PROSPERITY,
DEPRESSION, & THE
NEW DEAL
American History II - Unit 4
Ms. Brown
Review
• How did the radio change life in the 1920s?
• Quicker distribution of news coverage, entertainment, new forms of
advertising, shared American experience
• What were some common characteristics of flappers in
the 1920s?
• Distinct fashion – short hair, waist-less dresses
• Assertive and independent
• What double standard did women face in the 1920s?
• Women were encouraged to be sexy and fashionable but were
criticized by society, while men enjoyed sexual freedom and looser
social standards without criticism.
• While many women entered the workforce in WWI and
the 1920s, what types of challenges did women face?
• Few managerial jobs, earned less $ than men for same work
4.3 – HARLEM
RENAISSANCE
The Great Migration
• 1910-1930 - The Great
Migration
• hundreds of thousands of blacks left
the rural South/west for urban
northern cities in search of new jobs
• end of 1920s - over 40% of African
Americans lived in cities
• However, northern cities were
not very receptive to the
massive increase black
residents each year →
increased race riots and racial
violence
“Some said goodbye
cheerfully… others fearfully,
with terrors of unknown
dangers in their mouths…
others in their eagerness for
distance and said nothing.
The daybreak found them
gone. The wind said North.”
- Zora Neale Hurston
African American Goals
• National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP)
• founded in 1909, WEB Du Bois
• The Crisis - national magazine
• 1920s - push for civil rights gains
through legislative means - James
Weldon Johnson (poet, lawyer,
NAACP executive secretary)
pushed for antilynching laws, but
Congress passed none
• NAACP continued to organize against
lynchings, and slowly, they decreased to
an extent
Marcus Garvey
• Many blacks supported slow and
difficult legal change, but also
faced daily threats of violence and
discrimination
• Marcus Garvey (Jamaican
immigrant) believed blacks should
build a separate society
• 1914 - founded the Universal Negro
Improvement Association, moved to
NYC 1918 to recruit members
• mid-1920s - UNIA claimed 1 million
followers, appealed to black pride
Marcus Garvey
• Encouraged followers to return
to Africa, help native people
there throw off white colonial
oppressors, and build
independent black nations
• appealed to African Americans and
blacks in the Caribbean and Africa
• support declined in the mid-1920s
when Garvey was convicted of mail
fraud and jailed
• Garvey left a legacy of newly
awakened black pride, economic
independence, and interest in
African heritage
The Harlem Renaissance
• a literary and artistic
movement in the 1920s
celebrating African-American
culture
• Many blacks migrated to
Harlem (a neighboorhood in
NYC)
• residents from the South, Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and Haiti
• “Black capital of America”
• suffered from overcrowding,
unemployment, and poverty → in
part the inspiration for the Harlem
Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance
• 1920s
• led by well-educated, middle-class, blacks
• expressed a new pride in the African American experience
• celebrated black heritage, emphasized the trials of being
black in a white world
African American Writers
Writer
Background
Known for...
Claude
McKay
novelist and
poet,
Jamaican
immigrant,
militant
Songs of Jamaica, “The Harlem Dancer”
expressed the pain of life in black ghettos and in a
white-dominated society
encouraged blacks to resist
prejudice/discrimination
Langston
Hughes
poet, from
Missouri
I, Too , Dream Deferred (Harlem), Various poems,
short stories
described difficulties for working-class blacks
poetry read to the tempo of jazz and blues music
Zora Neale
Hurston
novelist and
poet, from
Florida,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
potrayed the lives of unschooled, poor Southern
blacks
celebrated the “common person’s art form” - ways
blacks developed to survive slavery and the Jim
Crow South
African American Performers
Performer
Background
Known for...
Paul
Robeson
actor, son of a
one-time slave
acclaimed performance in Shakespeare’s Othello
in London and NYC
Louis
Armstrong
trumpet player,
lived in New
Orleans and NYC
astounding sense of rhythm and ability to
improvise
became the most important and influential
musician in the history of jazz
helped popularize “scat”- improvised jazz singing
using sounds instead of words
Edward
“Duke”
Ellington
jazz pianist and
composer, played
at NYC’s Cotton
Club
played at the famous NYC Cotton Club
1920-30s - won fame as a top American
composer
Bessie
Smith
female blues
singer
outstanding 1920s vocalist
1927 - highest paid black artist in the world
“When the Negro was in Vogue”
• Read the excerpt from Langston Hughes’ autobiography.
DO NOT answer the questions on the sheet. DO answer
the questions below:
1. Why did Hughes and other Harlemites prefer not to
visit the Cotton Club and Lennox Ave?
2. How do you think whites viewed life in Harlem for
African Americans?
3. Do you believe the white perspective aligned with
actual life in Harlem in the 1920s?
4. What is ironic about the situations Hughes describes in
the 2nd half of the excerpt?
5. What does Hughes mean when he states: “it was the
period when the Negro was in vogue.”