The Harlem Renaissance
"Harlem is indeed the great Mecca for the
sight-seer; the pleasure seeker, the curious,
the adventurous, the enterprising, the
ambitious and the talented of the whole
Negro world.” James Weldon Johnson
Harlem

Small groups of blacks lived in Harlem as
early as 1880, especially in the area around
125th Street and "Negro tenements" on West
130th Street. The mass migration of blacks
into the area began in 1904, thanks to the
leadership of a black real estate entrepreneur
named Philip Payton, Jr. His company, the
Afro-American Realty Company, was almost
single-handedly responsible.
Harlem Continued

n the 1920’s, Harlem was the center of a
flowering of African American Culture that
became known as the Harlem Renaissance.
It was a time of amazing artistic production,
but ironically, many blacks were excluded
from viewing what they were creating. Many
jazz venues, like Small's Paradise and the
Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington played,
were restricted to whites only.
Black Identity
Booker T. Washington Up From Slavery
(1901)
 W.E.B. Dubois
 Jesse Fauset
 NAACP--1910
 The Brownie Book
 The Crisis

Black Identity

Marcus Garvey-- Universal Negro
Improvement Association
 Back To Africa movement
 "One ever feels his two-ness - an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled stirrings: two warring ideals in
one dark body, whose dogged strength alone
keeps it from being torn asunder.” W.E.B.
Dubois, in The Souls of Black Folks (1903)
The New Negro Movement

Name first given to the Harlem Renaissance
by Alain Lock
"Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for
group expression and self-determination.”
Alain Locke, in The New Negro (1925)
Themes
Racial Pride
 Equal Rights
 African Roots
 “Twoness”
 Self-Determination

Major Figures
･Langston Hughes Not Without Laughter
(1930)･
 Zora Neale Hurston Jonah's Gourd Vine
(1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937)･
 Nella Larsen Quicksand (1928), Passing
(1929)･
 Claude McKay Home to Harlem (1927),
Banjo (1929), Gingertown (1931), Banana
Bottom (1933)

Major Figures Continued
･Langston Hughes, poet
 Countee Cullen, poet
 James Weldon Johnson, poet
 Arna Bontemps, poet
 Paul Robeson, actor and singer
 Josephine Baker, actor and singer
