The Harlem
Renaissance
1920’s & 1930’s

Cultural Times
• Development of the African
American middle class
• WWI created jobs in the North
• Development of African
American literature, art, and music

Attitude of the
Times
• Artistic expression
• Racial pride
• Social and political equality
• Times led to great appreciation and awareness of African
American culture

Music and Art
• Means of expressing:
– African roots
– modern struggles
– new freedoms

Music
• Jazz and Blues
– Louis Armstrong
– Duke Ellington

The Banjo Lesson
Henry Ossawa Tanner

Jeunesse
Palmer Hayden

Chain Gang
William H. Johnson

Literature
• Many held to cultural language roots
– Gullah
• Hopes to challenge racial prejudices
• Freedom to express struggles
• Motivation to overcome obstacles

Harlem
• Housing executives planned to create neighborhoods in
Harlem designed specifically for white workers who wanted to commute into the city.

Harlem, cont.
• Developers grew overambitious, however, and housing grew more rapidly than the transportation necessary to bring residents into the downtown area. The once exclusive district was abandoned by the white middle-class.
Harlem landlords began renting to black tenants.
• .

• As a result, African-Americans began moving to Harlem en masse; between 1900 and 1920 the number of blacks in the New
York City neighborhood doubled.

Claude McKay
• Originally from Jamaica
• Began writing at age of 10
• Famous journalist

McKay’s Works
• America
• If We Must Die
• Enslaved

Countee Cullen
• Grew up in NYC and Baltimore
• Adopted by powerful minister
• Became influential through his writing
– Influenced
English
Romantics

Cullen’s Works
• Tableau
• Incident

Paul Lawrence
Dunbar
• Born to slave parents in KY
• One of first recognized
Af.Am. poets
• Befriended Douglass in
Chicago

Dunbar’s Works
• The Lesson
• Sympathy
• We Wear the Mask

Arna Bontemps
• Friend of Langston
Hughes
• Born of Creole parents
• Nashville connection!
Bontemps worked for many years as the librarian at Fisk.

Bontemps’ Works
God Sends Sunday (1931)
Black Thunder (1936 —historical novel)
Personals (3rd ed., 1973 collection of poetry)
The Harlem Renaissance
Remembered (1972)

Langston Hughes
• Worked hard to pay for college
• Ambitious with poetry
• Influenced by
Walt Whitman
• Wrote for musical audience

Hughes’ Works
• Weary Blues
• Dream Deferred
• I, Too
• Mother to Son

Presentations
Your assignment for this unit:
– Create a handout on one poem from the packet.
– Handout includes your poem
(including author), and a brief explication of the poem.
– You will do a formal reading of your poem and then briefly summarize your poetic analysis.