Lesson.

1. The Harlem Renaissance

2. The Harlem Renaissance
 The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a black
cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted.
 Lasting roughly from1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African
American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art. The Harlem Renaissance was
considered to be a rebirth of African-American arts.
 African Americans sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the
South.
 Others were people of African descent from racially stratified communities in the Caribbean who came to the
United States hoping for a better life. Uniting most of them was their convergence in Harlem.

3. What happened before The Harlem
Renaissance..
 During the Reconstruction Era, African Americans, began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural self-
determination.
 By 1875 sixteen African Americans had been elected and served in Congress and gave numerous speeches with their newfound civil
empowerment.[9]
 By the late 1870s, Democratic whites managed to regain power in the South. From 1890 to 1908 they proceeded to pass legislation that
disenfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites, trapping them without representation.
 They established the white supremacist regimes of Jim Crow segregation in the South and one-party block voting behind
southern Democrats.
 The Democratic whites denied African Americans their basic civic rights with the use of terror!
 They instituted a convict labor system that forced many thousands of African Americans back into unpaid labor in mines, on
plantations, and on public works projects such as roads and levees.
 African Americans were subject to brutal forms of corporal punishment, overwork, and disease from unsanitary conditions.
 Death rates were extraordinarily high.
 As life in the South became increasingly difficult, African Americans began to migrate north.

4. Harlem’s History
 The district had originally been developed in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for the white middle and
upper middle classes;
 its affluent beginnings led to the development of stately houses, grand avenues, and world-class amenities such as
the Polo Grounds and the Harlem Opera House.
 During the enormous influx of European immigrants in the late 19th century, the once exclusive district was abandoned
by the white middle class, who moved farther north.
 Harlem became an African-American neighborhood in the early 1900s.
 In 1910, a large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various African-American realtors and
a church group.
 Many more African Americans arrived during the First World War.
 Due to the war, the migration of laborers from Europe virtually ceased, while the war effort resulted in a massive demand
for unskilled industrial labor.
 The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit,
and New York.

5. Langston Hughes
 Lifespan: February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967
 Role: poet, novelist, playwright, columnist, social activist
 Langston Hughes is the most famous person associated with the
Harlem Renaissance and among the most influential leaders of
the movement. He famously wrote about the period that “the
negro was in vogue”. Considered among the greatest poets in
U.S. history, Hughes was one of the earliest innovators of jazz
poetry, poetry that “demonstrates jazz-like rhythm”. His works
often portrayed the lives of middle class African Americans.
Hughes was a proponent of creatingdistinctive “Negro” art and
not falling for the “urge within the race toward whiteness”.


6. Poem: The Negro Speaks of Rivers
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.
Published in 1921- Langston Hughes, wrote his most famous
poem when he was only seventeen. The idea of it came to him
while he crossed the Mississippi river while travelling on a train
to Mexico to meet his father. He began to think what Mississippi
had meant to Negros in the past leading him to think what other
rivers had meant to them and the thought came to him, “I’ve
known rivers”. He then penned down this much acclaimed poem
in around fifteen minutes. In the poem Langston connects to all
his African forefathers through rivers which are ‘older than the
flow of human blood in human veins’. He places his ancestors
on important historical and cultural sites and uses active verbs
like ‘I built’, ‘I bathed’, etc. to demonstrate their active
participation in civilization since ancient times, even when they
had to face discrimination.

7. W.E.B Du Bois
 Lifespan: February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963
 Role: writer, sociologist, civil rights activist
 In 1909, Du Bois co-founded the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization which
remains active even today.
 In 1910, the NAACP launched its official magazine The Crisis and
Du Bois was its editor for the first 24 years.
 The Crisis played an important role in the Harlem Renaissance
providing a platform for several well-known writers of the movement,
including Claude McKay and Langston Hughes.
 Du Bois was among the leading intellectuals of the renaissance
and wrote several important pieces which introduced concepts
like ‘double consciousness’ which were widely used by writers of
the movement.

8. Excerpt: The Souls of Black Folk
The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world. . . . One
ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled [opposing] strivings
[desires]; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder
[apart].
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife [conflict],—this longing to attain self-conscious
manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves
to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not
bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.
He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit
upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. . . .

9. Away back in the days of bondage [slavery] they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt
and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the
American Negro for two centuries.
To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies [evils], the cause of
all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than
ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—
Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,—
suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. . . .
Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal
and development, and yet the swarthy spectre [ghost] sits in its accustomed [familiar] seat. . . .The
Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised
land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment
rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was
unbounded save [except] by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.

10. Zora Neal Hurston
 Lifespan: January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960
 Role: author
 Zora Neale Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925 when the
Harlem Renaissance was at its peak and she soon became a
prominent figure of the movement.
 Her writings, more than anyone else, revealed the truth of the
black Southern experience as being a native of the rural South
she was intimate with black folklore.
 Hurston was the most prominent female writer of the Harlem
Renaissance and her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is
considered among the most influential works of not only the
Renaissance but also of African American and women’s literature.

11. Except: Their Eyes Were Watching God
“You know, honey, us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways. You in
particular. Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn’t for me to fulfill my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and to do. Dat’s
one of de hold-backs of slavery. But nothing can’t stop you from wishin’. You can’t beat nobody down so low till you can rob
’em of they will. Ah didn’t want to be used for a work-ox and a brood-sow and Ah didn’t want mah daughter used dat way
neither. It sho wasn’t mah will for things to happen lak they did. Ah even hated de way you was born. But, all de same Ah said
thank God, Ah got another chance. Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin’ on high, but they wasn’t
no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah’d take a broom and a cook-pot and
throw up a highway through de wilderness for her. She would expound what Ah felt. But somehow she got lost offa de
highway and next thing Ah knowed here you was in de world. So whilst Ah was tendin’ you of nights Ah said Ah’d save de text
for you. Ah been waitin’ a long time, Janie, but nothin’ Ah been through ain’t too much if you just take a stand on high ground
lak Ah dreamed.”Old Nanny sat there rocking Janie like an infant and thinking back and back. Mind-pictures brought feelings,
and feelings dragged out dramas from the hollows of her heart

12. Alain Leroy Locke
 Lifespan: September 13, 1885 – June 9, 1954
 Role: writer, philosopher, educator
 The first African American Rhodes Scholar, Alain Locke was the
editor of The New Negro: An Interpretation, which was published
in 1925.
 An anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and
African-American art and literature, The New Negro is
considered the definitive text of the Harlem Renaissance and
gave it the name by which it was known during the time, the
“New Negro Movement”.
 Along with W. E. B. Du Bois, Locke was the leading philosopher of
the Harlem Renaissance and gave the movement direction
and inspiration.

13. Excerpt: The New Negro
 http://faculty.gordonstate.edu/lsanders-
senu/Locke%20The%20New%20Negro.pdf

14. Claude McKay
 Lifespan: September 15, 1889 – May 22, 1948
 Role: poet, novelist, journalist
 Claude McKay was a Jamaican immigrant who at first wrote poems
primarily in Jamaican dialect but switched to Standard English forms
after moving to the United States.
 His militant sonnet “If We Must Die” was published in 1919 during a
period of intense racial violence. The poem noted for its revolutionary
tone became popular among African American readers and is
considered a landmark of Harlem Renaissance.
 His 1928 novel Home to Harlem became a best-seller and won
the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. The following year his
novel Banjo was published which was hailed as a radical work that
envisioned the black political identity in a global framework. McKay
was among the most famous writers of the Harlem Renaissance and
an influential figure of the movement.

15. Poem: America
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.