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Topics / The Twenties, 1920-1929 / Harlem Renaissance / Harlem

Renaissance (Overview)
In the early 20th century, African Americans fled poverty and persecution, moving from the Jim Crow South to the
North by the hundreds of thousands in what is known as the Great Migration. Between 1910 and 1929, nearly a
million African Americans moved from the South to the North. They left behind sharecropping, permanent debt, the
Southern Ku Klux Klan (there were groups in the North), and lynchings. As World War I began, factories desperately
needed workers. Black migrants filled the jobs, as well as the tenements in quickly segregated Northern cities.
Harlem, a neighborhood of New York City, was one such place where African Americans congregated. By the 1920s,
Harlem had become the geographical center for African Americans who had migrated North and a sort of haven for
African Americans to assert their African identity and heritage.
The Harlem Renaissance is known as a period of unprecedented artistic production by African Americans. As the
aesthetic counterpart to the social and political movement known as the New Negro Movement during the early 20th
century, the Harlem Renaissance represented a revolution in the ways African American artists perceived themselves
and their art and thus in the ways they would express themselves verbally, artistically, and musically. It celebrated
black culture and achievement with art and writing that focused on the lives of black people.
Literary Milieu
New organizations and publications were established to promote African American art. Harlem Renaissance artists
were largely inspired and enabled by black intellectuals and white patrons, such as Charles S. Johnson, editor of
Opportunity, white photographer Carl Van Vechten, and African American philosopher Alain Locke. The National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) funded the magazine the The Crisis and offered grants
to black writers, artists, and performers.
The writers of the Harlem Renaissance defied the simplified stereotypes assigned to them by
white culture by instead offering complex realistic renderings of African American life. Poet
Countee Cullen's work appeared in such mainstream publications as Vanity Fair, Bookman,
and Harper's. Langston Hughes avoided traditional forms and brilliantly combined black dialect
and musical rhythms to protest various forms of racial injustice. Hughes was a living example
of the great potential African Americans possessed as writers.
Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) was recognized by some as a masterpiece of the Harlem
Renaissance. The work recalled the music and content of Negro spirituals even as it reflected
modernist principles of writing. Claude McKay, whose Home to Harlem (1928) celebrated the
cabaret life of Harlem and aroused controversy for its representation of male African American desire, overtly
protested racial inequality.
African American author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston explored the experience of African American women.
She is best-known for her book Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and became one of the most published
women during the time period. Jessie Redmon Fauset and Georgia Douglas Johnson were part of a large group of
women poets, novelists, and playwrights to explore the complicated experience of African American female identity

during the Harlem Renaissance.

Visual Arts
The visual art of the Harlem Renaissance not only reflected the political, social, and cultural
awakening of what came to be known as the New Negro but also introduced new images of
African culture into American culture. Painter and muralist Aaron Douglas, who was called "the
father of African American art," created illustrations for The New Negro: An Interpretation
(1925), as well as for the writing of James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes. Other
painters such as William Henry Johnson and Jacob Lawrence attempted to represent
realistically the experience of African Americans during the early 20th century. Sculptor
Sargeant Claude Johnson brought together images from African and Mexican culture.
Though sculptor Augusta Savage was turned away from an art school because of her race,
she would eventually establish her own school, the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts. Additionally, she began the
Harlem Community Art Center and aided in the organization of the Harlem Arts Guild. Also a sculptor, Meta Vaux
Warrick Fuller turned her experience of solitude as a black woman who experienced severe racial discrimination into
widely celebrated art that brought together the images of African folktales and the painful experience of being an
African American woman in the early 20th century.
Music and Entertainment
The Harlem Renaissance also encompassed the achievements and prominence of musicians and performing artists
generated during what is known as the Jazz Age. The success of black musicals such as Shuffle Along (1921)the
first Broadway production that was written, produced, and performed by African Americansand Runnin' Wild (1923),
which inspired the phenomenon of the dance known as The Charleston, announced a new era of American music.
Along with Louis Armstrong, who is known as one of the founding fathers of jazz, musicians such as pianist and
composer Duke Ellington, pianist and bandleader Count Basie, and singer and bandleader Cab Calloway showcased
their talent in musical venues such as the Apollo Theater and The Cotton Club, most of which denied access to
African American patrons.
Some of the most notable musical and theatrical performers during the Harlem Renaissance
were women. The most famous of these were blues singers such as Ma Rainey, commonly
recognized as one of the earliest blues singers, and Bessie Smith, who called herself the
"Empress of the Blues" and became a national phenomenon as one of the most successful
singers of the early 20th century. Other singers such as Marian Anderson, who was the first
African American opera singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House, lived as examples
that African American women could achieve great and lasting success as musicians. Singer
and dancer Josephine Baker was one of the most prominent African American female
entertainers and rose to international fame from complete poverty.
Many white New Yorkers flocked to Harlem to hear the newly fashionable black music and poetry, and funded African
American artists. The "New Negro" intellectual became popular in white society. But, despite the celebration of black
pride and culture of the Harlem Renaissance, racism and segregation continued in both the North and the South.

Select Citation Style: MLA

MLA

Beaulieu, Elizabeth. "Harlem Renaissance (Overview)." American History. ABC-CLIO, 2015. Web. 29 Nov. 2015.
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Entry ID: 1187238