Pivotal publication Survey Graphic helped define the Harlem Renaissance
Our unit on the American Dream begins with an exploration of the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem Renaissance (HR) is the name given to the period from the end of World War I and through the middle of the 1930s Depression, during which a group of talented African-American writers and artists produced literature in four areas: poetry, fiction, drama, and essays. However, HR was more than just a literary movement: it included racial consciousness, “the back to Africa” movement led by Marcus Garvey, racial integration, the explosion of music particularly jazz, spirituals and blues, painting, dramatic revues, and others.
We will be focusing mostly on Langston Hughes as we study the Harlem Renaissance. His work ties in with the movement and our theme of the American Dream. In fact, one his poems is the basis for the title
One of the essays to come out of this time was “Harlem,” by Alain Locke. It was published in the Survey Graphic, a Harlem magazine. In this essay, Locke explains the nature of Harlem and what it means to the black community. Note the comparisons to Europe’s renaissance. The following file is the excerpt that we read in class:
We will be discussing the basics in class, but you can read more on the background of the HR here. When Harlem was built in 1904 it was designed for the upper class white community. It consisted of townhouses, luxury apartment buildings and single-family homes. The community was built on speculation, but it was not marketed properly. To the consternation of the developers, there were no buyers. So the area was opened up to the growing Black population around 1914. In the true sense of the word, Harlem was a ghetto, but in its youth it was a somewhat fashionable section of the city with a large Black, middle class population. Because New York is a port city, Blacks from the south, Africa and the West Indies also found their way to Harlem making it a truly cosmopolitan area.
Harlem grew into a center for Black culture where the creative arts in literature, visual art and music flourished. The members of the Harlem Renaissance were often called “New Negroes” because they had a newly found sense of pride in their heritage, a desire for political and social equality in their work as well as a certain love for their community. From the mid -1920s to the mid -1930s, approximately sixteen Black writers published many volumes of poetry and fiction pieces. They used Harlem’s growing popularity as “a unique opportunity to do what reconstruction after the Civil War had not done: create a positive public image of blacks as thinking, creative human beings in American society.
Harlem also became the center of the NAACP, which was founded in 1909 by W.E.B. Du Bois. At this Marcus Garvey founded time, the Urban League, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, UNIA. The purpose of the UNIA was to promote the well being of African Americans. The UNIA newsletter, The Negro World, targeted a different group from the NAACP organ, The Crisis. Unlike the UNIA, the NAACP was open to all people, colored or otherwise. In fact, there were several different white board members on the committee board (Ramparsad 274).
More importantly, the Harlem Renaissance was significant to American urban history because it brought attention to a city that was growing rapidly due to the increase in black population, and to the problems African Americans faced living in New York City.
The Harlem Renaissance artists with the power and forcefulness of their work insisted that the Black person be accepted as “a collaborator and participant in American civilization” in the words of the educator and critic Alain Locke.
Harlem newspapers and journals such as The Crisis, The Survey Graphic and Opportunity published the work of new and established Black writers. Locke is closely associated with the birth of the Harlem Renaissance. As a professor at Howard University, he helped encourage Black writers to explore themes relating the treatment of Blacks by white writers, feelings of alienation, the search for a true home, and the criteria by which African-American writing was evaluated and appreciated (Reuben 2). Also encouraged by the NAACP, many writers “created a blatant social protest trying to break the color barrier by shouting directly into the faces of hatred and unfairness” (Rosenblatt 91). To encourage and support the intellectually gifted young people, the journals sponsored literary contests that encouraged creative production and rewarded it with cash prizes and social introductions to the top writers of the time.
The Harlem Renaissance changed American culture, in general. Because the Harlem Renaissance appealed to a mixed audience, including the white book-buying market, African-American literature gained popularity. Although African-American publications like The Crisis and Opportunity published the work of their own people, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance relied primarily on white publishing houses and white-owned magazines. A chief aim of the Harlem Renaissance was “to push open the door to mainstream white periodicals and publishers” (Africana). There were a number of individuals who deeply disapproved of patronage by wealthy white patrons. Historian, Irvin Huggins, denounced the writers of the Harlem Renaissance “because the intellectuals who defined it became mimics of whites, wearing clothes and using manners of sophisticated whites, earning for themselves reputations as [uppity] from the very people they were supposed to be championing” (Bascom 13). In addition, W.E.B. DuBois was critical of works such as Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), for he thought it appealed to the demands of white readers and publishers.
Zora Neale Hurston, who, for a time, was part of the Harlem Renaissance inner circle, also sustained a seriously battered ego at the hand of her critics. Richard Wright, agreed with critics like Irvin Huggins. Wright criticized Hurston because her work lacked the anger that is so characteristic of his own work. He thought that her little stories were a shameful attempt to appeal to a white audience( Washington xvii).
Source: http://www.chatham.edu/PTI/Twenties/Claytor_01.htm[/slider]
