Harlem Renaissance
A renewal and flourishing of the black literary and musical culture during the years after
WWI in the Harlem section of NYC. This cultural movement celebrated black traditions,
voice, and everyday experience. Also called the Black Renaissance, New Negro
Movement. Although it was centered in the Harlem, many French-speaking black writers
from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the
Harlem Renaissance.
Historians disagree as to when the Harlem Renaissance began and ended. The Harlem
Renaissance is unofficially recognized to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or
mid 1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of
Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance,
was placed between 1924 (the year that Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a
party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance) and 1929 (the
year of the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression).
There would be no uniting form singularly characterizing the art that emerged out of the
Harlem Renaissance. Rather, it encompassed a wide variety of cultural elements and
styles, including a Pan-Africanist perspective, "high-culture" and "low-culture" or "lowlife," from the traditional form of music to the blues and jazz, traditional and new
experimental forms in literature such as modernism and the new form of jazz poetry. This
duality meant that numerous African-American artists came into conflict with
conservatives in the black intelligentsia, who took issue with certain depictions of black
life.
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Dorothy
West, and WEB Du Bois were some of the writers associated with the movement.
The music of the time: The Apollo Theatre (Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald), Jazz (Duke
Ellington), Blues/Spirituals helped shape the voice and sound of the literary movement.
African-American authors and poets, artists, musicians, and movie stars found greater
freedom of expression and greater support from white sponsors during the Harlem
Renaissance than had previously existed.
The progress—both symbolic and real—during this period, became a point of
reference from which the African-American community gained a spirit of selfdetermination that provided a growing sense of both Black urbanity and Black
militancy as well as a foundation for the community to build upon for the Civil
Rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s.