One of the most influential periods in Black American History post-slavery is the Harlem
Renaissance, an intellectual, social, and artistic explosion centered in Harlem, Manhattan,
New York City.
Novels like Passing by Nella Larsen, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
and the poetry of Langston Hughes were written during this period and have become important
pieces of the American literary canon.
Still, when discussing this topic we tend to flatten the dynamic personalities and identities
of the Black folk responsible for making this period so iconic in the literary sense.
Not only in America, but as part of the entire Black diaspora.
According to statistics before 1910 “more than 90% of the African-American population
lived in the American South.” Due to poor economic conditions and prevalent racial segregation
and discrimination, around six million African Americans moved to the North, Midwest and
West, to places like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Harlem between 1916 and 1970, a period
known as the Great Migration.
The first Great Migration (1916–40) is what we are concerned with here today.
This massive geographical change was done in order for Black Americans to gain a new
set of opportunities for themselves that were not available in the South. Of course, the
North just had their own non-Jim Crow flavored kind racial issues like Sundown Towns.
In 1925 “The New Negro” anthology edited by Alain Locke, the"Dean" of the Harlem Renaissance,
was published. It launched a new literary movement that spoke to the emerging new urban
Black identities that formed in the aftermath of the Great Migration.
As George Hutchinson, put it in the Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance:
“The Harlem Renaissance in literature was never a cohesive movement. It was, rather,
a product of overlapping social and intellectual circles, parallel developments, intersecting
groups, and competing visions--yet all loosely bound together by a desire for racial self-assertion
and self-definition on the face of white supremacy. The interplay between intense conflict and
a sense of being part of a collective project identified by race energized the movement
and helps account for our enduring fascination with it”
Sadly, we do not have the time to go through all the fantastic figures that made this movement
what it is, but we will do our best to ensure everyone leaves this video understanding some
of the key voices of the Harlem Renaissance.
The one you have most likely heard of is Langston Hughes. Born February 1, 1901 (Aquarius) in
Joplin, Missouri, Hughes became a prolific writer at an early age. He gained a lasting
sense of racial pride and solidarity from his maternal grandmother, who fed him a hearty
diet of Black Oral Traditions and stories about her activist experiences.
He was especially concerned with the working class Black people who were often neglected
in works trying to “elevate” the race.
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers", which was published in 1920, became Hughes's signature poem:
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1920) ...
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. ...
Hughes’s works would stress a racial consciousness and cultural nationalism that sought to unite
people of African descent across the globe. His writings would become an important centerpiece
of the Négritude movement in France and the French-speaking writers of Africa.
Mark A. Sanders in "African American folk roots and Harlem Renaissance poetry" says:
The sheer volume of [Hughs] writings, his iconoclastic attitude toward black middle-class
representation [...], and most importantly his concern for the lives and culture of poor
and working-class blacks has made him the veritable icon of the Harlem Renaissance.
(107)
Hughes’s legacy is an important part of not only Black American identity, but Black
consciousness across the world. In his words you see a love and appreciation for the beauty
of his people. That is what has made his poetry so powerful for generations.
The night is beautiful, So the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful, So the eyes of my people
Beautiful, also, is the sun. Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.
Born January 7, 1891 (Capricorn), Zora Neale Hurston is one of the most important Black
female writers of all time. Period.
Initially from Alabama, Hurston attended New York’s Barnard College and Columbia University
to study anthropology and do ethnographic research, with a particular focus on African-American
and Caribbean folklore. (Me too girl)
In 1936 and 1937, Hurston traveled to Jamaica and Haiti for research, and drew from this
experience her anthropological work, Tell My Horse (1938). Her work as a writer and
folklorist was used in Florida's historical and cultural collection, expanding upon previously
undocumented experiences.
Her most important and lasting piece of literary work is without a doubt Their Eyes Were Watching
God:
“Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe
it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know
nothin' but what we see…De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see."
Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades, for both cultural and political reasons one
of them was her use of African-American dialect, which you can see in the previous quote. Some
of Hurston's literary contemporaries criticized her use of it, claiming that it was rooted
in white racist traditions.
Richard Wright, in his review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, said:
“Her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic
tastes she knows how to satisfy. She exploits that phase of Negro life which is "quaint,"
the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the "superior" race.”
Richard Wright and I …have beef.
Modern academics like PBS colleague Henry Louis Gates, Jr., have underscored the significance
of Hurston’s use of this language:
“The narrative voice Hurston created, and her legacy to Afro-American fiction, [...] echoes
and aspires to the status of the impersonality, anonymity, and authority of the black vernacular
tradition, [...] true somehow to the unwritten text of a common blackness.
Due to the efforts of Alice Walker and other Black female academics, Hurston’s literary
star has risen over the decades and most recently, Hurston's manuscript Barracoon was published
posthumously in 2018.
From Jamaica and considered the "foremost left-wing black intellectual of his age" Festus
Claudius "Claude" McKay (pause—that is a West Indian name), is a writer not as well
known today, but was a huge influence on writers like James Baldwin and … Richard Wright.
Also, a Virgo.
McKay came to the U.S in 1912 to attend the Tuskegee Institute and in 1919 he wrote and
published one of his most famous pieces of poetry “If We Must Die” during the Red
Summer, a year where white supremacist terrorism and racial riots took place in more than three
dozen cities across the United States.
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
When the African-American museum was opened in (year) this poem was read during the dedication
ceremony.
McKay along with other Caribbean writers like Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, and Wilfred
Domingo, were influential as part of the Black Socalist societies that were forming around
this time.
In 1928, McKay published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which was both a bestseller
and also controversial for being too sexy. He attempted to capture the lives of “uprooted
black vagabonds” and did so with vigor to the chagrin of many.
McKay passed in 1948 and in 1977 was named the national poet of his native land of Jamaica.
Anne Spencer (another Aquarius) holds a unique place in the history of the Harlem Renaissance
because even though she lived outside New York City, she was still considered a key
intellectual player to the movement.
Spencer was a very well published anthologized poet, and was the first Virginian and one
of three African American women included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. During
her lifetime, Spencer published over 30 poems, but even still much of her work was lost to
the ages.
According to scholar of afro-american studies Carlyn E. Ferrari:
In addition to providing a voice for black environmental imaginaries, Spencer’s poetry
also challenges pervasive stereotypes specific to black women and their bodies. [...] What
is unique and remarkable about Spencer’s poetry is that she offers a vision of black
womanhood and the natural world that exists beyond the ideologies of dominion; she offers
an alternative way of being and thinking about being.” (186)
Spencer is unfortunately a lesser known figure, yet a supremely important part of planting
the seeds of what would become the Black Womanist movement. She is also a reminder that despite
the migration North, much of the Black history we look to is rooted in the South.
Her home became an important center of knowledge for the likes of: George Washington Carver,
Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Hot girl things.
Nella Larsen (Aries) was born in Chicago to a mixed race Afro-Caribbean father and a Danish
mother. Her father was absent in her life, leaving her to be raised in a white immigrant
family that taught her early on that she would have no place in white society. This also
limited Larsen’s early access into a Black identity. This disconnect would be the inspiration
for much of Larsen’s work.
According to Howard University professor of African-american literature, Gregory J. Hampton:
“It was not until the Harlem Renaissance
and the arrival of writers such as Nella Larsen that realistic images of black women began
to evolve in the African American literary tradition.”
Among her works, Larsen published two important novels of note, Quicksand and Passing. Quicksand
is her more autobiographical work, dealing with Helga Crane who struggles to find her
identity in a world of racialized crisis in the 1920s. She, like the author, has a white
mother and an absent Black father.
Passing, the more popular of the two, centers the reunion of two childhood friends, one
of whom is “passing” for a white woman married to a racist white husband in Harlem,
NY.
It … does not end well for her.
Also now a major motion picture.
Larsen did not fit seamlessly into the New Negro movement because so much of her work
dealt with the unspoken conflicts of not fitting into your racial identity.
Larsen’s Passing is about the losses gained from assimilating into whiteness and how for
Black folks it comes with more traumas. Not only does it mean a loss of community and
family, but also a total severance of Black history for future generations.
Unlike the Rachel Dolezals of the world, these people didn’t become white in order to take
over white institutions. They became white to be given a fair shot to survive in a racist
society. To simply be allowed to do what white people were allowed to do. To be full citizens.
It is a dark conflict that Larsen not only understood as a person, but embraced as a
writer.
Before we wrap up, we also have someone we should recognize in this story of the Harlem
Reinessance: Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, historian and activist. Schomburg was an Afro-Latino
man of Black Puerto Rican and German descent, proudly calling himself, Afro-Puerto Rican.”
After hearing from his teacher that Black people had no history, he spent the rest of
his life trying to prove that teacher wrong.
He collected and documented the accomplishments of people of African heritage all across the
world. He immigrated to New York City in 1891, eventually settling in Harlem.
By the 1920s Schomburg (Shom-burg) had amassed a collection which consisted of artworks,
manuscripts, rare books, slave narratives and other artifacts of Black history. He along
with Historian and civil rights activist, John Edward Bruce formed the Negro Society
for Historical Research, which brought together African, West Indian, and Afro-American scholars.
Schomburg’s collection is part of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture which
is located in Harlem today.
One of the frustrating parts of Black History Month is that it stuffs so much important
history and legacy into the shortest month of the year that you don’t have the time
to get into the meat of things. I never knew how many queer Black people were part of the
Harlem Renissance, the infighting between important figures, the structures of Black
feminism that were being built and the way it melded Black American and Black Immigrant
stuggles in a major city.
I’m from Brooklyn. I’ve been to Harlem so many times and yet, it wasn’t until I
started doing my own research that I got a real understanding of this history.
This video isn’t just a quick overview of the greatest hits of a literary era. It is
an invitation to do your own research and read up on these truly interesting players
in one of the golden ages of Black Intelligentsia. You will not regret it, there is a lot of
drama. And also a lot of important history that matters 365 days a year … not just
in February.