Harlem Renaissance Totally Explained

The Harlem Renaissance (also known as the Black Literary Renaissance and The New Negro Movement) refers to the blooming of African American cultural and intellectual life during the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the anthology The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke in 1925. Centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, the movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States. Across the cultural spectrum (literature, drama, music, visual art, dance) and also in the realm of social thought (sociology, historiography, philosophy), artists and intellectuals found new ways to explore the historical experiences of black America and the contemporary experiences of black life in the urban North. Challenging white paternalism and racism, African-American artists and intellectuals rejected merely imitating the styles of Europeans and white Americans and instead celebrated black dignity and creativity. Asserting their freedom to express themselves on their own terms as artists and intellectuals, they explored their identities as black Americans, celebrating the black culture that had emerged out of slavery and their cultural ties to Africa.
The Harlem Renaissance had a profound impact not only on African-American culture but also on the cultures of the African diaspora as a whole. Afro-Caribbean artists and intellectuals from the British West Indies were part of the movement. Moreover, many French-speaking black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance.

Origins

The Harlem Renaissance reflected the changes that had taken place in the African American community since the abolititon of slavery, and which had been accelerated as a consequence of the First World War.It can also be seen as specifically African-American response to and expression of the great social and cultural change taking place in America in the early 20th century under the influence of industrialization and the emergence of a new mass culture. Contributions that lead to the rise of the Harlem Renaissance included the great migration of African Americans to the northern cities and the First World War. Factors leading to the decline of this era include the Great Depression.
   Most of the participants in the African American literary movement descended from a generation whose parents or grandparents were slaves, and themselves having lived through the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. Many of these people were part of the Great Migration out of the South and other racially stratified communities who sought relief from prejudices and a better standard of living in the North and Midwest regions of the United States. Others were Africans and people of African descent from the Caribbean who had come to the United States hoping for a better life. Uniting most of them was their convergence in Harlem, New York City.
   At the end of the Civil War, the vast majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived in the South. Immediately after the end of slavery, the emancipated African Americans began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cutural self-determination. The failure of Reconstruction resulted in the establishment of a white supremacist regime of Jim Crow in the South, which through laws and through lynching denied African Americans civil and political rights, and undergirded their economic exploitation as share croppers and laborers. As life in the South became increasingly difficult, African Americans increasingly migrated North.
   Despite white racism, the African American community established a middle class, especially in the cities. Harlem, in New York City, became a center of this middle class. In the ninteenth century, the district had been built as an exclusive suburb for the white middle class and upper middle class, with stately houses, grand aveneus and amenities such as the Polo Grounds and an opera house. During the enormous influx of immigrants in the nineteenth century, the once exlusive district was abandoned by the native white middle-class. Harlem became a black neighborhood in the early 1900s. In 1910, a large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various African-American realtors and a church group. Many more African American arrived during the First World War.
   Due to the war, the migration of laborers from Europe virtually ceased, while the war effort resulted in a massive demand for unskilled industrial labor. Seeking better economic opportunities and an escape from the institutional racism of the South, thousands migrated north. The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans to the cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and New York City. This migration greatly expanded black communities, creating a greater market for black culture. Jazz and Blues, the black music of the South, came to the North with the migrants and was played in the nightclubs and hotspots of Harlem. At the same time, whites were becoming increasingly fascinated by black culture. A number of white artists and patrons began to view blacks and black culture less condenscendingly, and began to offer blacks access to "mainstream" pulblishers and art venues.
   The expanding black middle class supported activist groups such as the newly-formed NAACP, lead by W.E.B. Du Bois. After the end of World War I, many African American soldiers came home to a nation that didn't always respect their accomplishments. Race riots and other civil injustices occurred throughout 1919. In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey's populist Afrocentric movement also gained popularity. Historians disagree as to when the Harlem Renaissance began and ended. It is unofficially recognized to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid 1930s, although its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, is placed between 1924 (the year that Opportunity magazine hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and then resulting Great Depression).
   Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride that came to be represented in the idea of the New Negro who through intellect, the production of literature, art, and music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes of that era to promote progressive or socialist politics, and racial and social integration. The creation of art and literature would serve to "uplift" the race. There would be no set style or uniting form singularly characterizing art coming out of the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, there would be a mix of celebrating a wide variety of cultural elements, including a Pan-Africanist perspective, "high-culture" and the "low-culture or low-life," from the traditional form of music to the blues and jazz, traditional and new experimental forms in literature like modernism, and in poetry, for example, the new form of jazz poetry. This duality would eventually result in a number of African American artists of the Harlem Renaissance coming into conflict with conservatives in the black intelligentsia who would take issue with certain depictions of black life in whatever medium of the arts.
   The Harlem Renaissance was one of primarily African American involvement and an interpersonal support system of black patrons, black owned businesses and publications. However, it also depended on the patronage of white Americans, such as Carl Van Vechten and Charlotte Osgood Mason, who provided various forms of assistance, opening doors which otherwise would have remained closed to the publicizing of their work outside of the black American community. This support often took the form of patronage or publication. Then, there were those whites interested in so-called "primitive" cultures, as many whites viewed black American culture at that time, and wanted to see this "primitivism" in the work coming out of the Harlem Renaissance. Other interpersonal dealings between whites and blacks can be categorized as exploitative because of the desire to capitalize on the "fad", and "fascination" of the African American being in "vogue". This vogue of the African American would extend to Broadway, as in Porgy and Bess, and into music where in many instances white band leaders would defy racist attitude to include the best and the brightest African American stars of music and song. For blacks, their art was a way to prove their humanity and demand for equality. For a number of whites, preconceived prejudices were challenged and overcome. In the early 20th(early 1900's) century the Harlem Renaissance reflected social and intellectual changes in the African American community. An increase of education and employment opportunities had developed by the turn of the century.
   Corresponding with the Harlem Renaissance was the beginning of mainstream publishing. Many authors began to publish novels, magazines and newspapers during this time. Publishers began to attract a great amount of attention from the nation at large. Some famous authors during this time included Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke and Eric D. Walrond as well as Langston Hughes.
   The Harlem Renaissance would help lay the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, many black artists coming into their own creativity after this literary movement would take inspiration from it.

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