Black History Month 2015 - The Harlem Renaissance - Religion

Image source:  http://social.rollins.edu/wpsites/mosaic-hurston/2011/07/12/the-harlem-renaissance-a-social-documentary-through-art/  (Palmer C. Hayden, Midsummer Night in Harlem, 1938, oil on canvas)

Still working my way through the Harlem Renaissance. This time is a look at the influence of religion on the era.

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From the Wikipedia article on the Harlem Renaissance:

image source pbs.org

Christianity played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance. Many of the writers and social critics discussed the role of Christianity in African–American lives. For example, a famous poem by Langston Hughes, "Madam and the Minister", reflects the temperature and mood towards religion in the Harlem Renaissance. The cover story for The Crisis Magazine′s publication in May 1936 explains how important Christianity was regarding the proposed union of the three largest Methodist churches of 1936. This article shows the controversial question about the formation of a Union for these churches. The article "The Catholic Church and the Negro Priest", also published in the Crisis Magazine, January 1920, demonstrates the obstacles African–American priests faced in the Catholic Church. The article confronts what it saw as policies based on race that excluded African–Americans from higher positions in the church.

Various forms of religious worship existed during this time of African–American intellectual reawakening. Although there were racist attitudes within the current Abrahamic religious arenas many African–Americans continued to push towards the practice of a more inclusive doctrine. For example, George Joseph MacWilliam presents various experiences, during his pursuit towards priesthood, of rejection on the basis of his color and race yet he shares his frustration in attempts to incite action on part of The Crisis Magazine community.

There were other forms of spiritualism practiced among African–Americans during the Harlem Renaissance. Some of these religions and philosophies were inherited from African ancestry.

For example, the Islam religion was present in Africa as early as the 8th century through the Trans-Saharan trade. Islam came to Harlem likely through the migration of members of the Moorish Science Temple of America, which was established in 1913 in New Jersey.

Various forms of Judaism were practiced, such as Orthodox Judaism and Masorti Judaism and even Reformed Judaism, but it was Black Hebrew Israelites that founded their religious belief system during the late 20th century in the Harlem Renaissance.

Traditional forms of religion acquired from various parts of Africa were inherited and practiced during this era. Some commons examples were Voodoo and Santeria.

Religious critique during this era was found in literature, art, and poetry. The Harlem Renaissance encouraged analytic dialogue that included the open critique and the adjustment of current religious ideas.

Aaron Douglas (Image source:  convozine.com)

One of the major contributors to the discussion of African–American renaissance culture was Aaron Douglas who, with his artwork, also reflected the revisions African Americans were making to the Christian dogma. Douglas uses biblical imagery as inspiration to various pieces of art work but with the rebellious twist of an African influence.

Countee Cullen (image source www.poets.org)

Countee Cullen’s poem “Heritage” expresses the inner struggle of an African American between his past African heritage and the new Christian culture. A more severe criticism of the Christian religion can be found Langston Hughes’ poem “Merry Christmas", where he exposes the irony of religion as a symbol for good and yet a force for oppression and injustice.

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My religious beginnings were not via a Black church so I was not introduced to the divisive history of the Church. I accepted Christ at a bible camp that was through a (predominantly white) church that I wasn't a member of (a man came to one of my high school classes to talk about the youth group).

I started attending church regularly in 1992 when I was a guest at the "Soul" service on the Davis Monthan air force base in Tucson, Arizona. It was then that my education in modern religious segregation began. I was also looking more into my Black heritage and part of that was how spiritualism played a huge part in the lives of my ancestors and their peers and how they adapted to the new way of expressing it that was given to them by their captors and masters.

There are many who reject the "slave master's religion" but it has been a huge part of how Negros were able to connect socially. (I use the term "Negro" to mean before we started calling ourselves "Black"). Even in the 20th century when I was active in church, I could see how this bond (whether Christian or another organized religion) could mean so much in defining our communities and creating a somewhat safe place for us to express ourselves on a different level.

Black History Month 2015 - The Harlem Renaissance - Mainstream Recognition

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:

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.

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.

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! 

Black History Month 2015 - The Harlem Renaissance - Background of Harlem

Image source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons "Black Belt" by Archibald Motley

Another day in Black History Month means another post about the Harlem Renaissance! There is so much on this one era that I think this will be the only one I cover and I'll save the other ones for next time.

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From the Wikipedia article on the Harlem Renaissance:

During the early portion of the 20th century, Harlem was the destination for immigrants from around the country, attracting both people seeking work from the South, and an educated class who made the area a center of culture, as well as a growing "Negro" middle class. The district had originally been developed in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for the white middle and upper middle classes; its affluent beginnings led to the development of stately houses, grand avenues, and world-class amenities such as the Polo Grounds and the Harlem Opera House. During the enormous influx of European immigrants in the late 19th century, the once exclusive district was abandoned by the white middle class, who moved further north.

Harlem became an African-American 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–Americans 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. The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and New York.

Despite the increasing popularity of Negro culture, virulent white racism, often by more recent ethnic immigrants, continued to affect African-American communities, even in the North. After the end of World War I, many African-American soldiers—who fought in segregated units such as the Harlem Hellfighters—came home to a nation whose citizens often did not respect their accomplishments. Race riots and other civil uprisings occurred throughout the US during the Red Summer of 1919, reflecting economic competition over jobs and housing in many cities, as well as tensions over social territories.

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I'll be honest, before starting this series I only had a passing knowledge of Harlem at all let alone the Harlem Renaissance.  I have found the background of the area as interesting as if I focused on the people of the era like I have done in the past on my WordPress blog.

Black History Month 2015 - The Harlem Renaissance - The Great Migration North

Photo source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons  title: "Great Migration" 

Today we continue the look at the Harlem Renaissance and look at the background of the era.

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From the Wikipedia article on the Harlem Renaissance:

Until the end of the Civil War, the majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived in the South. After the end of slavery, the emancipated African Americans, freedmen, began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural self-determination. Soon after the end of the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 gave rise to speeches by African-American Congressmen addressing this Bill. By 1875 sixteen blacks had been elected and served in Congress and gave numerous speeches with their new found civil empowerment. The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 was renounced by black Congressmen and resulted in the passage of Civil Rights Act of 1875, part of Reconstruction legislation by Republicans. By the late 1870s, Democratic whites managed to regain power in the South. From 1890 to 1908 they proceeded to pass legislation that disenfranchised most Negros and many poor whites, trapping them without representation. They established white supremacist regimes of Jim Crow segregation in the South and one-party block voting behind southern Democrats. The Democratic whites denied African Americans their exercise of civil and political rights by terrorizing black communities with lynch mobs and other forms of vigilante violence as well as by instituting a convict labor system that forced many thousands of African Americans back into unpaid labor in mines, on plantations, and on public works projects such as roads and levees. Convict laborers were typically subject to brutal forms of corporal punishment, overwork, and disease from unsanitary conditions. Death rates were extraordinarily high. While a small number of blacks were able to acquire land shortly after the Civil War, most were exploited as sharecroppers. As life in the South became increasingly difficult, African Americans began to migrate north in great numbers.

Most of the African-American literary movement arose from a generation that had lived through the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. Sometimes their parents or grandparents had been slaves. Their ancestors had sometimes benefited by paternal investment in cultural capital, including better-than-average education. Many in the Harlem Renaissance were part of the Great Migration out of the South into the Negro neighborhoods of the North and Midwest. African–Americans sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the South. Others were people of African descent from racially stratified communities in the Caribbean who came to the United States hoping for a better life. Uniting most of them was their convergence in Harlem.

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As a person who grew up in a state that only has a 5-10% Black population depending on the area (I'm sure there are outlying areas in the state with even lower percentages), my perspective of Harlem in general was as a mystical Black place where everything we are started coming together at it's finest.  Actually most of the boroughs of  New York had this allure to me.

It wasn't until I visited Brooklyn for a few months in the late 90s that I saw that the people there were just people living regular lives and the famous people who were highlighted were a small part of a much more mundane whole. Yet I still have a bit of a sentimental romanticized view of Harlem.

I did see that the Great Migration of the American negro didn't stop after WWI. So many of the people I saw in the different areas were obviously southern. Things are better for Black people than they were in the 1800s and prior to the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s, but the south still gives reason for people to leave in search of something better.

I hope you will continue with me tomorrow on this journey through this era in American history that happens to be focused on the people of African descent.

Thanks or reading!

Black History Month 2015 - The Harlem Renaissance Part 1

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!

Black History Month 2015

Black History Month begins tomorrow! This year I am going to focus on artistic periods in modern Black history.The most known are the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 60s and 70s. I may also look at what I call the Brookyn Renaissance of the late 80s and early 90s if I can find enough information on it.

I covered quite a few of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement last year for National Poetry Month and will do a lot more of the poets this year in April so the entries this month will be all the other types of artists associated with these eras.

Harlem Renaissance:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Renaissance

Black Arts Movement:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arts_Movement#Key_writers_and_thinkers_of_this_movement

Brooklyn Renaissance:  (Still looking for articles about the 1980s-90s Spike Lee era)
Brooklyn Boheme docuemtnary:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/502118 (has commercials)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1601463/ (lists all that were featured in the film)

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Sketchbook Saturday

I remember drawing this one back in high school.  It wasn't for a class or anything; I just liked to try to draw specific emotions sometimes. As you can see in the lower left corner, what I was trying to convey here was "Distraught".  It has flaws but it is pretty good for a 16 year old.  Heck, it's pretty good in general since I can barely draw this well now since I am so out of practice!