A Brief Guide to the Harlem Renaissance

In the decades immediately following World War I, huge numbers of African Americans
migrated to the industrial North from the economically depressed and agrarian South. In
cities such as Chicago, Washington, DC, and New York City, the recently migrated sought
and found (to some degree) new opportunities, both economic and artistic. African
Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage and to become "The New Negro," a
term coined in 1925 by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke in his influential book of the
same name.
Countee Cullen thought long and hard in his poems about his own and collective AfricanAmerican identity. Some of his strongest poems question the benevolence of a Creator who
has bestowed a race with such mixed blessings. Claude McKay, born and raised in Jamaica,
wrote of the immigrant's nostalgia and the American negro's pride and rage. Jean (Eugene)
Toomer remains a mystery. Light enough to "pass" and alone constituting the generation's
Symbolist avant-garde, he appeared briefly on the Harlem Renaissance scene, became a
follower of the mystic Gurdjieff, and disappeared into the white world.
Sterling Brown, for many years a professor at Howard University, emerged in the thirties
with sometimes playful, often pessimistic poems in standard English and black vernacular
and in African American and European forms. In many of Brown's poems strong men and
women resist the oppression of racism, poverty, and fate.
The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance opened doors and deeply influenced the generations
of African American writers that followed, including Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks.
In the forties, fifties, and sixties, Hayden taught at Fisk University and the University of
Michigan and served two terms as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Since
the publication in 1945 of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks has combined a
quiet life with critical success. Her second book, Annie Allen, won the 1950 Pulitzer prize,
the first time a book by a black poet had won that coveted distinction, and the last time
until Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, almost forty years later. Brooks was a virtuoso of
technique, her exquisite poems exploring, for the first time, the interior lives of African
American individuals. Brooks' perspective shifted mid-career, her later work influenced by
the politically and socially radical Black Arts Movement of the sixties.
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Spanning the 1920s to the mid-1930s, the Harlem Renaissance was a literary,
artistic, and intellectual movement that kindled a new black cultural identity. Its
essence was summed up by critic and teacher Alain Locke in 1926 when he
declared that through art, Negro life is seizing its first chances for group
expression and self determination. Harlem became the center of a spiritual

coming of age in which Lockes New Negro transformed social

disillusionment to race pride. Chiefly literary, the Renaissance included the
visual arts but excluded jazz, despite its parallel emergence as a black art
form.
HARLEM RENAISSANCE

The nucleus of the movement included Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes,

Rudolf Fisher, Wallace Thurman, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, Arna
Bontemps, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston. An older generation of
writers and intellectualsJames Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Alain Locke,
and Charles S. Johnsonserved as mentors.
The publishing industry, fueled by whites fascination with the exotic world of
Harlem, sought out and published black writers. With much of the literature
focusing on a realistic portrayal of black life, conservative black critics feared
that the depiction of ghetto realism would impede the cause of racial equality.
The intent of the movement, however, was not political but aesthetic. Any
benefit a burgeoning black contribution to literature might have in defraying
racial prejudice was secondary to, as Langston Hughes put it, the expression
of our individual dark-skinned selves.
The Harlem Renaissance influenced future generations of black writers, but it
was largely ignored by the literary establishment after it waned in the 1930s.
With the advent of the civil rights movement, it again acquired wider
recognition.
Harlem Renaissance (HR) is the name given to the period from the
end of World War I and through the middle of the 1930s Depression,
during which a group of talented African-American writers produced
a sizable body of literature in the four prominent genres of poetry,
fiction, drama, and essay.

2. The notion of "twoness" , a divided awareness of one's identity,

was introduced by W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP).and the author of the influential book The Souls of Black
Folks (1903): "One ever feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro;
two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings: two warring
ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from
being torn asunder."
3. Common themes: alienation, marginality, the use of folk material,
the use of the blues tradition, the problems of writing for an elite
audience.
4. HR was more than just a literary movement: it included racial
consciousness, "the back to Africa" movement led by Marcus
Garvey, racial integration, the explosion of music particularly jazz,
spirituals and blues, painting, dramatic revues, and others.
It has been argued that the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, is the
defining moment in African American literature because of an unprecedented outburst of
creative activity among black writers. The importance of this movement to African American
literary art lies in the efforts of its writers to exalt the heritage of African Americans and to
use their unique culture as a means toward re-defining African American literary expression.
While the Harlem Renaissance began as a series of literary discussions in the lower
Manhattan (Greenwich Village) and upper Manhattan (Harlem) sections of New York City, it
gained national force when Charles Spurgeon Johnson, editor of Opportunity, the official
organ of the National Urban League, encouraged aspiring writers to migrate to New York in
order to form a critical mass of young black creative artists. The great migration from rural
America, from the Caribbean, and from Africa to northern American cities (such as New
York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.) between 1919 and 1926, in fact, allowed the Harlem
Renaissance to become a significant cultural phenomenon. Black urban migration, combined
with trends in American society as a whole toward experimentation during the 1920s, and
the rise of radical black intellectuals including Alain Locke, Marcus Garvey, founder of the
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis
magazine all contributed to the particular styles and unprecedented success of black
artists during this period.
Among the poets, fiction writers, and essayists answering Johnsons call were Langston
Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Helene Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen,
and Jean Toomer. Through their artistry, the literature of this period helped to facilitate a

transformation from the psychology of the Old Negro (characterized by an implied

inferiority of the post-Reconstruction era when black artists often did not control the means
of production or editorial prerogatives) to the New Negro (characterized as self-assertive,
racially conscious, articulate, and, for the most part, in charge of what they produced).
Landmark texts that marked this transformation and encouraged increased exploration of
African American experience through literature included The Book of American Negro Poetry
(1922), edited by James Weldon Johnson and The New Negro (1925) by Locke. The shortlived literary magazine Fire!! (1926) also had a significant impact on the literary production
because it represented the efforts of younger African American writers (such as Hughes and
Hurston) to claim their own creativity apart from older artists (such as DuBois and James
Weldon Johnson), as well as to establish autonomy from potential white exploiters.
With greater possibilities for artistic self-determination, the writers of the Harlem
Renaissance produced a sizable body of work, often exploring such themes as alienation and
marginality. Several writers, including Hughes, Hurston, Larsen, and Toomer relied
particularly on the rich folk tradition (oral culture, folktales, black dialect, jazz and blues
composition) to create unique literary forms. Other writers, such as Cullen, McKay and
Helene Johnson wrote within more conventional literary genres as a way to capture what
they saw as the growing urbanity and sophistication of African Americans. The literature of
the Harlem Renaissance, therefore, reflects the multiple ways that black experience in
America was perceived and expressed in the first decades of the twentieth century.