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“Harlem is indeed the great Mecca for the sight-seer; the pleasure seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious and

the talented of the whole Negro world."

- Alain Locke

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Harlem RenaissanceWhat was it?

Why?

Foundation

Writers

Visual Artists

The Musical Element

The Legacy

Why did it end?

Themes

What was it?

The Harlem Renaissance was a period of time in the early 20th century, particularly the 1920s, when African American thought and culture was redefined. African heritage and roots were embraced by the movement’s young writers, artists and musicians, who found in Harlem a place to express themselves. The movement altered not only African American culture, but American culture as a whole.

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Why?

Migration World War I Ends

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Migration

African Americans moved north in large numbers to:

1. Find better education for their children

2. Look for better employment opportunities

3. Escape the institutionalized racism

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Why?

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World War I ends

Optimism

Return to focus on issues at home

New emphasis on community building among African Americans in the North

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Foundation

3 Books

Harlem Shadows

Cane

There is Confusion

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Harlem ShadowsHarlem Shadows

- Written by Claude McKay- A collection of seventy-four poems- Published in 1922

Claude McKay

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Foundation

If We Must Die

IF we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

CaneCane

• Written by Jean Toomer, 1923

• Book of stories, poems and drawings

• Depictions of African American lives and experiences in a variety of settings

Foundation

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ExcerptUp from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the prewar cotton factory, dusk came. Up from the dusk the full moon came. Glowing like a fired pine-knot, it illumined the great door and soft showered the Negro shanties aligned along the single street of factory town. The full moon in the great door was an omen. Negro women improvised songs against its spell.

There is Confusion

• Written by Jessie Redmon Fauset in 1924 (probably the first novel by a woman during Harlem Renaissance)

• Plot focuses on a light-skinned African American who temporarily passes for a white person

FoundationTake me home

The Complex of color...every colored man feels it sooner or later. It gets in the way of his dreams, of his education, of his marriage, of the rearing of his children.

Themes

- 20th century African American experience

- Racial Pride

(though these themes existed, the work was so varied it is hard to identify themes that were consistent throughout the entire movement)

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Writers• Novelists• Poets

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Novelists

Claude McKay

Zora Neale Hurston

Alain Locke

WritersTake me home

Zora Neale Hurston• Lived in first “incorporated” black

community in Eatonville, Florida• Moved to Harlem in 1925• Graduated from Columbia University in

1928• Most famous book, Their Eyes Were

Watching God was published in 1937.• Her work focused on blacks living in

rural Southern communities in the early 1800s

• She never addressed white racism in her writing. She focused instead on her belief that black Americans could attain sovereignty from the racism that existed in American society.

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“Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at de sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.”

Read an excerpt from How it Feels to Be A Colored Me

Excerpt of"How it Feels to be Colored Me”by Zora Neale Hurston

But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Get set!"; and the generation before said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.

The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

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Alain Locke• In many ways, was a sort of father

figure of the Harlem Renaissance, because without his support many black artists during this era would not have been successful

• Was the first African American Rhodes Scholar

• He had a vision that young black artists and writers should use African roots as the basis of their art and culture

• He was editor of “The New Negro” a very popular anthology magazine

Click the picture to the left to read the March 1925 edition of The New Negro. It was devoted solely to discussion of Harlem and its culture. Many people have called it the manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Countee CullenListen to Countee

Cullen read Heritage• Adopted by a pioneer black activist

minister and his wife• Well-educated (earned his Masters in

English and French from Harvard)• Wrote “white” poetry and often

focused on racial concerns• Won more major literary awards

than any other black writer of the 1920s

• April 9, 1928, he married Yolande Du Bois (they divorced in 1930)

• Wanted to be known as a poet

NovelistsTake me home

If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be a POET and not NEGRO POET. This is what has hindered the development of artists among us. Their one note has been the concern with their race. That is all very well, none of us can get away from it. I cannot at times. You will see it in my verse. The consciousness of this is to poignant at times. I cannot escape it. But what I mean is this: I shall not write of negro subjects for the purpose of propaganda. That is not what a poet is concerned with. Of course, when the emotion rising out of the fact that I am a negro is strong, I express it. But that is another matter.

Countee Cullen (Brooklyn Eagle, 10 Feb. 1924)

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Claude McKay

• Was born in Jamaica on September 15, 1889

• 1920, published Spring in New Hampshire in England

• Many of the poems from Spring in New Hampshire were used in his Harlem Shadows (published 1922, in New York)

• Harlem Shadows showcased a new African American voice. It was bold and angry. It discussed the racial prejudices that McKay experienced when he arrived in America.

NovelistsTake me home Foundation

Poets• Langston Hughes

• Countee Cullen

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Langston Hughes

• Known as the “Poet Laureate of Harlem”

• One of the first African Americans to support himself solely as a writer

• Blended the sounds of jazz into his poetry

• Emphasized lower-class Black life• Focused on the need for artistic

independence and racial pride

PoetsTake me home

Play The Negro Speaks of Rivers

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

By Langston Hughes

I've known rivers:I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

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Visual Artists

• Aaron Douglass• Palmer Hayden• James Vanderzee

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Aaron Douglass• Often called the “Father of

African American Art,” Douglass used traditional African style in his art

• He was supported by W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke when he first arrived in Harlem from Kansas

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God’s Trombone

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Palmer Hayden

• Extremely talented painter

• Early in his career he focused mostly on landscapes

• In 1927, he moved to Paris and grew greatly as an artist

• In 1932, he returned to the U.S., and changed his focus to small town African Americans

• He has been criticized for perpetuating stereotypes of African American physical features

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View one of Hayden’s paintings

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James Vanderzee

• His photographs of the people and places of Harlem are his most famous works.

• His pictures reflected pride, dignity, and idealism.

• He photographed many famous Harlem Renaissance artists.

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Click here to see some of Vanderzee’s photos

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Musical Element

Duke Ellington

Bessie Smith Take me home

There is some question about whether or not jazz was part of the Harlem Renaissance. Regardless of whether or not it was, it undoubtedly influenced and was influenced by the work of Harlem Renaissance writers and artists.

Duke Ellington

Click here to listen to East St. Louis Toodle-oo (1926)

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• One of the most famous names in Jazz

• Altered the sound of jazz by blending the genre with African and Latin musical elements

• During the Harlem Renaissance, he and his band played at the hip Cotton Club, which only allowed white patrons.

• During the late 1920s, he was everywhere: touring, on Broadway, and in the movies

Bessie Smith• The most successful black

performing artist of her time

• Recorded with the biggest names in music at the time.

• Was over six feet tall and weighed more than 200 pounds.

• Starred in St. Louis Blues (1929)

• Died in a car accident in 1936 Musical Element

Take me homeWatch Bessie Smith sing St. Louis Blues

Why did it end?

– Natural end, it had run its course– Great Depression

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Great Depression

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•European Americans became less

accepting of African American

art and culture

•Economic problems

•Changes optimism for African

American

Legacy and Influences

• It brought African American writers and artists to white audiences.

• The themes and ideas expressed inspired future African American authors:

Ralph EllisonRichard WrightToni MorrisonAlice Walker

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