The Harlem Renaissance
Mid 1920s – Mid 1930s
Background/Harlem Renaissance
 The Harlem Renaissance refers to the flourishing of AfricanAmerican culture between the two world wars.
 In this period of cultural awakening, African-American literature,
music, art, theatre, and political thinking were all energized.
 The movement developed from a new pride in blackness, an
interest in African cultural heritage, and an appreciation of the
folkways and creativity of rural and urban blacks.
 The movement has its roots in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black
Folk (1903) and his founding of the magazine The Crisis (1910);
it developed with Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, founded
by the National Urban League (1922) and edited by Charles S.
Johnson.
Harlem Renaissance cont.
 James Weldon Johnson called Harlem “the Negro
capital of the world.”
 However, the movement is sometimes called the
Negro Renaissance as Harlem was just one center of
the movement.
 In 1926, Hughes published “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain,” an essay which provided the Harlem
Renaissance with its manifesto as Hughes called boldly
for both racial pride and artistic independence. “We
younger Negro artists who create now intend to
express our individual dark-skinned selves without
fear or shame.”
Langston Hughes criticized the black
middle-class for ignoring their own
culture in an attempt to appear elite:
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the
bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the
Blues penetrate the closed ears of the
colored near intellectuals until they listen and
perhaps understand. Let Paul Robeson
singing ‘Water Boy,’ and Rudolph Fisher
writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean
Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his
hands, and Aaron Douglas’s drawing strange
black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle
class to turn from their white, respectable,
ordinary books and papers to catch a
glimmer of their own beauty.
Note to Stafford - self:
Pause for Paul Robeson
 (but
don’t embed it in the video, because
it will not work with the override)
Aaron Douglas, 1898 - 1979
Aaron Douglas, 1898 - 1979
“Douglas combined angular Cubist
rhythms and seductive Art Deco
dynamism with traditional African and
African American imagery.”
Harlem Renaissance: The Movement
 Poets like Claude MacKay, Countee Cullen, and
Hughes reacted against the erudite, inaccessible
poetry of Modernists and wrote more accessible
poems. Hughes said that a poem “should be
direct, comprehensible, and the epitome of
simplicity.”
 The poetry of the Harlem Renaissance shuns
sentimentality, didacticism, stilted diction, and
romantic escape. The poets experiment with
black speech patterns, verse forms, and rhythms,
often inspired by jazz and the blues.
Harlem Renaissance Continued
Music was central to the flowering of the
Harlem Renaissance. Jazz clubs such as the
Harlem Casino, the Sugar Cane Club, and the
Cotton Club entertained both black and white
patrons. Harlem was home to Duke Ellington
and Fats Waller.
Whites comprised a substantial part of the
audience. Whites were attracted to what they
saw as the exotic in black life and black arts.
Jazz and Blues
During the Harlem Renaissance, blues and
jazz gained in popularity with AfricanAmerican and white audiences.
The blues is a music that originated in the
Deep South. Descended from AfricanAmerican spirituals and work songs, the
blues reflects the hardships of life and love
in its lyrics. However, the blues can be
humorous as well.
The Major Literary Players in
The Harlem Renaissance
 Writers central to the Harlem Renaissance include Jean Toomer,
Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and James
Weldon Johnson.
 Toomer’s master work is Cane, which combined poetry and
fiction in its depiction of African-American life.
 In their poems, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen condemned
bigotry and racial injustice in often explosive language.
 Zora Neale Hurston developed fiction and theater based on her
personal experience, her anthropological fieldwork, AfricanAmerican folklore, and Western mythology.
 However, at the center of the movement was Langston Hughes.
Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967
• Hughes dropped out of Columbia in 1922 and worked various jobs
before working as a seaman and as a newspaper correspondent and
columnist for the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, and
the New York Post.
 In late 1924, he returned to live with his mother in Washington, D.C.,
where he worked first as an assistant to Carter G. Woodson at the
Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
Dissatisfied with the work and lack of time to write, he quit.
 He then worked briefly as a cook at a fashionable restaurant in France
and as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel. It was there that Hughes
left three of his poems beside the plate of a hotel dinner guest, the
poet Vachel Lindsay, who recognized their merit and helped Hughes
secure their publication.
 Hughes resumed his college studies at Lincoln University in
Pennsylvania and earned his B. A. in 1929.
 After graduation, he settled in Harlem, which he became his primary
home for the rest of his life.
Langston Hughes, cont.
• Hughes was a prolific writer who worked in many genres: poetry,
fiction, nonfiction, drama, musicals, and children’s books. As a
popular newspaper columnist, Hughes created a fictitious Harlem
narrator named Simple.
• His life and travels are richly chronicled in his two volumes of
autobiography, The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder As I Wonder
(1956).
• His first poem was published at age 19, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
in The Crisis, and his final book of poems, The Panther and the Lash:
Poems of Our Times, the year of his death in 1967.
• Deeply interested in developing a black theater, Hughes founded the
Harlem Suitcase Theatre in New York in 1938, the New Negro
Theater in Los Angeles in 1939, and the Skyloft Players in Chicago in
1942.
• His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic
contributions of the Harlem Renaissance. He wanted to tell the
stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture,
including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and
language itself.
“I explain and illuminate the Negro
condition in America. This applies to 90
percent of my work.”
– Langston Hughes