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| A Great Day In Harlem (image source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9n2PXO0qIU) |
Today we continue the examination of the Harlem Renaissance. This part is the mainstream recognition of Harlem culture.
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From the Wikipedia article on the Harlem Renaissance:
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| Poet Claude McKay (image source wikimedia) |
The first stage of the Harlem Renaissance started in the late 1910s. In 1917, the premiere of Three Plays for a Negro Theatre took place. These plays, written by white playwright Ridgely Torrence, featured African-American actors conveying complex human emotions and yearnings. They rejected the stereotypes of the blackface and minstrel show traditions. James Weldon Johnson in 1917 called the premieres of these plays "the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American Theater". Another landmark came in 1919, when the poet Claude McKay published his militant sonnet, "If We Must Die," which introduced a dramatically political dimension to the themes of African cultural inheritance and modern urban experience featured in his 1917 poems "Invocation" and "Harlem Dancer" (published under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, these were his first appearance in print in the United States after immigrating from Jamaica). Although "If We Must Die" never alluded to race, African-American readers heard its note of defiance in the face of racism and the nationwide race riots and lynchings then taking place. By the end of the First World War, the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and the poetry of Claude McKay were describing the reality of contemporary African-American life in America.
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| Hubert Harrison, "The Father of Harlem Radicalism" (image source wikimedia) |
In 1917 Hubert Harrison, "The Father of Harlem Radicalism", founded the Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper, respectively, of the "New Negro Movement". Harrison's organization and newspaper were political, but also emphasized the arts (his newspaper had "Poetry for the People" and book review sections). In 1927, in the Pittsburgh Courier, Harrison challenged the notion of the renaissance. He argued that the "Negro Literary Renaissance" notion overlooked "the stream of literary and artistic products which had flowed uninterruptedly from Negro writers from 1850 to the present", and said the so-called "renaissance" was largely a white invention.
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| Writer James Weldon Johnson (image source wikimedia) |
The Harlem Renaissance grew out of the changes that had taken place in the African-American community since the abolition of slavery, as well as the expansion of communities in the North. These accelerated as a consequence of World War I and the great social and cultural changes in early 20th-century United States. Industrialization was attracting people to cities from rural areas and gave rise to a new mass culture. Contributing factors leading to the Harlem Renaissance were the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities, which concentrated ambitious people in places where they could encourage each other, and the First World War, which had created new industrial work opportunities for tens of thousands of people. Factors leading to the decline of this era include the Great Depression.
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I don't know about you, but I find this entire subject completely fascinating. It may be because I am an artist and a poet and a Black woman. This speaks to so many parts of me! As I look at this information I can't help but take a mental time travel trip and imagine being alive and Black in an era when there were still people alive who were formerly slaves. I know that the very air was charged with a residual racism from when we were less than human for CENTURIES. To be a Negro intellectual must have felt like revolution in and of itself.
I have really been enjoying going over the information for this series. I sincerely hope you are enjoying the process with me. Thanks for reading!
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