Aim: How did the Harlem Renaissance reflect the ideals of the 1920s?
Vocab (artists + previous lesson vocab)
Essential Questions:
Use Qs on the Documents at each station to guide you, think about the Aim and the big essay question for your exam.

 Bessie Smith - “Down Hearted Blues”
 Mamie Smith – “You Can’t Keep A Good Man Down”
 Furry Lewis – “Kassie Jones Part I (1927)
 Ethel Waters – “Shake That Thing”
 Duke Ellington – “East St. Louis Toodle-oo”
 Louie Armstrong – any song!

The First World War created a labor shortage in the
United States by ending the mass immigration of
Europeans workers who provided much of the labor to power American industry.
Meanwhile, industrialists (big business men) were making money from the war, because America's closest allies, Great Britain and France, relied heavily upon the
United States for supplies.
To end the labor shortage, the industrialists encouraged white women, black men and women, and Mexicans to enter industrial occupations that they had been barred from before the war.

Harlem Renaissance and Migration
“The Harlem Renaissance – a complex set of political, cultural, and artistic movements involving a variety of blacks…and black organizations…that centered mostly in New York in the 1920s and early 1920s – was built not only on the fact, but the significance, of black migration in the United States. So important had this migration become that it changed the way black people saw themselves and their future as Americans. The significance of this migration had even penetrated white popular culture; In 1926, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, two white men, started a radio program called Sam N Henry about two black men who had left the rural South to seek a better life in a northern city. By 1929, the show became
Amos N Andy, one of the most popular radio programs of all time.”
- Gerald Early, Professor of English and Afro-American Studies at Washington
University in St. Louis, Missouri
Posing in blackface for a Chicago Daily News feature in 1929, Freeman Gosden and Richard Correll were the voices behind
Amos ‘n’ Andy, the most popular program on radio. The nightly radio skits helped change understandings of American racial geography while disseminating (spreading) powerful images of black southerners in the big cities of the North. (Chicago Historical
Society)

Due to the South's losing so much labor, the crops were left to dry and spoil.

Another cause was lynching (hanging). It was found that where there had been a lynching, the people who were reluctant (refusing) to leave at first left immediately after this.

In every town African Americans were leaving by the hundreds to go North and enter into Northern industry (business).

They left the South in large numbers and they arrived in the North in large numbers.

The Migration of the African Americans, Panel no. 1,
1940-1941

The African Americans were given free passage on the railroads which was paid back by Northern industry. It was an agreement that the people brought North on these railroads were to pay back their passage after they had received jobs.

Many men stayed behind until they could bring their families North.

After arriving North the African Americans had better housing conditions than they had in the south, but they still weren’t great.

As well as finding better housing conditions in the
North, the migrants found very poor housing conditions in the North.
They were forced into overcrowded and dilapidated (rundown) tenement houses.

In many cities in the North where the African
Americans had been overcrowded in their own living quarters they attempted to spread out.
This resulted in many of the race riots and the bombing of African
Americans homes.

They arrived in Pittsburgh, one of the great industrial centers of the North, in large numbers.

The African Americans that had been brought
North worked in large numbers in one of the principal industries, which was steel.

The African Americans being suddenly moved from out of doors and cramped into urban life, contracted a great deal of tuberculosis. Because of this the death rate was very high.

The African Americans who had been North for quite some time met their fellowmen with disgust and judged the newly arrived blacks.

In the North the
African Americans had freedom to vote.

People who had not yet come North received letters from their relatives telling them of the better conditions that existed in the
North.

The female worker was also one of the last groups to leave the South.

“The Harlem Renaissance was one of celebration of black pride and culture.
It was a time where African Americans can express themselves freely and contribute to society. Many African Americans used their artwork, poetry and music to show the wonderful contributions of the African American
community.” - Joy Hakim. Historian
“We must develop our community for not only the benefits of African
Americans, but also to prove to the whites in America that we will no longer take their unfair treatment and discrimination. We refuse to follow the racist and segregationist laws in our own community and white America will not stop us from moving ahead.”
-Marcus Garvey Speaks About the Harlem Renaissance (1927)