Dawn in Harlem: Exploring the Origins of the
Harlem Renaissance through Image and Text
Carolyn Kyler
The Harlem Renaissance introduced a generation of artists who
sought to re-imagine the “New Negro” as a powerful, creative, and
inspiring figure for a new age. Emphasizing youth, new beginnings,
and a bright future, this reimagining offered a complex, multifaceted
figure who was both political and artistic, calm and revolutionary,
an intellectual and a fighter. Three collections of creative work from
this period showcase both the complexity and the potential of the
New Negro. The Harlem issue of Survey Graphic (1925), The New
Negro: An Interpretation (1925), and Fire!! (1926) represented a
generational shift and a new way of thinking about central questions
of cultural identity, political aspiration, and artistic innovation.
Graphic works are a key element of this thinking, revealing the visual
artists’ connections with Western and African artistic traditions and
amplifying the themes and motifs explored in the written works.
Visual artists made vital contributions to the Harlem Renaissance
movement and to African American culture. The movement gave
new opportunities to already established artists and encouraged the
work of younger artists. Among the most prominent artists were
photographer James Van Der Zee; sculptors Meta Vaux Warrick
Fuller, Augusta Savage, and Richmond Barthé; and painters Aaron
Douglas, Palmer Hayden, and William H. Johnson. These Harlem
Renaissance artists were, according to art historian Mary Schmidt
Campbell, the “first artists to develop a visual vocabulary for black
Americans” (13). That visual vocabulary included several themes
central to Harlem Renaissance literature: the centrality of Harlem
culture and the urban landscape, the legendary figures and ordinary
lives of African American folk culture, the significance of Africa as
the cultural touchstone of the New Negro, and a vision of African
American identity as young, new, and forward-looking.
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Writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance did not work in
isolation from each other. Some artists, like Richard Bruce Nugent
and Gwendolyn Bennett, were both writers and painters, and many
important projects of the era—such as the Harlem issue of Survey
Graphic, The New Negro: An Interpretation, and Fire!!—include
both text and images. The images, by both black artists and by white
artists, like Winold Reiss, illustrate and expand on the meanings of
the texts, providing a concrete and multifaceted vision of Harlem
Renaissance culture and the New Negro.
Dawn of the New Negro
Nowhere is the importance of the graphic image more powerfully
expressed than in Dawn in Harlem, an illustration by the Germanborn artist Winold Reiss that appeared in the Harlem issue of Survey
Graphic. Reiss’ illustration depicts this new era using a series of
intersections: between land and sky, between black and white, and
between past and future—intersections that serve to frame much of
the writing, art, and thinking of the Harlem Renaissance. Dawn in
Harlem combines an urban landscape with natural elements of sun
and sky. Both the urban and natural elements radiate, suggesting a
movement that starts in Harlem, but will have effects well beyond
it. Dawn never stands still—it cascades from one place to the next.
Dawn is a moment poised between past and future, and Reiss invites
us to consider what has come before, a past represented by the
buildings of Harlem. But dawn always looks forward, suggesting
that this landscape will be transformed and that the transformation
will radiate out through space and time.
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Critical Insights
Fig. 1: Winold Reiss, Dawn in Harlem, Survey Graphic (Mar. 1925): 663.
The figure of the New Negro, which was to become a unifying
concept of the Harlem Renaissance, was born long before the 1920s.
As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett note, “Almost
as soon as blacks could write, it seems, they set out to redefine—
against already received racist stereotypes—who and what a
black person was, and how unlike the racist stereotype the black
original could actually be” (3). By the early twentieth century, the
term “New Negro” was being used by African Americans across
the political spectrum to define their ideals and aspirations. Booker
T. Washington, a leader whose values are sometimes considered
antithetical to the later Renaissance, titled his 1900 collection of
works extolling the accomplishments of African Americans, A New
Negro for a New Century. In 1919, Marcus Garvey used the term
as a rallying cry of the Pan-African movement, writing that “The
New Negro has given up the idea of white leadership” (94). But in
the 1920s, the “New Negro,” which had become synonymous with
a call for political change, became also a call for literary and artistic
recognition. The Harlem Renaissance was the dawn of the idea that
artistic accomplishment could further the goal of civic equality.
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And, as exemplified by Reiss’ Dawn in Harlem, the movement’s
leaders believed that changes originating in Harlem could radiate
throughout the community, the country, and the world.
This idea of the “New Negro” and of a new dawn or new vision
for African-American people can be traced through the poetry of the
early twentieth century. James Weldon Johnson’s turn-of-the-century
poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which became known as the
Negro national anthem, exhorts African Americans to march toward
a bright future: “Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, / Let us
march on till victory is won” (lines 9–10). The words of this poem,
set to music by James Weldon Johnson’s brother, John Rosamond
Johnson, present an image of new people in a new day, informed and
inspired by the past, but focused on the future. Johnson’s remarkable
career as an educator, lawyer, diplomat, activist, editor, and writer
included both political and artistic success; fittingly, his vision of a
new day included both political and artistic accomplishment.
In 1922, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published The Book
of American Negro Poetry, James Weldon Johnson’s anthology
celebrating the work of black writers; in the preface, Johnson
presents a vision of art that anticipates and helps form the values
of the Harlem Renaissance: “The final measure of the greatness
of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art
they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great
until that people produces great literature and art. No people that
has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon
by the world as distinctly inferior” (9). Johnson defines art as the
indispensable and crowning achievement of the New Negro, the
accomplishment that cannot and will not be ignored. He asserts not
only that artistic success is vital, but that artistic success will lead to
political equality—a core theme of the era’s vision.
Johnson’s aim in his anthology was both to document the
existing accomplishments of African Americans and to encourage
and foretell greater work yet to come. He writes, “Much ground
has been covered, but more will yet be covered. It is this side of
prophecy to declare that the undeniable creative genius of the
Negro is destined to make a distinctive and valuable contribution to
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Critical Insights
American poetry” (Johnson, American Negro Poetry 47). As with
“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” several of the pre-Renaissance early
twentieth-century poems Johnson includes in his anthology sketch a
vision of the New Negro in terms of a new day. Chicago-born poet
Fenton Johnson wrote, “We are children of the sun, / Rising sun!”
(lines 1–2). World War I veteran, teacher, and poet Lucian B. Watkins
associated the sun of the new day with Africa and freedom—themes
that Harlem Renaissance poets would also adopt—in his poem “Star
of Ethiopia”:
Out in the Night thou art the sun
Toward which thy soul-charmed children run,
The faith-high height whereon they see
The glory of their Day To Be—
The peace at last when all is done. (lines 1–5)
And musician and poet Otto Leland Bohanan proclaimed in “The
Dawn’s Awake” that “The boon of light we craved, awaited long,
/ Has come, has come!” (lines 16–17). These poems proclaim
a vision of a new day of progress, peace, and justice—a day that
James Weldon Johnson believed could be hastened through poetry
itself. In this formulation, night represents the discrimination,
disenfranchisement, poverty, and violence of the Jim Crow era
and dawn evokes the birth of equality, opportunity, and peace. But
the image also works in more personal terms: darkness is a loss of
identity, purpose, and recognition that the dawn will lift.
The link between politics and art can also be seen in illustrations
of the time. One of the most striking images of the New Negro is
the May 1923 cover of the educational issue of The Messenger,
the influential labor-oriented African-American political magazine
founded by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. The issue
contains an essay on education and a range of reviews of books by
or about African Americans. But the strongest message is conveyed
by the cover, titled “The New Negro,” which depicts a black man in
the famous pose of August Rodin’s sculpture “The Thinker.” Both
the subject of the work and its origin are significant. By adapting the
work of a renowned French sculptor, this image portrays the New
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Negro as an intellectual who transforms European traditions. And
because this cover comes less than two decades after the first casting
of the statue in 1904, the image connects the New Negro both to the
classical philosophical traditions it evokes and to contemporary art.
These connections illuminate two important themes of the Harlem
Renaissance: first, the ideals of the Renaissance are born from both
Western and African culture and, second, the Harlem Renaissance
aimed to transform those cultures and make them new.
“Enter the New Negro”
The forerunner of Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro was a
special edition of Survey Graphic, the social and political journal
edited by Paul Kellogg. Kellogg got the idea for a special Harlem
edition of the magazine after attending a dinner hosted by Charles S.
Johnson in March 1924 honoring the publication of Jessie Redmon
Fauset’s novel There Is Confusion. The celebration “introduced the
emerging black literary renaissance to New York’s white literary
establishment” (Wintz 81), including Kellogg, who asked Locke, a
Howard University philosopher, to edit a special issue on Harlem.
When Locke structured the Harlem edition of the Survey Graphic
and when he wrote the introductory essay, “Enter the New Negro,”
he was drawing on an already-rich vocabulary and vision about a
new day for African Americans.
In “Enter the New Negro,” Locke exemplifies the “promise and
warrant of a new leadership” by quoting Langston Hughes’ poem,
“Youth” (631):
We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.
Yesterday, a night-gone thing
A sun-down name.
And dawn today
Broad arch above the road we came.
We march!
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Critical Insights