Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance

A renewal and flourishing of the black literary and musical culture during the years after WWI in the Harlem section of NYC. This cultural movement celebrated black traditions, voice, and everyday experience. Also called the Black Renaissance, New Negro Movement. Although it was centered in the Harlem, many French-speaking black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance.

Historians disagree as to when the Harlem Renaissance began and ended. The Harlem Renaissance is unofficially recognized to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid 1930s. 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, was placed between 1924 (the year that 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).

There would be no uniting form singularly characterizing the art that emerged out of the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, it encompassed a wide variety of cultural elements and styles, including a Pan-Africanist perspective, "high-culture" and "low-culture" or "low-life," from the traditional form of music to the blues and jazz, traditional and new experimental forms in literature such as modernism and the new form of jazz poetry. This duality meant that numerous African-American artists came into conflict with conservatives in the black intelligentsia, who took issue with certain depictions of black life.

Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Dorothy West, and WEB Du Bois were some of the writers associated with the movement.

The music of the time: The Apollo Theatre (Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald), Jazz (Duke Ellington), Blues/Spirituals helped shape the voice and sound of the literary movement.

African-American authors and poets, artists, musicians, and movie stars found greater freedom of expression and greater support from white sponsors during the Harlem Renaissance than had previously existed.

The progress—both symbolic and real—during this period, became a point of reference from which the African-American community gained a spirit of self-determination that provided a growing sense of both Black urbanity and Black militancy as well as a foundation for the community to build upon for the Civil Rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s.