THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

During the 1920s and 30s, Harlem, a mecca for Black arts and culture, was a major site for launching the careers of music greats Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. Other performers such as Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald made their talents known to exuberant crowds at nightclubs such as the Cotton Club, the Lenox Club, the Plantation Inn, the Savoy Ballroom, and the Renaissance Casino and Ballroom. Unfortunately, the well-known Cotton Club engaged in what Langston Hughes referred to as “a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites.”

In 1926, Joplin Missouri native, Langston Hughes, published Weary Blues. Each poem in this collection had qualities of lyricism and musicality to them. This was not surprising since a number of them were intended to be performed in a nightclub set to sounds of the blues and jazz.

The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Modernist Movement was not only a collective of musical artists. There was a growing body of visual art that sought to re-image the prevailing misperceptions about Black experiences. Painter Palmer C. Hayden created slice of life representations with a focus on working class Black Americans from urban areas like New York City and the rural South. In contrast, Archibald J. Motley’s paintings exemplified the upwardly mobile and metropolitan “New Negro.” Motley’s depictions aligned with the philosophy of Alain Locke.

It was Locke’s insistence that Black Americans seek social, political, and artistic change. The belief that the demand for civil rights was urgent is evoked by his book The New Negro: An Interpretation. This piece anthologizes the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, George Schuyler, and many others. Locke’s essay “The New Negro,” which is a part of the collection, frames this important moment in time, differentiating the progressive mindsets held by Blacks from the old ways of thinking and existing.

Connected to the ways of the “old Negro” was the imposition of the idea that the enslaved were not entitled to a state of personhood whereas the demands of the masters took precedence left little or no room for self-care. Many enslaved Africans and their immediate descendants compartmentalized their pain, having limited access to outlets for purgation. While Negro spirituals served as lamentations of the hardships experienced under slavery, they provided a momentary salve to survivors of abuse. During pre-emancipation and post-emancipation eras, these traumas were passed on socially.

Zora Neale Hurston illustrates similar traumas in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) through three generations of southern Black women--Nanny, Leafy, and Janie. Nanny, a survivor of sexual violence and manipulation is concerned about passing on the experience of trauma to her daughter Leafy by giving her the opportunity to obtain an education and a profession that would advance her socially, protecting her from the stigma slavery left behind. However, she too falls victim to sexual violence. Nanny survives but is a “cracked plate.” Leafy, faring worse than her mother, reverts to alcoholism, and is nowhere to be found in her daughter Janie’s life, other than as a reminder of the fate that Nanny tries to protect her granddaughter from. Nanny’s attempts at healing herself and her progeny are unsuccessful. Janie must learn on her own during her journey to horizon and back. Such a journey might serve as a metaphorical bridge between the ways of the “old negro” and the “new Negro.”

Harlem Renaissance literature demonstrated in a number of ways the need for calling attention to issues that still hindered the progress of Black people. During the Reconstruction era, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois both commented that the issue of the color line was cause of concern. Harlem Renaissance writers Nella Larsen and Wallace Thurman not only continued the discourse, but magnified it in their novels Passing and The Blacker the Berry, respectively, also calling attention to the trope of the tragic mulatto. George Schuyler also addressed the practice of racial passing in his satirical novel Black No More, whereas a scientific invention that causes Black people to transform their racial identity serves as a solution to America’s race problem.

This unit on the Harlem Renaissance presents the work of the discussed writers and many others. It opens with “Aims and Objects of Movement for Solution of Negro Problem,” a speech given by Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey, who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which had branches in Harlem and other predominantly Black areas of northern cities. Garvey, like Alain Locke, held strong sentiments about the progress of Black people. His version of the notion of a “new Negro,” called for an independent Black economy and Pan-Africanism.

Our study of the Harlem Renaissance concludes with Episode One of Key Topics in African American Literature, a student podcast that interrogates some of the major issues of the era.