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| Image source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/%22Getting_Religion%22_-_NARA_-_559118.jpg |
This year I decided to focus my Black History Month on the artistic eras of our rich and varied creative past. The first part of the series is going to be on the Harlem Renaissance.
From the Wikipedia article on the Harlem Renaissance:
The Harlem Renaissance was a movement that spanned the 1920s. During the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke. The Movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by the Great Migration (African American), of which Harlem was the largest. Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of the borough of Manhattan in New York City, in addition, many francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance.
The Harlem Renaissance is generally considered to have spanned from about 1918 until the mid-1930s.[6] Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, took place between 1924 (when Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression).
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For me growing up biracial with the white side of my family, I didn't really learn anything about this era as a child or teen. I was well into adulthood before I even heard of it! The main characters that I knew of from this time were names like Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. I knew the name Zora Neale Hurston but didn't know what role she played.
This series is as much an education for me as it is a presentation to inform others. I hope you enjoy reading the entries as much as I enjoyed writing them!
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