harlem renaissance poetry essay

• Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance: A Celebration of African-American Culture and Identity

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural, artistic, and intellectual movement that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s in Harlem, New York City. It served as a pivotal moment in African-American history, providing a platform for black artists and writers to express their experiences, hopes, and dreams. Through the power of poetry, these talented individuals captured the essence of Harlem and the complexities of the African-American identity. In this article, we will explore some of the remarkable poems that emerged during this vibrant period.

1. "Harlem" by Langston Hughes

2. "i, too" by langston hughes, 3. "yet do i marvel" by countee cullen, 4. "the negro speaks of rivers" by langston hughes.

One of the most iconic poems from the Harlem Renaissance is Langston Hughes' "Harlem." With its powerful imagery and thought-provoking questions, the poem encapsulates the frustrations and aspirations of African-Americans during this time. Hughes asks, "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" This poem serves as a call to action, urging African-Americans to fight against the suppression of their dreams and ambitions.

Another notable poem by Langston Hughes is "I, Too." This poem vividly expresses the resilience and determination of African-Americans, who were often marginalized and overlooked. Hughes writes, "I, too, sing America... They'll see how beautiful I am and be ashamed." Through his words, Hughes celebrates the beauty of black culture and asserts the importance of African-Americans in shaping the nation's identity.

Countee Cullen's poem "Yet Do I Marvel" delves into the complexities of faith and existence. Cullen explores the struggles faced by African-Americans, juxtaposing their immense contributions to society with the hardships they endured. In the poem, he ponders, "I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind... Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!" Through his introspective verses, Cullen highlights the contradictions and challenges faced by African-American artists.

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is a poem that celebrates the deep historical roots of African-Americans. Hughes connects the African-American experience to ancient rivers, symbolizing strength, perseverance, and resilience. He declares, "I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers." This powerful piece of poetry reminds readers of the rich heritage and indomitable spirit of African-Americans.

The poetry of the Harlem Renaissance serves as a testament to the resilience, creativity, and determination of African-Americans during a time of immense social and cultural change. Through their powerful words, poets like Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen captured the essence of Harlem and the struggles faced by African-Americans, while also celebrating their unique culture and identity. These poems continue to resonate today, reminding us of the importance of recognizing and embracing the diverse voices that shape our society.

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A Brief Guide to the Harlem Renaissance

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Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,      I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light      He did a lazy sway. . .      He did a lazy sway. . . To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.

            — Langston Hughes , “ The Weary Blues ”

When considering essential movements in American poetry, no conversation would be complete without a discussion of the Harlem Renaissance. With a lyricism seated in the popular blues and jazz music of the time, an awareness of Black life in America, its assertion of an independent African American identity, and its innovation in form and structure, the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance is unmistakable.

Though the exact dates of the movement are debatable, most consider its beginnings to be rooted in the end of the Reconstruction era, when legal segregation made living conditions for African Americans in the South unbearable. The lack of economic opportunities, and, more importantly, the prevalence of prejudice, lynching, and segregation in public spaces all contributed to the intolerable conditions of African Americans. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, jobs previously held by white males suddenly became available, and industrial expansion in the North provided opportunities for African Americans to seek a new lifestyle. They settled in various northern cities during this Great Migration, though New York City was the most popular, particularly the district of Harlem. African Americans of all social classes joined together in Harlem, which became the focal point of a growing interest in African American culture: jazz, blues, dance, theater, art, fiction, and poetry. Harlem and New York also became the home of many seminal African American institutions, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, W. E. B. Du Bois ’s  The Crisis , and more.

The Harlem Renaissance ushered in a time of many renewed firsts for African Americans in publishing: Langston Hughes , a central figure of the movement, published his first poem, “ The Negro Speaks of Rivers ,” in the June 1921 of The Crisis ; two years later, Jean Toomer ’s Cane was the first book of fiction (though it is more accurate to deem it a hybrid text, as it also contains dramatic dialogue and poetry) by an African American writer to appear from a New York publisher since Charles Chestnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream (Doubleday, Page, 1905); and Countee Cullen ’s first poetry collection, Color (Harper & Brothers, 1925), was the first book of poetry written by an African American to be published by a major American publisher since Dodd, Mead published Paul Laurence Dunbar .

These writers sought to examine and celebrate their experiences. In his preface to his anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), editor, author, and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson writes that African American artists need to find “a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos” of their experience. Another important anthology of the time appeared three years later: The New Negro , edited by sociologist and critic Alain Locke. The anthology collected essays, stories, poems, and artwork by a diversity of artists old and young, Black and white. Locke’s term “The New Negro” became popularized during the Harlem Renaissance, promoting a sense of pride and advocacy in the African American community, and a refusal to submit to the injustices they were subjected to. In fact, the Harlem Renaissance is alternately referred to as the “New Negro Renaissance.”

The same year The New Negro appeared, Cullen’s Color , a collection of poems that addressed racial injustice in the style of the English Romantics , was published. In his book, Cullen discussed his own and the collective African-American identity. Some of his strongest poems question the benevolence of a creator who has bestowed a race with such mixed blessings. His book was soon followed by Hughes’s The Weary Blues , a lyrical text whose sounds and cadences moved with the rhythms of the jazz and blues he was exposed to in his daily life in Harlem.

Other major writers of the time included Arna Bontemps , Sterling Brown , Claude McKay , Alice Dunbar-Nelson , Angelina Weld Grimké , and Georgia Douglas Johnson . McKay, born and raised in Jamaica, wrote of the immigrant’s nostalgia and the Black man’s pride and rage. Toomer remains a mystery; light enough to “pass” and alone constituting the generation’s symbolist avant-garde, he appeared briefly on the Harlem Renaissance scene, became a follower of the mystic Gurdijeff, and disappeared into the white world.

Brown, for many years a professor at Howard University, emerged in the thirties with sometimes playful, often pessimistic poems in standard English and Black vernacular and in African American and European forms. In many of Brown’s poems, strong men and women resist the oppression of racism, poverty, and fate.

By 1928, the literary tides seemed to shift away from poetry and more toward fiction, with the publication of such texts as Nella Larsen’s Quicksand , McKay’s Home to Harlem , and Bontemps’s God Sends Sunday , among others.

The Harlem Renaissance, which was sparked by industrial expansion and prosperity in the art fields, began its decline with the crash of Wall Street in 1929. Harlem became affected by rising unemployment and crime, and the neighborhood erupted in the Harlem Riot of 1935. Still, the immediate effects of the movement would echo into the Negritude movement of the 1930s and beyond.

The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance opened doors and deeply influenced the generations of African American writers that followed, including Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks . In the forties, fifties, and sixties, Hayden taught at Fisk University and the University of Michigan and served two terms as the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. After the publication in 1945 of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville , Brooks combined a quiet life with critical success. Her second book, Annie Allen , won the 1950 Pulitzer prize, the first time a book by a Black poet had won that coveted distinction, and the last time until Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah , almost forty years later. Many of the poets who would follow the Cullens and the Hugheses, these descendents of the Harlem Renaissance and the subsequent cultural, social, and literary trends, would also bring in the politically and socially radical Black Arts Movement of the sixties, which similarly sought to promote social change and a uniquely self-crafted African American identity.

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Home › Literature › Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 10, 2020 • ( 0 )

Between 1919 and 1934 African-American artists flocked to New York City, specifically to Harlem. This era was to become one of the most prolific periods of African-American writing. What Alain Locke called in 1925 a “New Negro Movement” was later defined by historians as the Harlem Renaissance. Among the poets who gained popularity during this era were Langston Hughes, Claude Mckay, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, Anne Spencer, Gwendolyn Bennett, Helene Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimké, and James Weldon Johnson. Many leading fiction writers also emerged during this period, including Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, Jessie Redmond Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Wallace Thurman. Moreover many of the poets of this era also wrote fiction. The Harlem Renaissance also included the creative works produced by brilliantly talented, prolific dancers, musicians, visual artists, and photographers.

Several conditions enabled this renaissance: Booker T. Washington’s death, World War I, deteriorating southern racial conditions, greater publishing opportunities, and Marcus Garvey’s influence on racial pride. When Booker T. Washington, a former slave and founder of Tuskegee Institute, died in 1915, W. E. B. DuBois, the first African American to take a Ph.D. from Harvard and one of the principal organizers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), replaced him as the principal spokesperson for African Americans. Although he held tremendous respect for Washington, DuBois disagreed strongly with his conciliatory attitude toward racial injustice in the South. DuBois endorsed more urgent demands for social change.

Langston Hughes

When World War I ended in 1918, returning black soldiers, especially those who had been recognized in France for their heroic achievements, were angered by racial conditions that remained unchanged in the United States. When in 1917 Woodrow Wilson proclaimed U.S. involvement in the war as a means to make the world safe for democracy, many African- American soldiers had felt certain that U.S. discrimination would be dismantled. Confronted by the same racial injustice and violence they left, many black veterans joined their anger with a rising spirit of unrest that was beginning to pervade the country.

Racial conditions in the South were becoming unbearable for African Americans, especially in rural areas. Workers faced unfair sharecropping arrangements, lynching, and segregation, as well as inferior schools and living conditions. Many began moving north with the hope of finding greater economic opportunity in the industrial cities of New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh. Soon African-American professionals followed. This huge influx of African Americans to the North became known as the Great Migration. Many of these people settled in Harlem, which was rapidly becoming known as a center for artistic opportunity.

In his essay “The New Negro,” Alain Locke, the first African-American Rhodes scholar, attempted to direct the spirit of unrest he saw rising in many black communities as a result of these changing conditions. Riots were breaking out across the country. McKay’s famous sonnet “If We Must Die” (1919) addresses this revolutionary spirit: “If we must die, O let us nobly die, / . . . Pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back!”

Locke’s solution was the creation and display of talented art, which would become the black ticket into the social fabric of white America. Placing the future in the hands of young artists like McKay, Locke charged them to produce the uncompromising art essential to the reconstruction of African-American identity. Johnson agreed that “nothing will do more to change [the] mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through his production of literature and art” (9).

In this art blacks would be more authentically represented. No more minstrel figures, such as the mammy and coon, comic grotesque figures that represented black females as asexual nurturers and black males as comic buffoons. Crisis, a publication of the NAACP, as well as Opportunity, the publishing arm of the Urban League, held writing contests to inspire young artists. Other outlets included the black socialist publication the Messenger , and white publishers and patrons who became more receptive to black art as well.

A variety of styles and literary devices, including dialect, strict standard English, high and low culture, parody, irony, and satire, fill the pages of Harlem Renaissance writings, creating a window into the rich diversity of perspectives alive in African-American communities. Yet artists continued to debate the best way to represent blacks, which classes to foreground in their work, and whether or not to use dialect. In addition writers struggled against the mean-spirited images of blacks as promiscuous. Some artists considered downplaying the theme of sexuality, which, when used unwisely, could only fuel the harmful effects of this stereotype. Others, like Hughes, insisted that artists must not be servants to outside approval. In his famous essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), Hughes responds to a fellow artist’s dismissal of his own culture in favor of uncritical acceptance of white Western culture as standard. Declaring the artist’s inability to realize full creative potential without respect for his own culture, Hughes issues a bold mandate to all young black artists:

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. . . . If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. (309)

Toomer was the first artist to enjoy widespread critical acceptance of his first work, Cane (1923), success that charged the confidence of other Harlem Renaissance writers. The collection, containing a novella, poetry, and short fiction, as well as drawings, is most noted for its focus on the strength and beauty of rural black women, such as Fern. In his free verse Hughes treats themes of black pride, black unity, racial violence, black poverty, black womanhood, African heritage, and integration. He also transcribed blues, jazz, and gospel into poetic verse. Such innovation gained him the reputation of “poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance.” In one of his most famous poems, the musician and his sounds come alive on the page: “Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. / He played the chords then he sang some more.” Johnson explored the sermonic tradition in his poetry, maintaining black verbal art forms, while McKay and Cullen cast their poetry in the traditional form of the sonnet. Cullen, perhaps more closely aligned with European-inspired poetic verse, nonetheless indulged in social protest with his poems “Hritage” (1925) and “Yet Do I Marvel” (1925), which questions God and the paradox of a black poet: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing; / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” Although Bontemps once collaborated with Hughes on a literary project, his poetry, influenced by his religious upbringing, is meditative and spiritual with a deep sense of racial pride.

While the movement often seemed to be dominated by men, women also managed to leave their enduring mark on the poetry of the era. Georgia Douglas Johnson attended to racial themes, yet was equally drawn to romanticism, sentimentalism, and issues concerning the human condition. Angelina Weld Grimké treated racial themes with a lyric sensibility. Much of Anne Spencer’s work is concerned with gender more than race. Race-conscious Gwendolyn Bennett wrote lyrics that focused on the “grace and loveliness” of the descendants of Africans (Gates 1227). Helene Johnson was described as “one of the younger group who has taken . . . the ‘racial’ bull by the horns” (Johnson 279).

Other important writers of the period include Eric Walrond, Sterling A. Brown, and Dorothy West. Walrond wrote of his experiences as a West Indian in Harlem, Brown continued Hughes’s emphasis on the poetics of blues culture, and West examined the wealthy class of blacks, writing and publishing well into her nineties.

In opposition to the radical modernist movement and such poets as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Harlem Renaissance poets did not view the entire modern world as a wasteland (see THE WASTE LAND ). Instead a sense of optimism pervaded their work, unlike the fatalism and pessimism found in many works of modernism . Like blues music, the poetry transformed hopelessness with love and laughter, the words and images infused with the power of persistence.

Historians David Levering Lewis and Nathan Huggins argue that the Harlem Renaissance failed in its mission to challenge inequitable conditions for blacks in North America through art. Literary critic Houston A. Baker, Jr., disagrees: He insists that such faith in the power of art could be “a mark of British and American modernism,” but that British and white American scholars would dismiss such efforts by labeling the movement a failure (14). Certainly if the success of the movement can be gauged by its influence on generations to follow, the Harlem Renaissance was a tremendous success. Not only did the movement have an impact on individual artists, but the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT of the 1960s looked to the Harlem Renaissance for guidance and direction.

An Introduction to the Black Arts Movement

An Introduction to the Beat Poets

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baker, Houston A., Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., et al., eds. “The Harlem Renaissance.” Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Nathan Huggins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. “The Weary Blues.” In Norton Anthology of African- American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Johnson, James Weldon, ed. The Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1922. Karenga, Maulana. Introduction to Black Studies. Los Angeles: Kawaida Publications, 1982. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. McKay, Claude. “If We Must Die.” In The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1922. ———. A Long Way from Home. New York: Lee Furman, 1937. Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Liveright, 1923. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins, 1980.

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Perspectives Black History

Harlem is everywhere : episode 3, art & literature.

How did the literature of the Harlem Renaissance play a central role in conversations around Black identity?

Jessica Lynne , Monica L. Miller and John Keene

How did the literature of the Harlem Renaissance play a central role in conversations around Black identity? In this episode we’ll learn about publications like Opportunity , The Crisis , and Fire!! which each promoted a unique political and aesthetic perspective on Black life at the time. We’ll learn about Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston before they became household names and explore how collaboration and conversation between artists, writers, and scholars came to define the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.

View the objects discussed in the episode and read the complete transcript below .

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VOICE 1 : Night wears a garment, VOICE 2 : All velvet soft, all violet blue . . . VOICE 3 : And over her face she draws a veil VOICE 1 : As shimmering fine as floating dew . . . VOICE 4 : And here and there In the black of her hair,

JESSICA LYNNE : The subtle hands of Night Move slowly in their gem-starred light.

That was “Street Lamps in Early Spring ” written by Gwendolyn Bennett in 1926.

Welcome to Harlem Is Everywhere brought to you by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m your host Jessica Lynne. I’m a writer and art critic. This is episode three: Art and Literature.

Today writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston seem fully present in our minds as staples in the canon of American literature. But there was a time when they were young and eager, stretching their wings and finding a voice, hoping to place their work in publications like The Crisis , Opportunity ,and Fire!! .

All three of these publications shared a goal of amplifying the voices and images emerging from the Harlem Renaissance. But they didn’t always agree on what stories to tell or who they wanted to tell them to. It was beautiful and it was complicated.

There are just too many talented people from this era to cover in one episode. We’ll speak about members of the younger generation like Hughes and Hurston and we’ll point out foundational figures like Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Spurgeon Johnson and Jessie Redmon Fauset.

We’ll hear from researcher and educator Monica L. Miller:

MONICA L. MILLER:   When Hurston walked in the door, she famously had a red feather boa on, threw that feather boa over her shoulder, and said the words, “Color struck!”

LYNNE: We’ll also speak with writer and professor John Keene:

JOHN KEENE : The writers of Fire!! were not concerned with presenting neat bourgeois representations of Black people.

LYNNE: In the fall of my junior year of high school, all the adults around me wanted a real answer to that existential question: “So, what do you want to do with your life?”

Everyone needed an answer to this question and I was drawing a blank.

Around this time my English teacher assigned Zora Neale Hurston’s novel  Their Eyes Were Watching God . I still have my high-school copy with the black-and-white portrait of Hurston taken by the photographer Carl Van Vechten. In it, Hurston wears a wide-brimmed hat tilted slightly to the right side of her face and a chunky, beaded necklace. I still need this necklace. Her smile is alluring, almost mischievous.

I felt so alive after reading Hurston’s words. I wanted to know everything about this Black Southern woman who depicted on the page so much of what was familiar to me as a Black Southern girl—even if I was living almost sixty years in the future.

Her characters were speaking a Black American English that I’d heard all my life and Hurston took special care to write dialogue in that vernacular throughout the novel.

Zora Neale Hurston (American, 1891–1960). Their Eyes Were Watching God , 1937. Walter O. and Savannah Evans Collection

You know that opening scene when Pheoby meets Janie on the back porch with a plate of food, ready to sit and visit a while? I had seen all the women in my life problem solve and caretake or gather together in much the same way.

So, what did I want to do with my life? I wanted to do whatever Hurston had done. And that included living in New York.

I had known what the Harlem Renaissance was, but immersing myself in Hurston’s life gave me a better sense of the Harlem that she’d encountered in the 1920s, and how it impacted her as an artist.

This was a Harlem that was opening its arms to Black folks from everywhere, including the South, and in doing so was fundamentally changing the cultural landscape of a nation.

If Harlem, if New York, was a place that was special enough for my newfound literary hero, it was special enough for me, too. What was it about these streets and avenues that made Hurston feel at home? How did this uptown neighborhood become the epicenter of the world’s first Black-led modern art movement? In a way, if I wanted to understand Hurston, I needed to understand Harlem.

LYNNE: Monica L. Miller is a professor of English and Africana studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.

MILLER: I teach and research African American literature and cultural studies, as well as Afro-diasporic literature and cultural studies. So, my work spans Black identity and culture from the United States into Europe.

LYNNE: In the early 1900s two major civil rights organizations created and distributed literary publications—the National Urban League promoted Opportunity m agazine while the NAACP released The Crisis . These publications had two main goals: to promote the values of the organizations and to offer a platform for established as well as younger Black artists to shine.

MILLER: What was really important about those magazines is that they were as part of the sort of early Black press movement magazines that included news, that included history, artwork, and often literature. So they were really important in terms of being a place where African American community was actually sort of talking to itself, right? And then ultimately you could sort of get the pulse of what was happening.

LYNNE: Not only what was happening in Harlem, but also in other major urban centers in the Northeast. These cities were becoming the home of so many people as a result of the Great Migration. These magazines were knitting together a community of people, similar to how Black-owned newspapers had done in the late 1800s.

MILLER: What was different about these journals, though, is precisely the way that they included the arts and literature.

LYNNE: These publications, like the people they represented and spoke to, weren’t a monolith. They were a mosaic of different styles and themes, ideals, and voices.

Opportunity was almost an extension of The New Negro anthology. This was a publication that looked to shape Black modernity in a powerful way. Charles S. Johnson acted as the editor while Alain Locke helped develop the magazine and was a frequent contributor.

The Crisis was created by W. E. B. Du Bois with Jessie Redmond Fauset acting as the editor.

MILLER: The Crisis is ultimately a relatively—I mean, I think we think about it now, but not at the time—a relatively conservative publication in the way that it balanced both, sort of, internal and external politics.

Du Bois was a proponent of respectability politics, which meant that he was really interested in putting, sort of, the best foot forward. He was very concerned about remaking the image of African Americans, both for themselves, but particularly for a sort of outside audience. So, The Crisis was a magazine that reflected those ideals and ideologies.

Left: Laura Wheeler Waring (American, 1887–1948). Egypt and Spring, Cover of The Crisis , April 1923. Collection of Walter O. and Linda Evans; Right: Laura Wheeler Waring (American, 1887–1948). The Strength of Africa, Cover of The Crisis , September 1924. Collection of Walter O. and Linda Evans

MILLER : When I look at the cover of The Crisis what I’m seeing there is this idea about Africa being the sort of classical base for African American art and culture. If Europe has the Greek and Roman past, African America has the African past. So, we see Egypt and a kind of Africanized version of Greece, which is really fascinating.

LYNNE: The cover of the February 1925 issue of Opportunity by artist Winold Reiss represented a new approach to thinking about West African aesthetics.

The cover features an illustration of a traditional mask framed by geometric patterns in yellow and black.

Winold Reiss (American, born Germany 1886–1953). Cover of Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life , February 1925. Collection of Walter O. and Linda Evans

MILLER: We’re being asked to think about African America as modern, but almost as modern sort of being borrowed and in conversation with the way that Modernist—capital M Modernist—artists had been thinking about and using African aesthetic forms.

LYNNE: Fire!! was something altogether different. The November 1926 cover by Aaron Douglas is of a sphinx and other abstract symbols on a completely black background. This cover demands attention.

MILLER: Here we’re sort of thinking about Africa in an avant-garde way, Like it’s really we’re supposed to be thinking like, oh, you know, this is exciting, this is maybe a little kind of outré. Like, it’s exotifying in some ways, but for the purpose of attraction.

LYNNE: While Opportunity and The Crisis represented more “respectable” values on their covers and in their pages, Fire!! was not at all remotely interested in respectability. It was a place for younger artists to discuss controversial topics like sexuality that the older guard might deem taboo. Here’s John Keene.

KEENE: The writers of Fire!! were not concerned with presenting neat bourgeois representations of Black people. They were interested in—you know, and of course it’s to our benefit—presenting a richer and fuller portrait of Black life at that moment.

So you get representations of working-class and poor Black people. You get representations of the struggles of the Black bourgeoisie. You get overt critiques of racism and White supremacy. You get, for example, with Richard Bruce Nugent, one of the very first works that deals with Black queer sexuality.

MILLER: The legend around Fire!! is that Wallace Thurman, who was a young writer who had come to Harlem from Los Angeles, and Bruce Nugent—who was perhaps the youngest person who was active in the Harlem Renaissance at that time, who had just come to New York from Washington, D.C.—both of them queer men, that they flipped a coin. And whoever got heads was going to write the story about prostitution and whoever got tails was going to write a story about homosexuality. And those were the two stories that they wanted to sort of anchor Fire!! magazine around, which was going to be which was going to be and ultimately turned out to be incredibly controversial at the time.

LYNNE: The artists and writers of Fire!! weren’t simply trying to find an audience amongst their peers. They represented the interests and ideas of an entire generation. A generation less concerned with signaling middle-class values and more concerned with honest expression.

Keene: The Harlem Renaissance writers and artists represented really, you know, Black America at that moment in the urban North in New York. So, you had writers, you know, who were from the West Indies, you had the Caribbean, you had writers who were born in the South. You had writers from New York itself, right, and other northern urban centers. So, you get this incredible mixture of people. And so respectability kind of went out the window!

MILLER: So Fire!! is for the younger Negro artists who want to, as Langston Hughes said in his essay, “The Negro Artists in the Racial Mountain,” who want to express themselves freely. And they don’t care if Black people like it, they don’t care if White people like it. That they’re doing it, right, to be what he said, “free within themselves.”

So, Fire!! is this magazine that includes just like The Crisis and Opportunity essays, poetry, artwork, history. But it does it from a decidedly radical point of view. Ironically, there was only one issue of Fire!! because the issues that were being stored to be sold all over the East Coast or as far as they could get the magazine burned up in a fire.

LYNNE: Yes… Fire!! magazine’s life was cut short due to a fire. But the bond and creative energy that existed amongst the younger generation stayed intact.

MILLER: The younger group of Negro artists who were part of Fire!! magazine were all kind of located in an apartment that was rented out by a sort of older woman in Harlem who was really interested in fostering the arts. Her name was Iolanthe Sydney. She rented apartments at a discount to artists. Aaron Douglas lived in this apartment. I think Bruce Nugent lived there on and off. Hurston was there occasionally. Wallace Thurman was there, Langston Hughes was there.

So, this apartment was was a place where… that was a salon of the younger Negro artists. Important, though, in that apartment was, because of Aaron Douglas and also Bruce Nugent, who were visual artists. The walls were painted by Douglas. There were drawings all over the place that were made by Bruce Nugent. He was the only, sort of, out gay man in the Harlem Renaissance, so his drawings and artwork were very provocative at the time. A lot of naked bodies and sensual depictions of the African American body.

So, they lived in a space that was filled with art, the writers. And the artists lived in a space that was filled with words.

LYNNE: The collaborative spirit of these visual and literary artists allowed their mediums to collide. A chance to explore subjects considered scandalous, and to simply let go.

John Keene has seen this in his own projects.

KEENE: I’ve done two books with visual artists, one of whom is also an amazing poet and one of them is an amazing photographer. I just did a poster with another wonderful photographer. And I feel like one of the things that I gain is a sense of depth, a deeper appreciation for the other mediums and for the medium I’m working in, right?

So, working with a visual artist you come to understand how they see the world, how they see the process of making art. And it informs my own work as a writer, and I believe the reverse is true, as well. The other thing too, I think, that I love about collaboration is it involves a certain amount of surrendering of the ego. You have to step back from the “I” and think in terms of “we”—how can we create—which I think is a great spur for creativity.

LYNNE: Ultimately, these publications were more similar than they were different. Each was dedicated to promoting the arts and literature of the Harlem Renaissance and the artists central to this movement and each had important figures behind their success.

One of them is Jessie Redmond Fauset, a novelist, poet, critic, and editor of The Crisis who is sometimes overshadowed by her male counterparts.

MILLER: Fauset is an incredibly important person in the Renaissance because of the way that she edited that magazine and also solicited work from writers and also encouraged them—like Charles Johnson and Alain Locke did for the Opportunity contest—really fostered a kind of literary environment. And ultimately, she and other people were part of many different kinds of salons that were taking place both in New York and also in Washington, D.C.

LYNNE: The Crisis and Opportunity not only provided a platform through commissioning artists for cover illustrations, they also sponsored contests for writers.

MILLER: And these contests were important because they not only supported artistic work and recognized it, but they were often the vehicle through which many of the writers that we associate with the Renaissance came to New York.

LYNNE: James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Missouri and grew up in various midwestern towns. Raised mainly by his maternal grandmother he developed a love of words early.

While in high school he began to compose the first of a lifetime of short stories, poetry and plays. In his early twenties Hughes moved to New York City to attend Columbia University. Around this time he submitted a poem to The Crisis . It was called “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

He’d written it as a teenager on a train crossing the Mississippi River. Writing the poem down on the back of an envelope, it seemed to flow out of him like the waters below. You can almost picture him reading the poem softly under his breath as the train headed south.

Here’s Hughes in his own voice reading the “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”:

LANGSTON HUGHES:

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.

LYNNE: Did he realize that what he’d just written would catapult his career and become one of the defining poems of the era? Hughes ended up submitting this poem to The Crisis after arriving in New York as a twenty year old.

MILLER: There are these moments, famous moments, when we think about the Renaissance.

LYNNE: One of those is when, after reading the poem, Du Bois turns to Fauset and says, “What colored person is there, do you suppose, in the United States who writes like that and is yet unknown to us?”

Langston Hughes has been close to John Keene’s heart throughout his own career. Here’s Keene reflecting on a portrait of a then twenty-four-year-old Hughes by German-born artist Winold Reiss.

This portrait features a young Hughes in a sharp suit seated at a desk with a notebook open… as if the viewer is watching the writer at work. Hughes looks into the distance, in contemplation.

Winold Reiss (American, born Germany, 1886–1953). Langston Hughes , 1925. Pastel on illustration board. National Portrait Gallery, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, Washington D.C.; Gift of W. Tjark Reiss, in memory of his father, Winold Reiss

KEENE: One of the things that it sort of signifies is his centrality, right? He was someone who was a kind of connecting figure for so many different members in what became the Harlem Renaissance, right? But even at his very young age, he was, I think, sort of establishing himself as one of the premier poets of his generation. So it’s sort of fascinating to see, you know, someone capture him at that young age, but also to kind of show the range of who he was through the juxtaposition of the images in the painting. The Cubism in the background and, of course, the pensive young poet in the foreground.

LYNNE: John Keene loves Hughes’s poems, for their approachability, humor, and lyricism.

KEENE: I think it was a combination of the poems’ musicality, their artistry. He’s very gifted in concision, their humor. And also the poems have a political bite. And you don’t have to be, you know, super sophisticated, you can be a child and pick up what he’s saying. So you get all of those elements together, and they make for very powerful and compelling poetry.

I probably encountered Langston Hughes’s poetry first as a small child from my parents and godparents and had been a fan of and loved Hughes’s work ever since.

LYNNE: John Keene didn’t need any prompting recalling Langton Hughes’s poem “Harlem.”

KEENE: So, the opening line, of course, is:

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? — Which, of course, provided Lorraine Hansberry with the title for her great play… Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

And then that final line:

Or does it explode?

LYNNE: Hughes had caught the attention of Du Bois and Fauset at The Crisis . Meanwhile, Hurston made a splash with the editors of Opportunity .

Hurston had previously been published in Opportunity . But in 1925 she entered a short story called “Spunk” and a play called Color Struck to one of the magazine’s literary contests. She won second place in both categories.

Another one of those famous moments in the history of the Harlem Renaissance was at the party celebrating this contest, when Hurston made her debut.

MILLER: When Hurston walked in the door, she famously had a red feather boa on, threw that feather boa over her shoulder, and said the words, “Color struck!” Which was actually the name of the play that she had won second prize for. The whole room turned to look at her. She announced her presence in Harlem with that gesture.

LYNNE: Zora Neale Hurston would become a force of the Harlem Renaissance and American literature more broadly. That night she met Langston Hughes, who would become a great friend. And she made another connection with Barnard College founder and trustee Annie Nathan Meyer.

Monica: And Annie Nathan Meyer, after seeing Hurston circulating in the party, said, you know what? I think that woman is the woman I want to see if I can integrate Barnard College with.

Hurston became Barnard’s first Black student after meeting Annie Nathan Meyer that evening. And for Hurston, securing an education was actually sort of everything. So moving into that room, making that impression, meeting her sort of, you know, soulmate in Langston Hughes, and this vehicle towards education and her ultimate career as both a writer and an anthropologist… Opportunity magazine gave her that opportunity.

LYNNE: She would go on to study anthropology and become the first Black graduate of Barnard College. After getting her degree Hurston wanted to return to the South, where she’d grown up, to document Southern Black life: its folk tales, songs, and stories.

After receiving funding, Hurston drove down South in a little coup nicknamed “Sassy Susie.”

MILLER: There’s a great photograph of her in front of her car with a gun in a holster because she was traveling through the South primarily alone and occasionally needed to to feel protected. Also the car, because sometimes there were not places where a Black person or Black woman in particular could stay—she would stay in the car.

This photograph is a beautiful contrast to a painting found in the exhibition titled Miss Zora Neale Hurston . The portrait, by Aaron Douglas, not only captures another side of Hurston but also a different style than the modern, geometric approach typically associated with Douglas.

Aaron Douglas (American, 1899–1979). Miss Zora Neale Hurston , 1926. Pastel on canvas. Fisk University Galleries, Nashville

MILLER: We have Hurston sitting in a chair and there’s a certain kind of dark brownness to the wood. So I’m really interested in the many many tones of brown that are in the painting. She’s wearing a brown kind of cloche hat, she’s got a little fur, and her coat is brown. So, it’s a sort of study in brown, which I think is really beautiful because it’s bringing out her skin tone.

What I also really like about this painting is the expression on Hurston’s face. She seems like she is relaxed and thinking and in the company of a friend. We think of Hurston as a person who has a lot of energy. Like, she just had tremendous energy. And this portrait is one of her where she’s calm, relaxed, and at ease.

LYNNE: It’s a refined, quiet portrait—a far cry from Hurston the pistol-totin’, Sassy Susie–driving, anthropological researcher….

During this time Langston Hughes was also down South.

MILLER: So Hurston was down in the South doing field work, collecting stories and folk songs. Trying to sort of study African American culture in a way that it hadn’t really ever been studied before and preserve it. And Langston Hughes was visiting Tuskegee Institute and giving a reading of his poetry. And they kind of got on the road together.

And the way that Hurston was traveling is that she was not traveling to universities. She was traveling to, you know, work camps, work sites, small Black communities where she could listen to stories and talk to ordinary Black people about their lives, you know, record their speech, their metaphors. I mean, all of the things that she called the characteristics of Negro expression. So they were really sort of out in smaller communities and rural communities driving around in Hurston’s car.

LYNNE: These two writers and their lives embody how the writings of the Renaissance traveled. It wasn’t work that only found an audience in the cosmopolitan North. It spoke to and resonated with these rural communities in a way that’s not surprising.

MILLER: Hurston’s collecting stories. Hughes is reading his work and interacting with people. So, in terms of how some of the Harlem Renaissance poetry and literature was received in other places, it was embraced.

LYNNE: The writings of the Harlem Renaissance traveled far and wide and covered many themes. The essays, novels, short stories, poems, and plays created during this time spoke to audiences in Europe, the Caribbean, and beyond about life in the rural South as well as the industrialized cities of the North.

The writer Nella Larsen tackled topics like colorism in her classic novel Passing . Other writers, like Claude McKay or Countee Cullen, found inspiration in themes of sexuality, alienation, and racial pride. There are so many incredible writers from the Harlem Renaissance to research and enjoy. Their contributions radically changed and inspired the written word and we can see, feel, and read their influence in so many writers today.

KEENE: We get a deeper sense of Black experience, Black interiority, Black subjectivity in a way that we had not seen before. So, I think that the Harlem Renaissance writers really opened up a lot of doors, a lot of windows for their peers and for all the writers who follow. Because we’re still, in a sense, walking through the doors that they opened up for us.

[Zora Neale Hurston singing “Halimufack”]

LYNNE: You may have had the chance to read Zora Neale Hurston’s work as a writer and an author. But I wanted to share something that feels really special to me as a self-identified Hurston fangirl. Here’s her singing.

[Zora Neale Hurston continues singing]

LYNNE: There’s something about hearing her voice that makes me realize—oh wow. She was a human being, with her own emotions and lived experience and singing voice.

LYNNE: “Halimufack” performed by Zora Neale Hurston is available in the Library of Congress .

LYNNE: A big thank you to Monica L. Miller and John Keene for spending time with us today. Our next episode will focus on the music and nightlife of the Harlem Renaissance. We’ll talk about the musicians, the brilliant ballrooms, and smokey bars, and the freedom that people found in challenging conventional understandings of sexuality.

Harlem Is Everywhere  is produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios.

Our senior producer is Stephen Key. Our producer is Maria Robins-Somerville. Our editor is Josh Gwynn. Mixing by our senior engineer, Marina Paiz. Additional engineering by senior audio engineer Pedro Alvira. Our assistant engineers are Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks.

I’m your host, Jessica Lynne. Fact checking by Maggie Duffy. Legal services by Kristel Tupja. Original music by Austin Fisher and Epidemic Sound

The Met’s production staff includes producer Rachel Smith; managing producer Christopher Alessandrini; and executive producer Sarah Wambold.

This show would not be possible without Denise Murrell, the Merryl H. & James S. Tisch Curator at Large and curator for the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism exhibition; research associate is Tiarra Brown.

Special thanks to Inka Drögemüller, Douglas Hegley, Skyla Choi, Isabella Garces, David Raymond, Ashley Sabb, Tess Solot-Kehl, Gretchen Scott, and Frank Mondragon.

Asha Saluja and Je-Anne Berry are the executive producers at Pineapple Street.

More from Harlem Is Everywhere

Harlem Is Everywhere : Episode 5, Art as Activism

Harlem Is Everywhere : Episode 4, Music & Nightlife

Harlem Is Everywhere : Episode 2, Portraiture & Fashion

About the contributors, jessica lynne.

Host, Harlem Is Everywhere

Monica L. Miller

Professor of English and Africana Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism

Harlem Is Everywhere

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From the Archives

In Circulation

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Harlem Renaissance

By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 14, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art.

Great Migration

The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem was meant to be an upper-class white neighborhood in the 1880s, but rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and desperate landlords seeking to fill them.

In the early 1900s, a few middle-class Black families from another neighborhood known as Black Bohemia moved to Harlem, and other Black families followed. Some white residents initially fought to keep African Americans out of the area, but failing that many whites eventually fled.

How Did the Harlem Renaissance Start?

Outside factors led to a population boom: From 1910 to 1920, African American populations migrated in large numbers from the South to the North, with prominent figures like W.E.B. Du Bois leading what became known as the Great Migration .

In 1915 and 1916, natural disasters in the south put Black workers and sharecroppers out of work. Additionally, during and after World War I , immigration to the United States fell, and northern recruiters headed south to entice Black workers to their companies.

By 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the South had moved north, and Harlem was one of the most popular destinations for these families.

Langston Hughes

This considerable population shift resulted in a Black Pride movement with leaders like Du Bois working to ensure that Black Americans got the credit they deserved for cultural areas of life. Two of the earliest breakthroughs were in poetry, with Claude McKay’s collection Harlem Shadows in 1922 and Jean Toomer’s Cane in 1923. Civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man in 1912 , followed b y God’s Trombones in 1927, left their mark on the world of fiction.

Novelist and du Bois protege Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1924 novel There Is Confusion explored the idea of Black Americans finding a cultural identity in a white-dominated Manhattan. Fauset was the literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis and developed a magazine for Black children with Du Bois.

Sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, who was integral in shaping the Harlem literary scene, used the debut party for There Is Confusion to organize resources to create Opportunity , the National Urban League magazine he founded and edited, a success that bolstered writers like Langston Hughes .

Hughes was at that party along with other promising Black writers and editors, as well as powerful white New York publishing figures. Soon many writers found their work appearing in mainstream magazines like Harper’s .

Zora Neale Hurston

Anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston courted controversy through her involvement with a publication called FIRE!!

Helmed by white author and Harlem writers’ patron Carl Van Vechten and filled with works from prolific Black writers including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Aaron Douglas, the magazine exoticized the lives of Harlem residents. Van Vechten’s previous fiction stirred up interest among whites to visit Harlem and take advantage of the culture and nightlife there.

Though Van Vechten’s work was condemned by older luminaries like DuBois, it was embraced by Hurston, Hughes and others.

Countee Cullen

Poetry, too, flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. Countee Cullen was 15 when he moved into the Harlem home of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the pastor of Harlem’s largest congregation, in 1918.

The neighborhood and its culture informed his poetry, and as a college student at New York University, he obtained prizes in a number of poetry contests before going on to Harvard’s master's program and publishing his first volume of poetry: Color. He followed it up with Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown Girl and went on to write plays as well as children’s books.

Cullen received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry and married Nina Yolande, the daughter of W.E.B. DuBois. Their wedding was a major social event in Harlem. Cullen’s reviews for Opportunity magazine, which ran under the column "Dark Tower," focused on works from the African-American literati and covered some of the biggest names of the age.

Harlem Renaissance Musicians

The music that percolated in and then boomed out of Harlem in the 1920s was jazz, often played at speakeasies offering illegal liquor. Jazz became a great draw for not only Harlem residents but outside white audiences also.

Some of the most celebrated names in American music regularly performed in Harlem— Louis Armstrong , Duke Ellington , Bessie Smith , Fats Waller and Cab Calloway , often accompanied by elaborate floor shows. Tap dancers like John Bubbles and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson were also popular.

Cotton Club

With the groundbreaking new music came vibrant nightlife. The Savoy opened in 1927, an integrated ballroom with two bandstands that featured continuous jazz and dancing well past midnight, sometimes in the form of battling bands helmed by Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford and King Oliver.

While it was fashionable to frequent Harlem nightlife, entrepreneurs realized that some white people wanted to experience Black culture without having to socialize with African Americans and created clubs to cater to them.

The most successful of these was the Cotton Club, which featured frequent performances by Ellington and Calloway. Some in the community derided the existence of such clubs, while others believed they were a sign that Black culture was moving toward greater acceptance.

Paul Robeson

The cultural boom in Harlem gave Black actors opportunities for stage work that had previously been withheld. Traditionally, if Black actors appeared onstage, it was in a minstrel show musical and rarely in a serious drama with non-stereotypical roles.

At the center of this stage revolution was the versatile Paul Robeson , an actor, singer, writer, activist and more. Robeson first moved to Harlem in 1919 while studying law at Columbia University and continually maintained a social presence in the area, where he was considered an inspirational but approachable figure.

Robeson believed that arts and culture were the best paths forward for Black Americans to overcome racism and make advances in a white-dominated culture.

Josephine Baker

Black musical revues were staples in Harlem, and by the mid-1920s had moved south to Broadway, expanding into the white world. One of the earliest of these was Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s Shuffle Along , which launched the career of Josephine Baker .

White patron Van Vechten helped bring a more serious lack of stage work to Broadway, though largely the work of white authors. It wasn’t until 1929 that a Black-authored play about Black lives, Wallace Thurman and William Rapp’s Harlem , played Broadway.

Playwright Willis Richardson offered more serious opportunities for Black actors with several one-act plays written in the 1920s, as well as articles in Opportunity magazine outlining his goals. Stock companies like the Krigwa Players and the Harlem Experimental Theater also gave Black actors serious roles.

Aaron Douglas

The visual arts were never welcoming to Black artists, with art schools, galleries and museums shutting them out. Sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, a protégé of Auguste Rodin , explored African American themes in her work and influenced Du Bois to champion Black visual artists.

The most celebrated Harlem Renaissance artist is Aaron Douglas , often called “the Father of Black American Art,” who adapted African techniques to realize paintings and murals, as well as book illustrations.

Sculptor Augusta Savage ’s 1923 bust of Du Bois garnered considerable attention. She followed that up with small, clay portraits of everyday African Americans, and would later be pivotal to enlisting black artists into the Federal Art Project, a division of the Work Progress Administration (WPA) .

James VanDerZee ’s photography captured Harlem's daily life, as well as commissioned portraits in his studio that he worked to fill with optimism and separate philosophically from the horrors of the past.

Marcus Garvey

Black nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism movement Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica but moved to Harlem in 1916 and began publishing the influential newspaper Negro World in 1918. His shipping company, Black Star Line, established trade between Africans in America, the Caribbean, South and Central America, Canada and Africa.

Garvey is perhaps best known for founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association, or UNIA, which advocated for “separate but equal” status for persons of African ancestry with the goal of establishing Black states around the world. Garvey was famously at odds with W.E.B. DuBois, who called him "the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America." His outspoken views also made him a target of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI .

Harlem Renaissance Ends

The end of Harlem’s creative boom began with the stock market crash of 1929 and The Great Depression . It wavered until Prohibition ended in 1933, which meant white patrons no longer sought out illegal alcohol in uptown clubs.

By 1935, many pivotal Harlem residents had moved on to seek work. They were replaced by the continuous flow of refugees from the South, many requiring public assistance.

The Harlem Race Riot of 1935 broke out following the arrest of a young shoplifter, resulting in three dead, hundreds injured and millions of dollars in property damage. The riot was a death knell for the Harlem Renaissance.

Why Was the Harlem Renaissance Important?

The Harlem Renaissance was a golden age for African American artists, writers and musicians. It gave these artists pride in and control over how the Black experience was represented in American culture and set the stage for the civil rights movement .

Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance . Laban Carrick Hill . The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930 . Steven Watson. The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary For The Era . Bruce Kellner, Editor.

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The Man Who Led the Harlem Renaissance—and His Hidden Hungers

By Tobi Haslett

Alain Locke led a life of scrupulous refinement and slashing contradiction. Photographs flatter him: there he is, with his bright, taut prettiness, delicately clenching the muscles of his face. Philosophy and history, poetry and art, loneliness and longing—the face holds all of these in a melancholy balance. The eyes glimmer and the lips purse.

It was this face that appeared, one summer morning in 1924, at the Paris flat of a destitute Langston Hughes, who put the scene in his memoir “ The Big Sea .” “ Qui est-il ?” Hughes had asked through the closed door. He was stunned by the reply:

A mild and gentle voice answered: “Alain Locke.” And sure enough, there was Dr. Alain Locke of Washington, a little, brown man with spats and a cultured accent, and a degree from Oxford. The same Dr. Locke who had written me about my poems, and who wanted to come to see me almost two years before on the fleet of dead ships, anchored up the Hudson. He had got my address from the Crisis in New York, to whom I had sent some poems from Paris. Now in Europe on vacation, he had come to call.

During the next two weeks, the middle-aged Locke, then a philosophy professor at Howard University, snatched the young Hughes from dingy Montmartre and took him on an extravagant march through ballet, opera, gardens, and the Louvre. This was the first time they’d met—but, after more than a year of sighing letters, Locke had come to Paris flushed with amorous feeling. The feeling was mismatched. Each man was trapped in the other’s fantasy: Hughes appeared as the scruffy poet who had fled his studies at Columbia for the pleasures of la vie bohème , while Locke was the “little, brown man” with status and degrees.

Days passed in a state of dreamy ambiguity. “Locke’s here,” Hughes wrote to their mutual friend Countee Cullen. “We are having a glorious time. I like him a great deal.” The words are grinning—and sexless. Hughes had found a use for the gallant Locke: an entrée to the bold movement in black American writing then rumbling to life. Cullen was gaining renown; the novelist Jessie Fauset was the literary editor of The Crisis; and Jean Toomer’s “Cane”—a novel in jagged fragments—had trumpeted the arrival of a new black art, one chained to the fate of a roiling, bullied, “emancipated” people. “I think we have enough talent,” W. E. B. Du Bois had announced in 1920, “to start a renaissance.”

Locke drove it forward and is remembered, dimly, as its “dean.” Whoever knows his name today likely links it to “ The New Negro: An Interpretation ,” a 1925 anthology that planted some of the bravest black writers of the nineteen-twenties—Hughes, Cullen, Toomer, Fauset, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston—squarely in the public eye. “The New Negro,” which appeared just a year after Locke’s summer visit with Hughes, launched the Negro Renaissance and marked the birth of a new style: the swank, gritty, fractious style of blackness streaking through the modern world.

Jeffrey C. Stewart’s new biography bears the perhaps inevitable title “ The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke .” But the title makes a point: the New Negro, that lively protagonist stomping onto the proscenium of history, might also be thought of, tenderly, as a figure for Locke himself. Stewart writes,

Locke became a “mid-wife to a generation of young writers,” as he labeled himself, a catalyst for a revolution in thinking called the New Negro. The deeper truth was that he, Alain Locke, was also the New Negro, for he embodied all of its contradictions as well as its promise. Rather than lamenting his situation, his marginality, his quiet suffering, he would take what his society and his culture had given him and make something revolutionary out of it.

Here was a man who enshrined his passions in collections, producing anthologies, exhibitions, and catalogues that refracted, according to Stewart, an abiding “need for love.” But even love could be captured and slotted into a series. Stewart tells us that among Locke’s posthumous effects was a shocking item that was promptly destroyed: a collection of semen samples from his lovers, stored neatly in a box.

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Meticulousness was a virtue among Philadelphia’s black bourgeoisie, the anxious world into which Locke was born. On September 13, 1885, Mary Locke, the wife of Pliny, delivered a feeble, sickly son at their home on South Nineteenth Street. Arthur LeRoy Locke, as the boy was christened, spent his first year seized by the rheumatic fever that he had contracted at birth. The Lockes were Black Victorians, or, as Alain later put it, “fanatically middle class,” and their mores and strivings shaped his self-conception and bestowed upon him an unusual entitlement to a black intellectual life. Pliny was well educated—he was a graduate of Howard Law School—but he suffered, as a black man, from a series of wrongful firings that scrambled the family’s finances.

Roy (as Alain was known in childhood) was Pliny’s project. “I was indulgently but intelligently treated,” Locke later recalled. “No special indulgence as to sentiment; very little kissing, little or no fairy stories, no frightening talk or games.” Instead, Pliny read aloud from Virgil and Homer, but only after Roy had finished his early-morning math exercises. He was being cultivated to be a race leader: a metallic statue of polished masculinity. But he was powerfully drawn to his mother. Pliny opposed this, and worked to shred the bond. Locke later recounted that his father’s death, when he was six, “threw me into the closest companionship with my mother, which remained, except for the separation of three years at college and four years abroad, close until her death at 71, when I was thirty six.” Under the watchful care of the struggling Mary, Roy became a precocious aesthete. And he proceeded, with striking ambition, from Central High School to the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy to Harvard.

Alain, as he was now called, fashioned himself as a yearning man of letters. Enraptured by his white professors, he decorated his modest lodgings in punctilious imitation of their homes. Not quite five feet tall, he had bloomed into a dandy, strutting down the streets of Cambridge in a genteel ensemble—gray suit, gray gloves, elegant overcoat—while displaying a shuddering reluctance to associate with the other black students at Harvard. They weren’t “gentlemen,” and, when a black classmate introduced him to a group of them, he was appalled:

Of course they were colored. He took me right up into the filthy bedroom and there were 5 niggers, all Harvard men. Well, their pluck and their conceit are wonderful. Some are ugly enough to frighten you but I guess they are bright. . . . They are not fit for company even if they are energetic and plodding fellows. I’m not used to that class and I don’t intend to get used to them.

This is from a letter to his mother, and the bile streams so freely that one assumes that Mary indulged the young Locke’s contempt. But his arrogance followed from the strangulating tension between who and what he was: blackness was limiting, oppressive, banal, a boorish hurdle in his brilliant path. “I am not a race problem,” he later wrote to Mary. “I am Alain LeRoy Locke.”

He’d arrived at Harvard when William James and then John Dewey had electrified philosophy in America under the banner of pragmatism, a movement that repudiated idealism and tested concepts against practice. Locke, who also became a devotee of the philosopher and belletristic aesthete George Santayana, went on to become the first black Rhodes Scholar—though as soon as he got to Oxford he was humiliated by white Americans, who shut him out of their gatherings. The scorn was instructive: the foppish Locke joined the Cosmopolitan Club, a debate society composed of colonial élites, who exposed him to the urgencies of anti-imperial struggle and, crucially, to the gratifications of racial and political solidarity. He finished a thesis—ultimately rejected by Oxford—on value theory, while slaking his sexual thirst in pre-Great War Berlin. He returned to Harvard to earn his Ph.D. in philosophy, for which he submitted a more elaborate version of his Oxford thesis, before joining the faculty at Howard. Mary moved down to Washington, where she was cared for by her doting son.

Locke’s other devotions were ill-fated. Much of his erotic life was a series of adroit manipulations and disastrous disappointments; Langston Hughes was just one of the younger men who fell within the blast radius of the older man’s sexual voracity as they chased his prestige. He fancied himself a suitor in the Grecian style, dispensing a sentimental education to his charges, assistants, protégés, and students—but hungering for mutuality and lasting love. Locke had affairs with at least a few of the writers included in “The New Negro.” His desultory sexual romps with Cullen stretched over years—though Cullen himself would flee the gay life by marrying W. E. B. Du Bois’s daughter Yolanda, in a lavish service with sixteen bridesmaids and thirteen hundred guests. Her father described the spectacle in The Crisis as “the symbolic march of young black America,” possessed of a “dark and shimmering beauty” and announcing “a new race; a new thought; a new thing rejoicing in a ceremony as old as the world.” To Locke, it was a farce.

He found his own way to stay afloat in the world of the black élite. Pliny had wanted his son to be a race man, and now Alain was lecturing widely and contributing articles to Du Bois’s Crisis , which was attached to the N.A.A.C.P., and Charles Johnson’s Opportunity , the house organ of the National Urban League. But he stood aloof from the strenuous heroism of Negro uplift, and what he thought of as its flat-footed insistence on “political” art. Locke was a voluptuary: he worried that Du Bois and the younger, further-left members of the movement—notably Hughes and McKay—had debased Negro expression, jamming it into the crate of politics. The titles of Locke’s essays on aesthetics (“Beauty Instead of Ashes,” “Art or Propaganda?,” “Propaganda—or Poetry?”) made deflating little incisions in his contemporaries’ political hopes. Black art, in Locke’s view, was mutable and vast.

Not unlike blackness itself. In 1916, Locke delivered a series of lectures called “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations,” in which he painstakingly disproved the narrowly “biological” understanding of race while insisting on the power of culture to distinguish, but not sunder, black from white. Armed with his pragmatist training, he hacked a path to a new philosophical vista: “cultural pluralism.”

The term had surfaced in private debates with Horace Kallen, a Jewish student who overlapped with Locke at both Harvard and Oxford. Kallen declared that philosophy should, as his mentor William James insisted, concern itself only with differences that “make a difference”—which included, Kallen thought, the intractable facts of his Jewishness and Locke’s blackness. Locke demurred. Race, ethnicity, the very notion of a “people”: these weren’t expressions of some frozen essence but were molded from that suppler stuff, tradition —to be elevated and transmuted by the force and ingenuity of human practice. He could value his people’s origins without bolting them to their past.

His own past had begun to break painfully away. Mary Locke died in 1922, leaving Alain crushed and adrift. But her death also released him, psychically, from the vanished world of the fin-de-siècle black élite, with its asphyxiating diktats. As he moved into modernism, he found that his life was freer and looser; his pomp flared into camp. At Mary’s wake, Locke didn’t present her lying in state; rather, he installed her, alarmingly, on the parlor couch—her corpse propped like a hostess before a room of horrified guests.

“The New Negro,” which appeared three years later, stood as proof, Locke insisted, of a vital new sensibility: here was a briskly modern attitude hoisted up by the race’s youth. The collection, which expanded upon a special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic , revelled in its eclecticism, as literature, music, scholarship, and art all jostled beside stately pronouncements by the race’s patriarchs, Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. The anthology was meant to signal a gutting and remaking of the black collective spirit. Locke would feed and discipline that spirit, playing the critic, publicist, taskmaster, and impresario to the movement’s most luminous figures. He was an exalted member of the squabbling clique that Hurston called “the niggerati”—and which we know, simply, as the Harlem Renaissance.

The term has a crispness that the thing itself did not. It was a movement spiked with rivalries and political hostility—not least because it ran alongside the sociological dramas of Communism, Garveyism, mob violence, and a staggering revolution in the shape and texture of black American life, as millions fled the poverty and the lynchings of the Jim Crow South. The cities of the North awaited them—as did higher wages and white police. With the Great Migration came a loud new world and a baffling new life, a chance to lunge, finally, at the transformative dream of the nation they’d been forced, at gunpoint, to build. Modernity had anointed a new hero, and invented, Locke thought, a New Negro.

But he hoped that this new figure would stride beyond politics. Radicals irked him; he regarded them with a kind of princely ennui. In his mind, the New Negro was more than mere effect: history and demography alone couldn’t possibly account for the wit, chic, or thrilling force of “the younger generation” to whom he dedicated the volume. In the title essay, Locke presented a race whose inner conversion had flown past the lumbering outside world. The Negro leaped not just from country to city but, crucially, “from medieval America to modern.” Previously, “the American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact,” he wrote, but now, “in Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises at least to be—a race capital.”

Black people had snapped their moorings to servitude and arrived at the advanced subjectivity lushly evinced by their art: their poems and paintings, their novels and spirituals. Aaron Douglas had made boldly stylized drawings and designs for the anthology, which rhymed with the photographs of African sculptures that dotted its pages: masks from the Baoulé and the Bushongo; a grand Dahomey bronze. Negroes were a distinct people, with distinct traditions and values held in common. Their modern art would revive their “folk spirit,” displaying a vigorous continuity with their African patrimony and an embrace of American verve. “So far as he is culturally articulate,” Locke wrote in the foreword to his anthology, “we shall let the Negro speak for himself.”

The sentence shines with triumph; it warms and breaks the heart. Behind Locke’s bombast was the inexorable question of suffering: how it forged and brutalized the collective, forcing a desperate solidarity on people not treated as such. The task that confronted any black modernist—after a bloody emancipation, a failed Reconstruction, and the carnage of the First World War—was to decide the place, within this blazing new power, of pain. Locke preached a kind of militant poise. His New Negro would face history without drowning in it; would grasp, but never cling to, the harrowing past. In the anthology, he cheered on “the lapse of sentimental appeal, then the development of a more positive self-respect and self-reliance; the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual recovery from hyper-sensitiveness and ‘touchy’ nerves.” So the book’s roar of modernist exuberance came to seem, in a way, strained.

But also lavish, stylish, jaunty, tart; bristling with whimsy and gleaming with sex. “The New Negro” thrust forth all the ironies of Locke’s ethos: his emphatic propriety and angular vision, his bourgeois composure and libertine tastes. “What jungle tree have you slept under, / Dark brown girl of the swaying hips?” asks a Hughes poem, titled “Nude Young Dancer.” Locke liked it—but was scandalized by jazz. And though he wrote an admiring essay in the anthology on the passion of Negro spirituals, he also chose to include “Spunk,” a short fable by Hurston about cheating and murder.

Locke relished every titillating contradiction but shrank, still, from political extremes. Hoping to avoid the charge of radicalism, he changed the title of McKay’s protest poem from “White House” to “White Houses”—an act of censorship that severed the two men’s alliance. “No wonder Garvey remains strong despite his glaring defects,” the affronted poet wrote to Locke. “When the Negro intellectuals like you take such a weak line!”

And such a blurred line. In a gesture of editorial agnosticism, Locke brought voices to “The New Negro” that challenged his own. Among the more scholarly contributions to the anthology was “Capital of the Black Middle Class,” an ambivalent study of Durham, North Carolina, by E. Franklin Frazier, a young social scientist. More than thirty years later, Frazier savaged the pretensions and the perfidies of Negro professionals in his study “The Black Bourgeoisie.” A work of Marxist sociology and scalding polemic, it took a gratuitous swipe at the New Negro: the black upper class, Frazier said, had “either ignored the Negro Renaissance or, when they exhibited any interest in it, they revealed their ambivalence towards the Negro masses.” Aesthetics had been reduced to an ornament for a feckless élite.

The years after “The New Negro” were marked by an agitated perplexity. Locke yearned for something solid: a home for black art, somewhere to nourish, protect, refine, and control it. He’d been formed and polished by élite institutions, and he longed to see them multiply. But the Great Depression shattered his efforts to extend the New Negro project, pressing him further into the byzantine patronage system of Charlotte Mason, an older white widow gripped by an eccentric fascination with “primitive peoples.” Salvation obsessed her. She believed that black culture could rescue American society by replenishing the spiritual values that had been evaporated by modernity, but that pumped, still, through the Negro’s unspoiled heart.

Mason was rich, and Locke had sought her backing for a proposed Harlem Museum of African Art. Although the project failed (as did his plans for a Harlem Community Arts Center), Mason remained a meddling, confused presence in his life until her death, in 1946. During their association, he passed through a gantlet of prickling degradations. Her vision of Negro culture obviously didn’t align with his; she demanded to be called Godmother; and she was prone to angry suspicion, demanding a fastidious accounting of how her funds were spent. But those funds were indispensable, finally, to the work of Hughes and, especially, Hurston. Locke, as the erstwhile “mid-wife” of black modernism, was dispatched to handle the writers—much to their dismay. He welcomed the authority, swelling into a supercilious manager (and, to Hughes, a bullying admirer) who handed down edicts from Godmother while enforcing a few of his own.

The thirties also brought revelations and violent political emergencies that plunged Locke into a rapprochement with the left. Locke the glossy belletrist gave way to Locke the fellow-traveller, Locke the savvy champion of proletarian realism. There was a fitful attempt to write a biography of Frederick Douglass, and a dutiful visit to the Soviet Union. But he was never a proper Communist. After the Harlem riot of 1935, he wrote an essay titled “Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane” for Survey Graphic , in which he pronounced the failure of the state and its economic system, but congratulated Mayor LaGuardia on his response to the riot, while also cautioning against both “capitalistic exploitation on the one hand and radical exploitation on the other.” Frazier thought this a mealymouthed capitulation; taking Locke on a ride around Washington in his Packard coupe, Frazier screamed denunciations at his trapped, flustered passenger.

Locke was middling as an ideologue, but remained a fiercely committed pragmatist. The rise of Fascism saw his philosophical work make crackling contact with politics. “Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace,” a lecture delivered in the early nineteen-forties, took aim at the nation’s enemies and their “passion for arbitrary unity and conformity.” He sometimes groped clumsily for the radical language of recrimination: inching further from his earlier aestheticism, he praised Richard Wright’s “ Native Son ” as a “Zolaesque J’accuse pointing to the danger symptoms of a self-frustrating democracy.” And he remained riveted by the Negro’s internal flight. One of his most gratifying contributions was his advocacy of the painter Jacob Lawrence, and his sixty-panel tribute to the Great Migration. (Inspecting a layout of Lawrence’s series in the offices of Fortune , Locke exulted that “ The New Masses couldn’t have done this thing better.”) Lawrence had expressed what Locke, with his fidgeting dignity, couldn’t quite: the anger, the desolation, and the bracing thrill of a people crashing into history.

Locke was still driven by a need for order, for meticulous systems: the project that towered over his final years was “The Negro in American Culture,” a book he hoped would be his summum opus. “The New Negro” anthology had been a delectably shambling sample of an era, confected from disparate styles and stuffed with conflicting positions. But “The Negro in American Culture”—he’d signed a contract for it with Random House, in 1945—was to be the lordly consummation of a life spent in the service of black expression. The book is a fixture of his later letters: either as an excuse for his absences (“It’s an awful bother,” he apologized to one friend, “but must turn out up to expectation in the long run”) or as something to flaunt before a sexual prospect. Mason’s death had sapped some of his power, so this new mission refreshed his stature and his righteous purpose.

But he couldn’t finish the thing: his health was failing, he was stretched between too many obligations, and he was consumed, as ever, by the torment of unrequited love. His life was still replete with younger men to whom he was an aide and a guide—but not a sexual equal. “What I am trying to say, Alain,” the young Robert E. Claybrooks wrote, “is that you excite me in every other area but a sexual one. It has nothing to do with the differences in ages. Of that I’m certain. Perhaps physical contact was precipitated too soon—I don’t know. But I do know, and this I have withheld until now, an intense feeling of nausea accompanied me after the initial affair, and I know it would be repeated each time, if such were to happen again.” Solomon Rosenfeld, Collins George, Hercules Armstrong: the names flit through the last chapters of Locke’s life, delivering the little sting of sexual insult. By the end, he called himself “an old girl.”

Yet Stewart’s biography aims to heave Locke out of obscurity and prop him next to the reputations he launched. At more than nine hundred pages, it’s a thudding, shapeless text, despotic in its pedantry and exhausting in its zeal, marked by excruciating attention to the most minuscule irrelevances. This is touching—and strangely fitting. Stewart’s research arrives at a kind of Lockean intensity. But even Stewart’s vigor falters as Locke’s own scholarly energies start to wane. “Locke’s involvement with the race issue,” Stewart finally admits about “The Negro in American Culture,” “had been pragmatic, a means to advance himself—to gain recognition, to be esteemed, and ultimately to be loved by the people.”

Love: the word is applied like glue, keeping this vast book in one preposterous piece. Locke’s most lasting lover was Maurice Russell, who was a teen-ager when he found himself looped into Locke’s affections. “You see youth is my hobby,” Locke wrote him at one point. “But the sad thing is the increasing paucity of serious minded and really refined youth.” Russell was there—along with a few other ex-beaux—in 1954, at Benta’s Funeral Home, on 132nd Street in Harlem, after Locke’s death, from congestive heart failure. W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley; Mrs. Paul Robeson; Arthur Fauset; and Charles Johnson all paid their respects to the small, noble figure lying in the coffin, who perhaps would have smiled at a line in Du Bois’s eulogy: “singular in a stupid land.”

The New Negro was a hero, a fetish, a polemical posture—and a blurry portrait of a flinching soul. But Locke took his place, at last, in the history he wished to redeem. “We’re going to let our children know,” Martin Luther King, Jr., declared in Mississippi in 1968, “that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe.” Locke’s class had cleaved him from the “masses”—and his desires had estranged him from his class. From this doubled alienation sprang a baffled psyche: an aesthete traipsing nimbly through an age of brutal rupture. Wincing from humiliation and romantic rejection, he tried to offer his heart to his race. “With all my sensuality and sentimentality,” he wrote to Hughes after Paris, “I love sublimated things.” ♦

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A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance

With the end of the Civil War in 1865, hundreds of thousands of African Americans newly freed from the yoke of slavery in the South began to dream of fuller participation in American society, including political empowerment, equal economic opportunity, and economic and cultural self-determination.

Unfortunately, by the late 1870s, that dream was largely dead, as white supremacy was quickly restored to the Reconstruction South. White lawmakers on state and local levels passed strict racial segregation laws known as “Jim Crow laws” that made African Americans second-class citizens. While a small number of African Americans were able to become landowners, most were exploited as sharecroppers, a system designed to keep them poor and powerless. Hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) perpetrated lynchings and conducted campaigns of terror and intimidation to keep African Americans from voting or exercising other fundamental rights.

With booming economies across the North and Midwest offering industrial jobs for workers of every race, many African Americans realized their hopes for a better standard of living—and a more racially tolerant environment—lay outside the South. By the turn of the 20th century, the Great Migration was underway as hundreds of thousands of African Americans relocated to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York. The Harlem section of Manhattan, which covers just three square miles, drew nearly 175,000 African Americans, giving the neighborhood the largest concentration of black people in the world. Harlem became a destination for African Americans of all backgrounds. From unskilled laborers to an educated middle-class, they shared common experiences of slavery, emancipation, and racial oppression, as well as a determination to forge a new identity as free people.

The Great Migration drew to Harlem some of the greatest minds and brightest talents of the day, an astonishing array of African American artists and scholars. Between the end of World War I and the mid-1930s, they produced one of the most significant eras of cultural expression in the nation’s history—the Harlem Renaissance. Yet this cultural explosion also occurred in Cleveland, Los Angeles and many cities shaped by the great migration. Alain Locke, a Harvard-educated writer, critic, and teacher who became known as the “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance, described it as a “spiritual coming of age” in which African Americans transformed “social disillusionment to race pride.”

The Harlem Renaissance encompassed poetry and prose, painting and sculpture, jazz and swing, opera and dance. What united these diverse art forms was their realistic presentation of what it meant to be black in America, what writer Langston Hughes called an “expression of our individual dark-skinned selves,” as well as a new militancy in asserting their civil and political rights.

Among the Renaissance’s most significant contributors were intellectuals W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Cyril Briggs, and Walter Francis White; electrifying performers Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson; writers and poets Zora Neale Hurston, Effie Lee Newsome, Countee Cullen; visual artists Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage; and an extraordinary list of legendary musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ivie Anderson, Josephine Baker, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and countless others.

Josaphine Baker

At the height of the movement, Harlem was the epicenter of American culture. The neighborhood bustled with African American-owned and run publishing houses and newspapers, music companies, playhouses, nightclubs, and cabarets. The literature, music, and fashion they created defined culture and “cool” for blacks and white alike, in America and around the world.

As the 1920s came to a close, so did the Harlem Renaissance. Its heyday was cut short largely due to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and resulting Great Depression, which hurt African American-owned businesses and publications and made less financial support for the arts available from patrons, foundations, and theatrical organizations.

However, the Harlem Renaissance’s impact on America was indelible. The movement brought notice to the great works of African American art, and inspired and influenced future generations of African American artists and intellectuals. The self-portrait of African American life, identity, and culture that emerged from Harlem was transmitted to the world at large, challenging the racist and disparaging stereotypes of the Jim Crow South. In doing so, it radically redefined how people of other races viewed African Americans and understood the African American experience.

Most importantly, the Harlem Renaissance instilled in African Americans across the country a new spirit of self-determination and pride, a new social consciousness, and a new commitment to political activism, all of which would provide a foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In doing so, it validated the beliefs of its founders and leaders like Alain Locke and Langston Hughes that art could be a vehicle to improve the lives of the African Americans. 

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The Harlem Renaissance: A Uniquely American Movement

March 13, 2024

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The Significance of the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance, a cultural and artistic movement among African-Americans in the 1920s, was significant due to its intersection of historical time and place. Harlem, as a result of the Great Migration and its international character, became an epicenter for cultural expression. The post-World War I era, marked by urbanization and a burgeoning ‘New Negro’ identity, provided fertile ground for artistic and intellectual blossoming.

The Emergence of Urban Values

The 1920s marked a pivotal moment in United States history, revealing the nation’s transition into an urbanized society. Urban living, beyond mere geographical relocation, symbolized a shift towards modernism and a distinct set of values. Figures like Elaine Lock emphasized urban life as a catalyst for the emergence of a ‘New Negro’ identity, representing a departure from rural traditions to embrace modernity, creativity, and cultural exchange. The Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement of the era, exemplified this urban ethos, showcasing African-Americans’ rich cultural heritage while challenging racist stereotypes through literature, art, and music.

Langston Hughes and the Authenticity of Black Culture

Langston Hughes, in his essay ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,’ advocated for embracing the authenticity of black culture rather than aspiring to assimilate into white culture. Hughes critiqued the inclination among some black individuals, particularly from the middle class, to distance themselves from working-class black culture and idolize white culture. He celebrated the richness and originality of working-class black culture, exemplified by jazz, as an inherent expression of African-American life. Hughes encouraged artists to stay true to their roots and disregard societal expectations, emphasizing the importance of authenticity and self-expression.

Impact of 1919 Racial Violence on the Harlem Renaissance

The racial violence of 1919, evidenced by incidents like the Red Summer, influenced the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Works such as Walter White’s ‘The Fire in the Flint’ depicted the struggle of African-Americans amidst racial terrorism. White’s novel explored themes of political activism versus racial uplift, echoing the historical conflict between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Additionally, the violence inspired other writers to address the fear and trauma of lynching, reflecting the pervasive impact of racial violence on African-American communities and contributing to the themes of resilience and resistance in Harlem Renaissance literature.

Reception of the Harlem Renaissance in White America

The Harlem Renaissance had a significant impact within the African-American community, but its reception among white Americans was mixed. While jazz music, a prominent product of the Renaissance, gained popularity among white audiences, many venues in Harlem restricted African-American patrons. The literature of the Harlem Renaissance reached some white readers, but mainstream publishing and patronage often imposed limits on the visibility of black voices. Wealthy white patrons sometimes viewed African-American culture through a lens of exoticism, leading to conflicted relationships with artists like Langston Hughes.

Carl Van Vechten

Carl Van Vechten, a white author and supporter of black artists, appropriated African-American idiom in his literature, believing he could speak for African-Americans as an honorary member of the culture. However, his use of racial slurs and his assumption of superiority over the culture he depicted sparked criticism and raised questions about cultural appropriation and the role of outsiders in defining black culture.

The Ku Klux Klan

During the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan experienced significant growth outside of the rural South, particularly in the Upper Midwest and Western states. Klan leaders, like Hiram Evans, defined their mission as promoting ‘100% Americanism,’ which meant Native white Protestant supremacy. While some Klan members acknowledged African-Americans as part of the country, they expected them to conform to racial hierarchies and keep their cultural practices separate.

The Influence of Langston Hughes’s Poetry on Hip Hop

Langston Hughes’s poetry, with its emphasis on oral tradition and musicality, provides a potential link to the development of the Hip Hop movement. The oral tradition, rooted in West African cultures and carried through the Atlantic slave trade to the United States, enriched American culture and influenced the construction of verse, including impromptu verse.

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Harlem Renaissance in English Literature

The Harlem Renaissance, an imaginative and cultural movement that took place in the 1920s and early 1930s, marked a significant period in American history. It originated mostly among African Americans in the bustling Harlem district of New York City and was characterized by an influx of creative expression in the forms of art, music, literature, and intellectual thought. This time period came after the Great Migration during which a large number of African Americans relocated from the rural South to urban centers in the North in search of better prospects and escaping discrimination based on race.

 A cornerstone of African American literary history and a testament to the ability of art to effect social change, the Harlem Renaissance is enormously significant in English literature because it gave voice to the African American experience, dispelling prevalent stereotypes and prejudices and generating an extensive number of iconic literary works that still have an impact on writers and scholars today.

Table of Contents

Themes and characteristics of Harlem Renaissance

Identity and racial consciousness.

The literature of the Harlem Renaissance extensively examines identity and racial consciousness. In a culture characterized by institutionalized racism and discrimination, writers of this era struggled with issues of self-identity and cultural belonging. Defining one’s identity as an African American in a largely white culture was a common theme in their writings. Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage,” which explore the nuanced interplay between racial heritage and human identity, are two examples of poems that explore this issue.

Read More: Modern Period in English Literature

The exploration of African American heritage and folklore:

The writers of the Harlem Renaissance showed a keen interest in examining and honoring African American folklore and legacy. They looked to African customs, folktales, and spirituals for inspiration as they attempted to reestablish a connection with their cultural heritage. The literature of the time was significantly impacted by the resurgence of interest in African and African American folklore that resulted from this investigation. For example, Zora Neale Hurston gained notoriety for compiling African American folktales in “Mules and Men,” and Claude McKay frequently included elements of African and Jamaican culture in his poetry.

Social and political commentary:

Many Harlem Renaissance authors made social and political commentary using their literary platforms. They talked about things like the fight for civil rights, segregation, and racial inequity. They criticized the inequality and injustices African Americans endured in the US through their writings. A well-known person of the time, W.E.B. Du Bois aided the movement with his essays and as editor of “The Crisis,” the NAACP magazine, which offered a forum for political engagement and discussion.

Jazz and music as inspiration

The social and cultural context of the Harlem Renaissance was heavily influenced by jazz and music. Jazz music’s rhythms, improvisation, and rich emotional range greatly influenced writers. Many of the era’s poems and prose pieces have syncopated rhythms and lyrical elements, which are clear indications of this influence. Particularly Langston Hughes was well-known for his jazz-influenced poetry that encapsulated the spirit and vigor of the Harlem nightlife. 

Read More: Eliot’s conception of Tradition and Individual Talent

The portrayal of urban life in Harlem:

The literature of the Harlem Renaissance frequently portrayed the colorful and dynamic urban life of Harlem, which provided inspiration for a great deal of the artistic production of the time. The neighborhood’s distinct atmosphere was depicted vividly by writers, who created vivid images of the busy streets, jazz clubs, and cultural events. Works that encapsulate the essence of urban life in Harlem and reflect the cultural energy of the time include the prose poem “Cane” by Jean Toomer and the poem “Harlem Shadows” by Claude McKay.

Literary forms and styles of the Harlem Renaissance:

Langston Hughes’ poetic style: One of the most well-known poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes is praised for his unique style, which struck a deep chord with the African American experience. His poetry frequently used simple, approachable language to portray African Americans’ hopes and daily struggles. Hughes’ poetry resonated with a wide audience because of its honesty and simplicity. In his verses, he encapsulated the cadence and rhythm of African American speech, giving voice to the common man while tackling issues of social justice and racial pride. 

Novels and Short Stories

Zora neale hurston’s storytelling techniques:.

Known for her vivid and genuine storytelling, Zora Neale Hurston was a prolific novelist and short story writer during the Harlem Renaissance. Her writing frequently portrayed strong, multifaceted African American individuals with unique voices and dialects, giving a vivid and realistic picture of Southern African American society. Folklore, accent, and oral traditions were all skillfully woven into Hurston’s stories, making her storytelling distinctive. Her masterful tale of African American culture, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” is a shining example of her storytelling ability.

Read More: Waiting for Godot as an absurd play

Exploration of the African American experience in fiction: The early 20th century African American experience was depicted in a variety of ways in novels and short stories written during the Harlem Renaissance. The Great Migration, the pursuit of identity, family dynamics, and the difficulties of surviving in a segregated society were among the subjects covered by writers. These stories frequently offered a glimpse into the challenges and lives of African Americans, illuminating their tenacity and aspirations. The works of authors like Jean Toomer ( “Cane” ) and Nella Larsen ( “Passing” ) provided nuanced viewpoints on race, identity, and the difficulties associated with racial passing.

W.E.B. Du Bois and his influence on Harlem Renaissance thought: W.E.B. Du Bois, a well-known scholar and thinker, edited “The Crisis” magazine and wrote pieces that greatly influenced the Harlem Renaissance’s intellectual debate. In his writings, Du Bois highlighted the value of political activism, civil rights, and education as vital instruments for furthering African American advancement. His well-known essay “The Souls of Black Folk” advocated for a dual consciousness that acknowledged one’s multiple identities as an American and an African. Many writers were inspired to participate in social and political criticism through their works by Du Bois’s views and advocacy, which served as a solid intellectual foundation for the Harlem Renaissance.

The role of literary magazines and newspapers in the movement:

W.E.B. Du Bois, a well-known scholar and thinker, edited “The Crisis” magazine and wrote writings that greatly influenced the Harlem Renaissance’s intellectual debate. In his writings, Du Bois highlighted the value of political activism, civil rights, and education as vital instruments for promoting African American advancement. His well-known essay “The Souls of Black Folk” advocated for a dual consciousness that acknowledged one’s multiple identities as an American and an African. Many writers were inspired to participate in social and political criticism through their works by Du Bois’s views and advocacy, which served as a solid intellectual foundation for the Harlem Renaissance.

Key Figures of the Harlem Renaissance

Langston hughes.

One of the key figures in the Harlem Renaissance was Langston Hughes, who was born in 1902. He was born and raised in the Midwest and moved to Harlem in the early 1920s, where he was fully absorbed in the neighborhood’s vibrant arts and culture. The challenges, goals, and day-to-day experiences of African Americans were depicted in Hughes’ poetry and prose, which encapsulated the spirit of African American life at the time. His works, which often incorporate inspiration from jazz and blues, are praised for their approachable language and melodies. Examples of these include “The Negro Talks of Rivers,” “The Weary Blues,” and “Montage of a Dream Deferred.” Hughes fought against racial stereotypes, promoted social and political change, and celebrated black culture and heritage through his writing. In addition to his literary accomplishments, he is recognized for having represented the African American community at a critical period in American history.

Zora Neale Hurston

Born in 1891, Zora Neale Hurston was a prolific author and anthropologist who had a big impact on the Harlem Renaissance. Raised in the rural South, she brought a distinct viewpoint to her writings, which frequently examined African Americans’ experiences in the rural South and the complexity of their cultural heritage. Hurston’s masterpiece “Their Eyes Were Watching God” explores the life and self-discovery of a black woman named Janie Crawford. In addition to her literary accomplishments, Hurston also carried out insightful anthropological studies, documenting African American rituals and folklore during her fieldwork.

One of the most significant and enduring literary movements in English history, the Harlem Renaissance paved the way for African American authors to take charge of their voices and experiences. It is significant because it sparked an emerging body of writing that tackled important social issues, questioned racial stereotypes, and celebrated African American culture. It was this movement that not only cleared the path for a new wave of African American writers but also permanently altered the literary landscape of the United States and changed the story of its cultural identity. These works offer priceless insights into the complex relationships between race, identity, and creative expression. They also serve as a reminder of the ability of literature to affect social change and promote understanding.

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Eng 102 - The Argumentative Essay: Harlem Renaissance

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Harlem Renaissance

Issues and Controversies in American History  is an excellent source for information on the Harlem Renaissance . 

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The issue:  Should Harlem Renaissance writers and artists primarily seek to integrate with mainstream culture and advance the political goals of the civil rights establishment through their works? Or should Renaissance artists be free to express authentic and distinctly African American themes?

• Arguments for cultural integration:  In order to counter more than a century of racist stereotypes of blacks in American pop culture, Renaissance artists have an obligation to convey "respectable" images of African Americans to white society. In other words, art should be used as a political means, not for its own sake. Once black culture is accepted and integrated into mainstream culture, then political, social and economic equality will follow. Furthermore, the whole notion of "black art" is stereotypical in its own right; artists should express a wide array of themes and subject matter that aims to transcend racial identity.
• Arguments against cultural integration:  Countering racist portrayals in popular culture is crucial to achieving equality for African Americans, but not at the cost of sacrificing authentic and realistic forms of black artistry. A Renaissance artist should capture the unique voice of the black masses, not the whitewashed, "proper" portrayals that cater to the elite tastes of the black bourgeoisie and white society. The melting pot of cultural integration should be rejected in favor of the mosaic of cultural harmony, in which many cultures coexist apart from one another. Only when African Americans are accepted and respected for their own unique culture can genuine equality follow.

Harlem 1900-1940 . The website for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture contains an online exhibition on black life in Harlem during the era of the Harlem Renaissance. Includes timeline of events, images, text, bibliography, and resources for teachers.

Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia . A project Ferris State University, the Jim Crow Museum website houses an exhaustive collection of artifacts documenting the Jim Crow era.

Rhapsodies in Black . The Institute of International Visual Arts presents an online exhibition of text and images highlighting the history and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. 

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow . The website for the PBS series includes brief summary text and images exploring the Harlem Renaissance. Links to related topics and larger themes provided.  

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The Gale In Context: U.S. History database provides access to Academic Journals, Magazines, Primary Sources, Reference Books, and Biographies related to the Harlem Renaissance . 

The Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918- c. 1937) was an important period in the development of African American culture. During this era, a group of influential figures in the creative arts helped to turn the New York City neighborhood of Harlem into a major center of African American music, literature, politics, and culture. It was less a movement than an attempt by artists to support each other in a cultural environment during a period in American history when there was not broad support for African American creative expression.

Also called the “New Negro Movement,” the Harlem Renaissance was merely the most famous of several urban clusters of African American expression. Cities such as Chicago, Kansas City, Memphis, and Cleveland were also...

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"Harlem Renaissance."  Gale U.S. History Online Collection , Gale, 2020.  Gale In Context: U.S. History , https://link-gale-com.ezproxy.tmcc.edu/apps/doc/CSVSGR697740729/UHIC?u=tmcc_main&sid=UHIC&xid=5f9a33e3. Accessed 9 Apr. 2020.

The EBSCO ebook collection provides access to dozens of books dedicated to the Harlem Renaissance.

Use the Table of Contents to identify specific aspects of the Harlem Renaissance. 

Subjects:  SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / American / African American Studies; American literature--African American authors--History and criticism; African American arts--New York (State)--New York--20th century; African American arts--20th century; African Americans--Intellectual life--20th century;  Harlem Renaissance ; African Americans--New York (State)--New York--Intellectual life--20th century

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MLA Citations are provided:

Huggins, Nathan Irvin.  Harlem Renaissance . Vol. Updated ed, Oxford University Press, 2007.  EBSCOhost , search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=362479&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

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The Cosmopolitan Modernism of the Harlem Renaissance

A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art explores the world-spanning art of the Harlem Renaissance.

In January 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened an exhibition dedicated to the vibrant history of Harlem—the institution’s first attempt at displaying and interpreting African American culture. “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968” came to life at the tail end of the civil rights movement and on the cusp of Black Power.

Enthusiastically promoted by the Met’s then-director, Thomas P.F. Hoving, the show was meant to signal the institution’s commitment to civil rights and the Black political struggle and to bring Black and white audiences together in the celebratory space of the museum. But something was missing—in retrospect, an unthinkable omission. Not a single painting, sketch, or sculpture was on view in the “Harlem on My Mind” galleries. No fine art by Black artists—no fine artwork of any kind, in fact—appeared.

Instead, “Harlem on My Mind” represented Harlem via floor-to-ceiling photomurals, archival ephemera, and street soundscapes alongside interpretive text. It was the cutting edge of immersive exhibition design; the Met had never put on an exhibition like it before (and hasn’t since). Yet from the perspective of many Black artists, critics, academics, and organizers, the show was woefully retrograde. Despite concerns raised by community representatives during the exhibition’s development, the Met had reduced the culture of Harlem to an object of sociological, or even ethnographic, inquiry. Black people were once again the subjects, rather than the authors of their representation.

The museum’s choice was strange, but also telling. By refusing to integrate the art in its galleries, the Met seemed to reject the idea that Black art could be worthy of display and to suggest that Black audiences might prefer flashy spectacle to works of fine art. The show also reflected a persistent trend in the interpretation of the Harlem Renaissance. Too often, the movement has been understood as a historical moment and social phenomenon while its visual art in particular has gone unconsidered, as if it were enough to acknowledge that Black people created art during this period without bothering to inquire into what that art looked like or what it meant.

Today, the legacy of “Harlem on My Mind” lies in the organizing that its failures prompted. In response to the exhibition, artists formed the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and picketed the show, carrying signs that read “Harlem on Whose Mind?” and “Whose Image of Whom?” The BECC, which remained active through the 1970s, would go on to demand that the Met and other art institutions hire Black curators and administrators and display work by Black artists. It would not be an overstatement to suggest that the new Met show “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” curated by Denise Murrell, is a descendant of this activism. The show is an open-ended exploration of the era’s art, gathering paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and photographs by well-known and relatively unknown artists into a vibrant and searching collage that offers us a wide range of views on the Harlem Renaissance’s origins and meanings and the ways the movement found artistic expression. Rather than merely concluding the Met’s Harlem saga by showcasing the artistic variety and vicissitudes of the Harlem Renaissance, this exhibition points us in a thousand new directions for engaging with the art of the period and paves the way for future exhibitions too.

One of the strongest impressions left by “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism ” is the story it weaves about Black sociality in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. The social spaces that the exhibition makes visible are many and varied—and, noticeably, not all of them are situated in New York City. Black people gather in city streets and in their homes, in bars and dance halls, in jazz clubs and pool halls and beauty salons, at lawn parties and luncheons and formal dinners, and through a variety of associations, professional, fraternal, and sororal. The scenes on view belie any notion of a homogeneous Harlem Renaissance. Instead, we see the movement through a prism, glimpsing the gradations of Black experience and even seeing social groups at odds with one another.

In Elks Marching , a 1934 painting by Malvin Gray Johnson, we witness marchers on parade, boat-hatted and white-trousered Black men in orderly ranks, whose collectivity suggests the cohesive power of Harlem’s fraternal orders. In contrast, the dancers in Palmer Hayden’s 1943 Beale Street Blues , an unruly composition of clashing patterns and shifting viewpoints, move to an entirely different rhythm. And in James Van Der Zee’s 1927 photograph Luncheon Party —in which finely dressed women pose around an elegant table setting gleaming with middle-class respectability—we see a very different Harlem Renaissance than we do in Archibald J. Motley Jr.’s 1936 painting The Liar , in which a set of men gather in a windowless back room to shoot pool, smoke cigarettes, and drink whiskey on the rocks.

The differences between Motley’s pool shooters and Van Der Zee’s bourgeois diners mark out just some of the varieties of Harlem life in the 1920s to the 1940s. Van Der Zee’s photographs are celebrated for democratizing the possibility of representation and for bringing portraiture to an ascendant Black middle class. Yet they also crafted a very specific image of Blackness. The equally stylish subjects of Motley’s painting offered another: They let it all hang out. Smoking, dancing, and drinking, strolling and laughing, Motley’s Black subjects convey nothing so much as ease and enjoyment.

Yet to some, certain features of Motley’s paintings—the gleam of bright eyes against rich dark skin, thick lips parting to reveal white teeth, the artist’s consistent interest in “typical” nightlife scenes—have seemed to verge on caricature. Is this ironic? Are Motley’s paintings a (very) early form of pop art, digesting the tropes of popular entertainment? Did Black viewers see themselves in this work, or did white audiences eagerly consume these scenes? Perhaps these questions are beside the point. In 1926, Langston Hughes wrote: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too…. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.”

This indifference to the viewer’s probing gaze is reflected in the persistent inward turn of Motley’s compositions. Across his paintings, and perhaps most notably in his lovely Blues of 1929, we see his subjects looking into the painting, gazing at each other rather than back at the viewer. In Blues , we are confronted with a wall of backs: of the members of the orchestra, of men leading smiling partners in dance, of humanity cheek to cheek and mouth to mouth. Although subjects in a painting, they are indifferent to our gaze. There is a sense of warm enclosure, of the scene’s sufficiency unto itself.

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The scenes of Black social life on view are not limited to the city blocks of Harlem. Motley, who was born in New Orleans and spent most of his life in Chicago, never lived in New York, despite being celebrated as one of the Harlem Renaissance’s leading artists. The Met exhibition suggests that “Harlem” was more an ethos than a geography; the movement’s “transatlantic modernism” extended far beyond New York and even North America.

One of the Harlem Renaissance’s other capitals was Paris, where an international set of Black artists studied, worked, and socialized. Encounters in that cosmopolitan center are reflected in the works on view—for example, in the lithe deco form of Richmond Barthé’s sculpture of the Senegalese dancer Féral Benga. Barthé, a Mississippi native who traveled to Paris from New York in 1934, was enchanted by the cabaret sensation, who performed alongside Josephine Baker in Paris’s Folies Bergère. Benga, who appears in the nude, is all sinewy elegance. Poised on the balls of his feet, he sweeps the blade from his signature saber dance overhead as he twists at the waist in a gleaming bronze that evokes the hue of his skin.

In Barthé’s sculpture of Benga, we catch sight of a queer Harlem Renaissance—a theme reflected in nearby works, including Dark Rapture , a nude painting of James Baldwin by his dear friend Beauford Delaney, which shimmers with prismatic color. Both gay, Barthé and Benga met amid the artistic ferment of Paris, where the sculptor, like many Black Americans of the time, sought social freedom and artistic inspiration in the city where the dancer, disinherited by his father, made his home after leaving Dakar.

Diasporic pathways like these yielded another of the exhibition’s most compelling portraits. The seated Black man in the Dutch artist Nola Hatterman’s 1930 painting has only recently been identified as Louis—or Lou—Drenthe. An émigré to Amsterdam from Suriname (at the time still a Dutch colonial possession), Drenthe played the trumpet on the city’s jazz scene, joining American acts when they headlined overseas. In this 1930 work, he is natty and urbane in a brown suit jacket, bow tie, and tan trousers, his pose a study in composed self-possession, his expression alert and sensitive yet distant. Although Drenthe worked as a waiter in Amsterdam’s first Surinamese restaurant, here he is pictured instead as the patron of a café whose red gingham tablecloths are refracted in the glass of pale beer at his elbow. (Originally intended as an advertisement for the Amstel brewery, the painting was ultimately rejected by the company.) Trompe l’oeil details—a pair of yellow leather gloves perched at the forefront of the canvas, three coasters bearing the Amstel logo, a crisp newspaper whose legible advertisements may suggest his additional employment as a stage actor—push this painting beyond the realm of conventional portraiture and echo the collage aesthetic of Picasso’s early cubism.

Alain Locke, the chief theorist of the Harlem Renaissance, identified Harlem as the home of the New Negro, the Black man or woman liberated from stereotypes, shaping their own life as they shaped a nascent Black culture. Yet far from New York, Drenthe cuts the figure of the international New Negro.

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It is unsurprising that portraiture should dominate in an exhibition dedicated to the exploration and affirmation of modern Black identity. Among the many examples on view, I found myself powerfully drawn to Winold Reiss’s Two Public School Teachers , a pastel drawing of two gray-clad women with luminous features. As in Reiss’s other portraits, including those of Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois (both also on view), careful shading makes the subjects’ face and hands contrast strikingly with their bodies and clothing, which are suggested only by minimal and fluid contour lines.

As I am sure others will, I made the mistake of assuming that Reiss, like his subjects, was Black. I was surprised to learn not only that was he a white German but that this sensitive yet matter-of-fact drawing found itself at the heart of a controversy over representation. Reiss, who often made African American men and women his subjects, had been chosen by Locke to provide illustrations—among them Two Public School Teachers —for an issue of the publication Survey Graphic , which explored Harlem, the “Mecca of the New Negro,” through writing on history, philosophy, sociology, and culture. That issue, which proved successful, would later become the core of the volume The New Negro: An Interpretation , which expanded on Reiss’s illustrations and the essays, poetry, and fiction selected by Locke.

Yet reactions were mixed when the Harlem public encountered Two Public School Teachers in print and in a concurrent exhibition at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, it was the only place in the city where Reiss’s portraits of Harlemites would be seen during his lifetime). One Black viewer called the two women “forbidding”; another worried that the work might even be a “sinister move to prevent the hiring of Negro teachers.” But Locke responded in no uncertain terms to such criticisms. To his mind, such critics were “Philistines” whose fixation on promoting “favorable” representations suggested a “playing-up to Caucasian type-ideals” and threatened a “truly racial art with the psychological bleach of ‘lily-whitism.’”

The issue of colorism is also taken up in a work by another lesser-known Harlem Renaissance artist brought to light by the Met exhibition, the portraitist Laura Wheeler Waring. Her small painting Mother and Daughter shows two women in profile, tightly compressed within the space of the canvas. Their marked resemblance makes their relationship clear, yet the younger-seeming woman in the foreground is significantly paler, with closely curled red hair and rosy cheeks.

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This painting predates Nella Larson’s Passing , a Harlem novel about two women who can “pass” as white, by just two years. Yet while Passing ends with the tragic death of the woman who conceals her background and chooses to “pass,” the message of Waring’s painting is more ambiguous. Is it, we are invited to wonder, a critique of a Black elite for whom racial advancement meant the dilution of physical features perceived as “racial”? Or is it a reflection on feelings of kinship and belonging that transcend color? Waring herself, as her self-portrait (which is also on view) shows, had lighter skin, while many of her subjects—mostly young women—had a variety of skin tones. In one such portrait, an anonymous dark-eyed, dark-haired young woman, with deep brown skin painted like matte velvet, shading into cool umber and faint violet, cradles a pomegranate while looking at us.

In contrast to these singular portrait subjects, the exhibition also invites us to witness the unfolding saga of the collective Black subject of history, as depicted by the painter Aaron Douglas in his monumental Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction .

One of the artist’s masterpieces, this New Deal–era painting, commissioned by the Works Progress Administration, has been temporarily taken down from the high walls of the Schomburg Center and brought to eye level. The 11-foot painting is the largest in Douglas’s four-panel series tracing the diasporic journey from Africa to the modern metropolis, where the Black man becomes the urban industrial proletariat. Within this dense and complex composition, figures stooping to pick cotton are awakened by an orator, whose powerful voice is made visible by the concentric circles that radiate from him, producing ever more subtle gradations of hue and tone as they overlap and inflect the artist’s signature silhouetted forms. Broken chains dangle from arms lifted in strength and celebration as uniformed figures take up arms, recalling the critical historical revision of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction : It was Black people who liberated themselves, stealing back their own labor power from the slaveholding South and rising up to fight those who held them in bondage.

The painting’s composition can be read from right to left, like a text, but its narrative also radiates out from its core and moves from the foreground into the background, where institutions of learning and employment crown a distant hill. While Douglas’s work is often interpreted as straightforwardly documentary, the painting’s interpenetration of forms and bodies and its exploration of different modes of storytelling transcend linear narrative. In Black American history, we see the past unfold in the present.

The exhibition offers many more engagements with Black history and identity. A small and sober section at the show’s end displays explicit artistic engagements with racial violence. Here, one can find Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s In Memory of Mary Turner as a Silent Protest Against Mob Violence . Not even two feet high, it is a memorial monument that exists only in painted plaster. Its subject, Mary Turner, was murdered by a lynch mob in 1918. Grasping hands drag at her skirts, yet she rises above them unimpeded, her cradling arms evoking the unborn child who died along with her. This plaster sketch, which despite Fuller’s wishes was never cast in more durable bronze, reminds us that we are just beginning the work of reckoning with and rectifying the violence that scarred 20th-century Black life.

The Met show is only the fourth major museum exhibition to engage the Harlem Renaissance (not counting “Harlem on My Mind ” ). Beyond its significance in bringing forgotten artists to light and suggesting new approaches, it is a pleasure to experience, a rich tapestry of themes and topics, people and places, perspectives and explorations that reveals the scope and breadth of the Harlem Renaissance. We have HBCUs to thank for their stewardship of many of the revelatory works on view, as well as the descendants of artists like Laura Wheeler Waring, who in the absence of institutional interest preserved their legacies for much of the past century.

One final work by Romare Bearden, a sort of coda to the exhibition, sounds a reminder of the struggles that brought us to this present moment, in which we can engage the complexities of Black art through shows like this one. Bearden, who came later, was not an artist of the Harlem Renaissance, though his work certainly stands on its foundations. Although the exhibition does not mention it, he is linked to this history in another way: In 1969, as a founding member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, he was among the artists who called for an urgent protest of “Harlem on My Mind.”

Bearden’s work, like his activism, gives us a chance to reflect on the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance. In his massive and sprawling 1971 collage, The Block , we see Harlem and its residents through the open windows of apartment buildings, where tiny and intimate scenes in photo collage each becomes a work of art on its own. These city blocks, which imparted an ethos to the world, are not knowable from a single view. You need to get up close, to get into the thick and the mix of it, to understand and appreciate this Harlem. We could say the same about the Met’s exhibition, where each work opens a new window onto the Harlem Renaissance.

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The Harlem Renaissance

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87 Harlem Renaissance Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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• Harlem Renaissance: “Dream Boogie” Poem by Langston Hughes Therefore, the selected work represents the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance and can be used for improving the understanding of the movement.
• The Harlem Renaissance and American Culture The Harlem Renaissance was born as a result of the significant events which occurred in the lives of Afro-Americans at the beginning of the 20th century. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Harlem Renaissance: Historical Roots and Climate Harlem Renaissance is, undoubtedly, a phenomenon unmatched in the strength of its impact both on the contemporary culture of the 1920s and 1930s, but also on the very identity of all African-Americans to this day.
• Harlem Renaissance and African American Culture The Harlem Reissuance grew after the abolition of slavery and later culminated into a greater force with the consequences brought about by WWI and the change in the cultural and social structure in the American […]
• Harlem Renaissance Influence on Afro-American Culture The Harlem Renaissance is widely known as a period in the history of the United States that greatly influenced the general development of American society and in particular the development of Afro-American culture.
• Harlem Renaissance Movement Analysis It was around this time that they began to advocate racial equality with the Americans and with the birth of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 their struggle for the […]
• Harlem Renaissance and Its Role for Afro-Americans The movement also helped to pave the way for the further struggle of the African-American population for their rights because now they emerged as educated and talented people.
• The Harlem Renaissance and the Struggle for a Black Identity The failure of Reconstruction and the implementation of the racial segregation threw the Afro-Americans into a difficult dilemma. Booker Washington was a prominent figure of the Post-Reconstruction Era and the leader of the Afro-American community.
• Harlem Renaissance: African American Art The use of OBSCURA cameras was one of the strategies that advanced the works of art that several artists of the time executed.
• Harlem Renaissance’ History: Issues of Negro Writers The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the ‘New Negro Movement,’ refers to the blossoming of African American intellectual and cultural life in the decade of the 1920s.
• Harlem Renaissance and Astonishing Literary Creativity Nevertheless, one of the most vital changes that laced the Harem Renaissance was the culture of music as explored in the remaining section of the paper.
• Harlem Renaissance Poets Overview The poet describes how the musician sways to the rhythm of the blues and the emotional uplifting he gets out of the experience.
• Literary Works of Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance was a term used collectively by social thinkers to represent the efforts by African-Americans to transcend the white-favored government systems in the new states, especially New York, from the southern states where […]
• Angelina Grimke’s Contribution to the Harlem Renaissance Grimke’s play was one of the first to be written by black authors highlighting the plight of blacks in the US.
• Harlem Renaissance: Historical and Social Background It was a period of social integration and the development of literary and artistic skills by the African Americans. The Harlem Renaissance was a period of artistic explosion of the African Americans and an opportunity […]
• Harlem Renaissance: The Cultural Movement In 1931, she collaborated with Langston Hughes in the production of the play “Mule Bone,” which was never published because of the tension between the two writers, and in 1934, she authored her first novel, […]
• Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance Within a short period, Harlem was transformed in to one of the trendiest neighborhoods in the whole of New York. Although Langston’s poems, spoke of the experiences of black Americans in light of a white […]
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• How Did the Great Migration Impact the Harlem Renaissance?
• Did the Harlem Renaissance Make Important Contributions to the African American Experience?
• What Was the Overall Impact of the Harlem Renaissance?
• How Did Harlem Renaissance Lead to Many Social Changes?
• Was the Harlem Renaissance a Failure or Not?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Shape Literature?
• Did the Harlem Renaissance Represent Everyone or Was It an Elitist Movement?
• How Was the Harlem Renaissance Reflected in Toni Morrison’s Jazz?
• Who Did the Harlem Renaissance Movement Appeal to and How?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Writer Zora Neale Hurston Influence America?
• What Historical, Social, and Cultural Forces Shaped the Harlem Renaissance?
• How Did the Irish Renaissance Influence the Harlem Renaissance?
• Why Was Harlem the Center of the Renaissance of African American Arts in the 1920s and 1930s?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Affect Future African American Artists in America?
• Who Do You See as the Most Major Player in the Harlem Renaissance, and Why?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Impact American Society During the 1920S and Beyond?
• What Similarities and Differences of Theme, Imagery, Tone and Style Are Demonstrated in the Works of Harlem Renaissance Authors?
• How Did the Creative Expression of African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s Lead to a New Black Cultural Identity?
• What Does the Harlem Renaissance Reveal About U.S. History?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Help Americans to Understand the History and Culture of African Americans?
• What Were the Key Concerns of the Harlem Renaissance?
• Why Did the Harlem Renaissance End?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Influence Art Today?
• Who Was the Most Important Contributor to the Harlem Renaissance and Why?
• Why Is the Harlem Renaissance Important to America?
• How Did Harlem Become Black?
• Why Did Harlem Become the Capital of Black America?
• How Did Jazz Influence the Harlem Renaissance?
• Where Did the Harlem Renaissance Get Its Name?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, January 25). 87 Harlem Renaissance Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/harlem-renaissance-essay-topics/

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IvyPanda . "87 Harlem Renaissance Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." January 25, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/harlem-renaissance-essay-topics/.

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Harlem Was No Longer the Same After This Dinner Party

Harlem was synonymous with the arts. But what I didn’t know was how that had come to be.

By Veronica Chambers

This article is also a weekly newsletter. Sign up for Race/Related here .

As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, Harlem always seemed like a magical place. I learned about the Studio Museum in Harlem and artists like Alma Thomas and Romare Bearden. Langston Hughes’s poems were featured on posters in my local library, and everybody knew Duke Ellington because of his signature tune, “Take the A Train,” written by Billy Strayhorn. There were the Apollo Theater, where Ella Fitzgerald first sang, and dance troupes like the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Dance Theater of Harlem. Harlem was synonymous with the arts. But what I didn’t know was how that had come to be.

My senior thesis in college was on the dinner party that launched the Harlem Renaissance. It was amazing to me that a group of creative giants had prioritized art to serve as a case study in marrying talent to opportunity. The people I knew often said that art could make a difference, but the Harlem Renaissance showed me it was truly possible. In the early 1920s, Black Americans were excluded from many of the fields in which other Americans were building bases of power and generational wealth: from the unions to Wall Street and Congress. But as the historian David Levering Lewis noted, “no exclusionary rules had been laid down regarding a place in the arts. Here was a small crack in the wall of racism, a fissure that was worth trying to widen.”

So on March 21, 1924, two Black academics, Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson, invited more than 100 guests to the Civic Club in Manhattan with a grand plan to give young Black artists a shot at the kinds of opportunities they’d rarely had before: book deals with major publishing houses, their artwork on display in museums, their songs on radio and Broadway rotation. The party was, as we wrote about it recently in the Times , a major success. In the decade afterward, more than 40 major works by Black Americans were published. Levering Lewis wrote in When Harlem was in Vogue that no more than five Black American writers published significant books between 1908 and 1923.

What we know now, and what we’ll keep exploring in this series about the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance , is how that kind of creativity and hope can take on an astonishing velocity. From the inimitable voice of the writer Zora Neale Hurston and the painted murals of Aaron Douglas to the song stylings of Louis Armstrong, Harlem was forever changed after the Civic Club dinner. Wallace Thurman, a poet who lived in Harlem during the Renaissance, noted that the neighborhood had become “almost a Negro Greenwich Village. Every other person you meet is writing a novel, a poem or a drama.”

It’s not too hard to draw a line between the work that was begun then to the work that exists now: the poetry of Mahogany L. Browne and Kwame Alexander, the Black superheroes imagined by Eve L. Ewing and Malcolm Spellman, or the novels by Colson Whitehead, Edwidge Danticat and James McBride. The Harlem Renaissance reshaped the landscape of American culture, and for Black artists around the globe the aperture of what was possible widened.

Invite your friends. Invite someone to subscribe to the Race/Related newsletter. Or email your thoughts and suggestions to [email protected] .

Veronica Chambers is the editor of Narrative Projects, a team dedicated to starting up multi-layered series and packages at The Times. More about Veronica Chambers

A New Light on the Harlem Renaissance

A century after it burst on the scene in new york city, the first african american modernist movement continues to have an impact in the american cultural imagination..

The Dinner Party:  When Charles Johnson and Alain Locke thought that a celebration for Jessie Fauset’s book “There Is Confusion” could serve a larger  purpose, the Harlem Renaissance was born .

A Period of Survival:  During the Harlem Renaissance, some Black people hosted rent parties , celebrations with an undercurrent of desperation in the face of racism and discrimination.

An Ambitious Show:  A new MoMA exhibition, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” aims to shift our view  of the time when Harlem flourished as a creative capital. It gets it right, our critic writes .

An Enduring Legacy: We asked six artists to share their thoughts on the contributions  that the Harlem Renaissance artists made to history

Crafting a New Life: At the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance, Augusta Savage fought racism to earn acclaim as a sculptor. The path she forged is also her legacy .