The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance

The African American poet Langston HughesAn African American writer and poet who was raised in the Midwest but lived most of his adult life in Harlem. Hughes’s poetry became a vehicle for assailing racism while communicating the dignity of African American life and culture. personified the militancy and diversity of the New Negro. His mother had defeated segregation in Topeka, Kansas, five decades before the famous Brown v. Board decision that originated in this Midwestern state capitol. The agreement she secured permitted Hughes to attend the school nearest his home. His treatment in this school and the “integrated” schools of nearby Lawrence would leave a lasting impression on the young Hughes about the shortcomings of integration in the North. Langston Hughes’s grandfather had been among the martyrs of John Brown’s raid in West Virginia. His grandmother kept the bullet-ridden shawl her late husband wore when he was killed at Harper’s Ferry and told young Langston stories about his family’s long fight for justice. His grandmother was the first black woman to attend Oberlin College in Ohio. His granduncle had been a US congressman representing Virginia. The Hughes ancestry also included Native Americans and people of European descent. His distant relatives even included leading men such as Senator Henry Clay.

Hughes attended Columbia University in 1921, but his real education took place in the adjacent community of Harlem. Hughes immediately recognized that the spirit of his poetry was alive in this mecca of independent black art and culture. In 1926, Hughes and several notable writers, such Zora Neale HurstonA controversial figure in her own lifetime for her use of black vernacular in her work, Hurston’s prose is renowned today for its drama and authenticity. Hurston’s work described the conditions many Southern blacks faced and dealt candidly with controversial topics affecting black communities. and Countee Cullen, teamed with artist and fellow Kansan Aaron Douglas to create a literary magazine called Fire!! This journal was not well received by the mainstream black press. Few middle and upper-class black readers were prepared for the journal’s honest depiction of black life and were deeply troubled by its inclusion of a piece about homosexuality. In fact, the reviewer from the Baltimore Afro-American declared that the journal deserved to be thrown into the fireplace. Ironically, a warehouse fire would later destroy many of the unsold copies. Surviving copies of the journal and the work of its contributors and hundreds of other writers and artists demonstrate that the Harlem RenaissanceA cultural movement centered around the black neighborhood of Harlem that produced a wealth of uniquely American art, literature, poetry, music, and plays. While previous generations of African Americans had usually sought to mirror European culture, black artists from around the country joined those in Harlem in creating uniquely American and African American styles of cultural expression. represented a new attitude among black intellectuals. We “intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” Hughes exclaimed. “If the white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful, and ugly too.”

Figure 6.23

Langston Hughes was one of the most prolific writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

This new spirit contrasted sharply with the work of most African American artists, musicians, and writers who, prior to the 1920s, mirrored European styles. Because most white Americans also sought to produce art and literature that reflected European standards, the Harlem Renaissance would inspire the creation of uniquely American art, music, and literature in future generations. Zora Neale Hurston would later become one of the most well-known writers of the era, although her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was not published until 1937. Hurston’s work acknowledged the poverty and conditions faced by rural blacks and celebrated black dialogue. Her style set Hurston apart during an era when many black newspapers scolded the masses for speaking too informally and too loudly on trains because it created a negative impression in the minds of white passengers. Hurston’s work was seldom appreciated in its own time, however, and most artists that participated in the Harlem Renaissance still wrote from the perspective of the black middle class.

Figure 6.24

Like many Harlem Renaissance artists, Hale Woodruff was born in the Midwest. He left his hometown of Cairo, Illinois, studied art at Harvard, and taught at Atlanta University as well as Spellman College and Morehouse. His art depicted a variety of topics, including a series of famous murals depicting the slave revolt aboard the Amistad.

Despite its middle-class pedigree, the work of the Harlem Renaissance was still daring and uniquely American. Its poetry, prose, music, and art reflected the unique struggles of those who achieved a high level of education and economic security yet were denied the respectability granted to others whose journeys were less burdened. Hughes wrote poems inspired from his own life. For example, he wrote about the loneliness of being the only black student in an “integrated” school and being ridiculed by teachers when he expressed his ambitions to become a writer. No matter how successful one rose to be, even those whites that called themselves friends of the race acted differently among other whites, Hughes explained. Others practiced segregation with little regard for its consequences upon the self-perception of black children. “They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes,” Hughes wrote in his poem I Too Sing America, “but I laugh, and eat well, and grow strong.” The poem If We Must Die by Claude McKay was more direct, counseling violent resistance to the violence of racism in the midst of the race riots of 1919.

The independence of black writers was reflected by the works of black musicians in Harlem and throughout the United States in the 1920s. No longer content to mirror the styles of European classical music or the sedate melodies of the era’s Big Bands that excluded them, black musicians created a new style of music that reflected the highs and lows of life in black enclaves like New Orleans. Jazz featured an up-tempo beat with improvised solos bound together by a bolder rhythm and harmony than could be found anywhere else. A phalanx of traveling musicians transferred different styles of music, such as blues with its unique chords and “blue” notes. None of these styles and forms of music was invented by any one person, although W. C. Handy is often known as “the Father of the Blues” for his role in capturing the rhythms he observed throughout black America and transferring them to sheet music.

On any given night in 1920s America, one might go in search of the blues as it moved from its birthplace in the Mississippi Delta north to Chicago and all points east and west. If one knew where to look, they might even find it in the factory towns of New England and the mining camps of Appalachia. However, if a musical style could ever be said to have an address, during the 1920s, the home of jazz was Harlem. The machine politics of Kansas City’s Tom Pendergast and other city bosses permitted the growth of tenderloin districts where liquor and jazz flowed. However, none of these compared to Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom or Apollo Theater, a melting pot where the Chicago style of Louis Armstrong mixed with the St. Louis Blues and Charlie “Bird” Parker’s Kansas City Jazz.

Wealthy and middle-class whites seldom visited Harlem’s jazz clubs, despite the rising popularity of jazz and blues worldwide. Most whites preferred the “plantation atmosphere” of Manhattan’s Cotton Club, where black musicians performed but were never allowed to partake. At hundreds of similar venues throughout the nation, black musicians, light-skinned dancing girls, and white-gloved waiters offered a taste of black culture to a white America that was not yet ready for the New Negro of Harlem. Despite its hypocrisy in drawing the color line against black patrons, The Cotton Club provided an authentic portrait of US culture and all its contradictions. Scholar Alain Locke wrote that before the Harlem Renaissance, black Americans were expected to follow a formula created by white Americans of the “good negro” who was docile and childlike, hardworking but incapable of independent thought.

As evidenced by Locke and many other scholars, such as historian Carter G. WoodsonKnown as the “Father of Black History,” Woodson was an educator in West Virginia who earned a PhD from Harvard and founded what eventually became African American History Month. Equally important, Woodson studied topics such as the history of slavery from the perspective of black Americans during an era when academic studies of slavery were dominated by Southern whites., the 1920s also saw a renaissance in black scholarship. Woodson rose from the coal mines and segregated schools of West Virginia to become the second African American to receive a PhD from Harvard University. Woodson started what became black history month. More impressively, Woodson transformed black history from a branch of Southern history practiced by Southern whites to its own scholarly discipline. Woodson’s life work was the inclusion of black perspectives and the incorporation of African American history within the larger narrative of US history.

Woodson lived in a time when scholars accepted slavery as a positive good for the slave with a few unfortunate exceptions and a few unkind masters. The standard work on the subject, American Negro Slavery (1918) by U. B. Phillips claimed that slaves “were by racial quality submissive rather than defiant, light-hearted instead of gloomy, amiable and ingratiating instead of sullen, and whose very defects invited paternalism rather than repression.” Woodson discovered hundreds of firsthand accounts of slavery from the perspective of the slave that forever altered America’s perception of American slavery and antebellum history. Woodson also explained how the miseducated views of these historians justified and perpetuated racist ideas in the minds of both white and black Americans.