The Harlem Renaissance

Winold Reiss

. Definition of Renaissance:

A rebirth, reflowering of the arts

Harlem: a neighborhood of New York City

Movers & Shakers

• Winold Reiss created this image of the writer Langston Hughes in 1927, during the period called the Harlem Renaissance, when the creative talents of African American's came together and blossomed. The Harlem Renaissance started at the end of World War I and continued in the middle of the 1930's.

Jazz

Blues is a type of music that deals with hardships of life and love. This type of music was typically self-accompanied by the singer on a harmonica or a guitar. Singers often worked with jazz bands or pianists. It paved the way for boogie-woogie music which later became known as rhythm and blues. Jazz and Blues were originally played in the South but rapidly began spreading to the North. Along with Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton helped pave the way for Duke Ellington, who was a talented band leader and musician.

Duke Ellington

• Band leader Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was a musical genius. A composer of over one thousand works and a performer, Ellington traveled all over the world with his band. They were also featured in motion pictures made by several studios.

Women Jazz ArtistsAfrican-American women

were also a part of this movement. Talented singers such as Billie Holiday, Josephine Baker and Bessie Smith took their place in the Jazz field and struggled with the barriers that men had already set up. Although the Harlem Renaissance ended in the 1930s, Jazz and Blues continued to be a part of music history.

• http://www.tesd.k12.pa.us/stoga/dept/Barry/Barry4/music/Harlem%20Renaissance%20Music%20page.htm

Billie Holiday, born in 1915, was the definitive voice of jazz singing from the late 1930s through the 1940s. Like her predecessor Bessie Smith, she excelled in taking any old tune and transforming it into a major human statement. Of her own songs, the most famous are "Billie's Blues" (1936) and "God Bless' the Child That's Got His Own."                                                                      

List of musical artists

• Louie Armstrong• Dizzie Gilespie• W.C. Handy • John Coltrain• Marian Anderson• Scott Joplin

Louie Armstrong

The Hub of Excitement

• Harlem's millionairess, Alelia Walker opened the first floor of her home as a gallery, known as “The Dark Tower.”

• Wallace Thurman, Leigh Whipper, Sonoma Tally, Augusta Savage, Eric Waldron, among others, basked in the sunshine of public appreciation. Langston Hughes painted the walls with his poetry.

• She helped her mother found The Mme. C. J. Walker Mfg. Co. in 1905, then opened its New York office and beauty salon in 1913. Upon Madam Walker's death in 1919, A'Lelia Walker became president of the company.

http://www.jocelync.com/wom04.html

Alelia underwrote the expenses of these artists, opening the Dark Tower to Renaissance figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Bruce Nugent, and  Aaron Douglas who gathered for art exhibits and poetry readings. 

Financial reversals at the Walker Company forced the closing of the “Dark Tower” in October 1928.  She wrote afterwards, “Having no talent or gift, but a love and keen appreciation for art, The Dark Tower was my contribution.”  

Alelia

Female Playwrite

ten plays written by Hurston (1891-1960), author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until they were recently rediscovered and published in 1997.

Historical Fiction: Their Eyes were watching God, available in La Cima Library

http://www.broward.org/library/harlemrenaissancecat07.htm

Writers such as Claude Mc Kay and Marcus Garvey quickly became the primary proponents of Pan-African thought.

The Harlem Renaissance began as a movement to celebrate the African American experience in the United States while confronting the social ills of society created by racial biasness.

America at the turn of the century was awash with progressivism. The Progressive Movement was a response to the growing awareness of the many ills of American society. Progressivism was rooted in the belief that man was capable of improving the lives of all society's members.

Writers

lain Leroy Locke, (1886 -1954) a Harvard graduate (graduating magna cum laude in 1907) and the first African American to be named a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, advanced the theory of "cultural pluralism," which values the uniqueness of different styles and values available within a democratic society.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940) is impressed upon African American consciousness who encouraged people of African descent to return to Africa. These sentiments and the impact of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the Black Star Line infected much of the enhanced racial consciousness of the period.

Intellectual Contributions

Sterling Brown-Writer

• Sterling A. Brown, an influential writer of period, suggests that the black intelligentsia consisted of African-American writers, poets, philosophers, historians, and artists whose expertise conveyed five central themes: 

• 1. Africa as a source of race pride,2. Black American heroes3. Racial political propaganda,4. The "Black folk" tradition, and5. Candid self-revelation and disclosure

The Cotton ClubThe Cotton Club was a famous night club in New York City that operated during Prohibition. While the club featured many of the greatest African American entertainers of the era, such as Duke Ellington,Count Basie, Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong,Nat King Cole,Billie Holiday, and Ethel Waters, it generally denied admission to blacks.

LinksLibrary of Congress: http://search.loc.gov:8765/query.html?bqwidth=100%25&aqbkgrd=%23ffffff&locqclass=query&imo=0&qt=+harlem+renaissance&search_button=SEARCH http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/harlem/harlem.html Zora Neale Hurston Chronology Billy Holiday: http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/jazz/holliday_1 Lesson Planhttp://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/features/songs_times/flash.html African american history site!!http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/features/civilrights/flash.html

http://www.ephemerapress.com/walk-harlem.html

ragtime

• http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/ragtime/ragtime-home.html home page. Black contributions

• http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200035798/default.html sound bites & explanation

Other writers and poets included:

• Gwendolyn Bennett, Otto Leland Bohannon, Marita Bonner, Arna Bontemps, William Brathwaite, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Sterling A. Brown, Countee Cullen, Carrie Williams Clifford, Anita Scott Coleman, James D. Corrothers, Waring Cuney,  Marion Vera Cuthbert, Clarissa M. Scott Delany, Wilfrid A. Domingo, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Aloise Barbour Epperson, Rudolph Fisher, Arthur Huff Fauset, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimke, Florence Marion Harmon, Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson,  Helene Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Vernon Loggins, Richard Bruce Nugent, Mary White Ovington, Esther Popel, Florence Ruffin Ridley, Anne Spencer, Gertrude Schalk, George Samuel Schuyler, Mary Church Terrell, Wallace Thurman, Eloise Bibb Thompson, Jean Toomer, Eric Walrond, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Dorothy West, Walter White, Lucian B. Watkins and Carter G. Woodson

Important Playwrights

Important playwrights, dramatists and actors of the period included:

• Eulalie Spence, Randolph Edmonds, Charles Gilpin, Florence Mills, Paul Robeson, Willis Richardson, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, Angelina W. Grimke,  Alain Locke, Alvira Hazzard, Regina Anderson (Ursula or Ursala Trelling)

Star musicians/dancers and entertainers included:

• Josephine Baker, Marion Anderson, Bennie Carter, Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, Ferdinand "Jellyroll Morton" Lamothe, William Henry "Chick" Webb, Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, William "Count" Basie, Noble Sissle , Eubie Blake, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Thomas Andrew Dorsey, James Reese Europe, W. C. Handy, James Fletcher Henderson, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Paul Robeson, Cab Calloway, Hall Johnson and Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters, Flournoy "F.E." Miller, Aubry Lyle, Adelaide Hall, Ada Ward, Lester Young, Arthur "Happy" Rhones

Outstanding visual artists of the period included:• William H. Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, Palmer Hayden. Aaron

Douglas, Malvin Gray Johnson, Laura Wheeler Waring, Richmond Barthé, Sargent Claude Johnson, Augusta Savage, James Lesesne Wells, Albert Alexander Smith, James Van Der Zee, Archibald J. Motley, Hale Woodruff and Jacob Lawrence.