the race riots and lynchings of the time.

In 1921 Shuffle Along, written, composed and produced by African Americans, brought jazz to Broadway and ran for 504 performances. The zenith came between about 1924, when Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life held a party for Black writers attended by many white publishers, and 1929. Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro appeared in 1925, and The Crisis and Opportunity published Black writers and gave them annual prizes. In 1932 Augusta Savage founded the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts, and her encouragement led to the Harlem Artist Guild in 1935; in 1939 she was the only African American commissioned to create an exhibit for the New York World’s Fair. The Great Depression, which began with the crash of 1929, brought the era to an abrupt end.

Alain Locke, the philosopher regarded as the movement’s “dean”, edited The New Negro, which brought together Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, the communist poet from Jamaica, with lesser-known writers such as the poet Anne Spencer. Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” was a notable jazz poem, and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” weighed an African past against Christian culture. Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Eric D. Walrond and James Weldon Johnson also became nationally known, and Richard Bruce Nugent explored experimental form and LGBT themes. Hubert Harrison argued in 1927 that the “Renaissance” was largely a white invention.

In music Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson led bands, and Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Ethel Waters and Florence Mills performed. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith sang openly of love between women, and Gladys Bentley ran the Clam House, a hub for queer patrons. Roland Hayes was the first African-American man widely recognised as a concert artist, and the composers William Grant Still and Florence Price set Black poets’ verse. Aaron Douglas, the “Father of African-American Art”, drew on ancient Egyptian and Native American motifs, and Augusta Savage put everyday Black people at the forefront of her sculpture. White patrons such as Carl Van Vechten and Charlotte Osgood Mason opened doors.

The movement opened mainstream publishing houses and white periodicals to Black writers, whose novels, magazines and newspapers drew national attention. Shuffle Along proved that Black and white audiences would pay to see African Americans on Broadway; all-black productions of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and of Four Saints in Three Acts followed, and composers carried blues, spirituals and jazz into the concert hall. It brought the Black experience within the corpus of American cultural history and changed the image of the African American from rural, undereducated peasant to urban, cosmopolitan sophistication.

Its dependence on white patrons, publishers and audiences was also a weakness. Du Bois criticised Claude McKay’s bestselling Home to Harlem (1928) for meeting the “prurient demand[s]” of white readers, and Black work was treated as exotic: once a publication had taken one, other Black authors had to look elsewhere. Some of the most famous clubs, such as the Cotton Club, where Ellington often played, admitted white audiences only. Critics argue that the movement could not separate itself from white, European culture, its intellectuals imitating white manners and etiquette. Sharing American progressivism’s faith in reform and in art as an agent of change, its artists were unprepared for the Great Depression, and the movement ended abruptly on naïve assumptions about the centrality of culture.

The Harlem Renaissance helped lay the foundation for the civil rights movement after World War II, giving the African-American community a spirit of self-determination, a growing sense of black urbanity and black militancy, and a base for the struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Many Black artists who came to maturity afterwards were inspired by it, and Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness was revived in the Black Pride movement of the early 1970s. Its new appreciation of folk roots and spirituals gave artists a rich source, and it is regarded as a creative crucible for African-American art and for its institutionalisation in white-dominated museums and cultural institutions.

Its reach was international: many Francophone Black writers from the African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were influenced by it, and in Paris the dancer Josephine Baker set fashions for Black and white women alike. Later scholarship has widened its picture. Black feminist critics have re-evaluated the work of women whose contributions were overlooked at the time, and Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset have gained renewed acclaim. Writers have also recovered its queer culture, from the drag balls of the Hamilton Lodge to the blues of the cabarets, though homosexual acts could still lead to arrest; Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in 1993 that the Harlem Renaissance “was surely as gay as it was black”.