The Harlem Renaissance

Jugami School · High School English

The Harlem Renaissance

For about twenty years, a few dozen blocks of upper Manhattan changed American poetry, music and art.

Picture Lenox Avenue on a Saturday night in 1926. A piano is going in a basement club. Upstairs, a young poet has just published his first book. Down the street a photographer is setting up lights for a wedding portrait, and a painter is sketching silhouettes for a magazine cover. None of them knows that historians will one day give all of this a name.

Here’s the plan: first, what the Harlem Renaissance was and why it happened in Harlem. Then a quick timeline, the writers, the musicians and the artists. Last, a game to test what you’ve learned and some questions to argue about.

Start with Langston HughesSee the timeline

Original Jugami illustration: silhouettes of a trumpeter, a reader holding a gold book and a dancer in front of a night skyline of Harlem, with a gold moon, rays and rings.
Original Jugami art in a flat, layered silhouette style, a nod to the look Aaron Douglas made famous.

What was the Harlem Renaissance?

The Harlem Renaissance was a burst of Black writing, music, art, theater and ideas centered in Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City. Historians date it from roughly the end of World War I (1918) to the late 1930s. Its busiest years ran from about 1924, when Opportunity magazine brought young Black writers together with white publishers, to the stock market crash of 1929.

Why Harlem? In the Great Migration, millions of Black Southerners moved north to escape segregation laws and lynching and to find work. Harlem drew huge numbers of them, along with immigrants from the Caribbean, so that a preacher from Georgia, a poet from Kansas, a sculptor from Florida and an activist from Jamaica could all end up on the same street.

What was new? Writers and artists set out to show Black life in their own words and images, instead of the stereotypes in minstrel shows and popular fiction. Alain Locke called this spirit “the New Negro” in his 1925 anthology. Not everyone agreed on how to do it. Some wanted art that would win white respect; others, like Langston Hughes, wanted to write about working people, blues and jazz exactly as they were.

Who paid for it? Black magazines such as The Crisis (from the NAACP) and Opportunity (from the National Urban League) printed new writers and gave prizes. White patrons and publishers, such as the critic Carl Van Vechten, opened other doors. That help came with strings, and writers argued about it at the time.

A note on words. Writers in the 1920s used the word “Negro,” which was then the respectful term; it appears in titles like The New Negro. You’ll see it in the period titles and poems we quote. Today we say Black or African American.

Timeline

  1. 1910s The Great Migration begins. Between 1910 and 1970 about six million Black Americans leave the rural South for cities in the North and West; about 400,000 go in 1916–1918 alone, as World War I opens factory jobs.
  2. 1919 On February 17, the 369th Infantry, the “Harlem Hellfighters,” parades up Fifth Avenue and into Harlem. That summer, the “Red Summer,” white mobs attack Black communities in cities across the country; Claude McKay answers with “If We Must Die.”
  3. 1921 Shuffle Along, an all-Black musical by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, becomes a Broadway hit (504 performances). In June, The Crisis prints Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
  4. 1923 Jean Toomer publishes Cane. Bessie Smith makes her first record. The Cotton Club opens at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue.
  5. 1924–1925 Opportunity magazine holds a dinner where Black writers meet white publishers (1924). In March 1925, Survey Graphic publishes a special issue, “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro”; Alain Locke grows it into the book The New Negro. Countee Cullen’s Color appears.
  6. 1926 Hughes’s first book, The Weary Blues. Young writers including Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston and Aaron Douglas launch the magazine Fire!!; it lasts one issue.
  7. 1927 Duke Ellington’s orchestra opens at the Cotton Club on December 4. James Weldon Johnson publishes God’s Trombones.
  8. 1929 The stock market crashes in October and the Great Depression begins. Money for books, shows and patrons dries up.
  9. 1935 On March 19, a false rumor that a teenage boy caught shoplifting on 125th Street had been beaten to death sparks a riot in Harlem. Between the Depression and the riot, the hopeful mood of the 1920s is gone.
  10. 1937 Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, written as the era fades, later becomes one of its most-read books.

The writers

Each writer will get a full unit. Langston Hughes is open now; the others are on the way.

Two short lines show how different these voices could be. McKay’s 1919 sonnet opens with a dare: If we must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, and Cullen’s 1925 sonnet ends with a puzzle: Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing! One is a battle cry; the other is a question to God. Both use the sonnet, a form English poets had used for centuries, to say something new.

Sources: McKay, Harlem Shadows (Harcourt, Brace, 1922), p. 53, first printed in The Liberator, July 1919; Cullen, Color (Harper, 1925), p. 3. Both read from scans of the original books on Wikisource.

The music

Blues and jazz were the sound of the Renaissance, coming north with the migrants from the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans and the rest of the South. Poets listened. Hughes built whole poems on the shape of a blues verse.

The art

Painters, sculptors and photographers gave the movement its images. Look up their work at the museums that hold it; we don’t reproduce it here, but the art on this page borrows the bold, layered spirit.

Game: Who Made It?

Eight works, four names each. Who made it? Click a name or press 1–4, then Enter for the next round.

Talk About It

  • The Cotton Club featured Black performers but its audience was white-only, with rare exceptions for Black celebrities. What does that tell you about who the Renaissance was “for”? Can you think of a modern example?
  • Some writers wanted art that would prove Black Americans’ talent to white readers; Hughes wanted to write about ordinary working people, and the blues and jazz they loved, as they were. Which approach would you choose, and why?
  • White patrons helped many of these artists publish. When does support from outside a community help, and when does it start to control the work?
  • McKay and Cullen used the sonnet; Hughes used the blues. Does the form a writer chooses carry its own message?
  • Why do you think a movement like this happened in one neighborhood instead of spread out across the country? Is there a “Harlem” for any art form today?

Sources