The Harlem Renaissance
In the 1920s, artists and writers in “the capital of black
America” produced an explosion of creativity in music and
culture
BY BRYAN BROWN | FOR JUNIOR SCHOLASTIC
Decades later, poet Langston Hughes could still remember the
excitement. Just 19, he was in New York City, riding uptown on the
subway, and finally getting his first sight of Harlem.
“It was still early morning and people were going to work,”
Hughes wrote in his memoir. “Hundreds of colored* people! I wanted
to shake hands with them, speak to them. . . . Harlem! I stood
there, dropped my bags, and felt happy again.”
In 1921, the young black poet, originally from Missouri, was
soon to be part of one of the most creative periods in U.S.
history. This flowering of African-American writing, music, and art
is called the Harlem Renaissance (a period of rebirth or
revival).
Harlem in the 1920s was like nowhere else on Earth. During World
War I (1914-18), a mass movement called the Great Migration,
an exodus of 6 million blacks from the South to Northern cities
like New York, Chicago, and Detroit (1916-70), began bringing
African-Americans by the tens of thousands from the rural South to
Northern cities. In New York, most of them made their way to upper
Manhattan, where the city’s local blacks were moving to take
advantage of plentiful apartments.
“Negro* Colony Growing,” read a July 1923 headline in The
New York Times. By then, an estimated 150,000 blacks were packed
into Harlem, a city within a city with its own vibrant street life
and culture.
Among the new arrivals was a whole generation of young writers
and thinkers. “Harlem was like a great magnet for the Negro
intellectual, pulling him from everywhere,” Hughes wrote. As a
group, they began writing with a bold new voice about what it meant
to be a black American.
“At the beginning of the 20th century, black people were
believed to have no history or culture,” said scholar Howard Dodson
Jr. For many Americans, the Harlem Renaissance was the first clue
that they were wrong.
Hughes’s voice was one of the most memorable. His response to
the 19th-century poet Walt Whitman’s declaration “I Hear America
Singing” could have spoken for the whole movement. “I, too, sing
America,” he wrote:
I am the darker brother.They send me to eat in the kitchenWhen
company comes,But I laugh,And eat well,And grow strong.
A chorus of poems, novels, and essays poured forth. Florida
native Zora Neale Hurston, who arrived in Harlem with $1.50 in her
purse, would write of the burden of black women in her
novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In 1925, a collection of
works by Harlem’s writers contained a challenge in its very title:
The New Negro.
THE JAZZ AGE
The Harlem Renaissance was just as vibrant in its visual art.
Artists such as Aaron Douglas absorbed the work of modern masters
like Pablo Picasso, then added striking symbols to capture the
African-American experience.
Meanwhile, the sounds of Harlem were spreading across the
country. During the 1920s, the U.S. was celebrating a time of
prosperity called the Jazz Age, named for that combination of
African rhythm and modern harmony developed by American blacks.
Whites ventured to Harlem venues like the Cotton Club—where black
customers were barred—to hear the “hot” music. The club’s
bandleader, Duke Ellington, became one of America’s greatest
popular composers. There and in clubs catering to black customers,
musicians like trumpeter Louis Armstrong set a new, higher bar for
skill and passion in American music.
The Great Depression of the 1930s put a damper on the high
times. But Harlem remained “the capital of black America,” as
historians have called it.
As the 20th century progressed and blacks began to play a fuller
role in American life, many of them remembered the Harlem
Renaissance as the beginning of a great transformation. For
African- Americans, it was a time when black pride was a new,
thrilling sensation—and was even, as one scholar has put it, “the
rebirth of a people.”
