Bettmann / Corbis
FEBRUARY 17, 2014
#1: The Harlem Renaissance
In the 1920s, artists and writers in “the capital of black America” produced an explosion of
http://magazines.scholastic.com/news/2014/02/The-Harlem-Renaissance
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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 kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
DUKE ELLINGTON (AT PIANO) WAS ONE OF AMERICA'S MOST FAMOUS COMPOSERS