What Was the Flowering of African American Arts in the 1920s Called
The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York Metropolis as a Black cultural mecca in the early on 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the menses is considered a gold age in African American civilisation, manifesting in literature, music, stage functioning and fine art.
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Great Migration
The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem was meant to be an upper-class white neighborhood in the 1880s, but rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and desperate landlords seeking to make full them.
In the early 1900s, a few heart-class Black families from another neighborhood known equally Blackness Bohemia moved to Harlem, and other Blackness families followed. Some white residents initially fought to go on African Americans out of the expanse, but failing that many whites somewhen fled.
Outside factors led to a population boom: From 1910 to 1920, African American populations migrated in large numbers from the South to the Due north, with prominent figures like W.E.B. Du Bois leading what became known as the Great Migration.
In 1915 and 1916, natural disasters in the south put Black workers and sharecroppers out of work. Additionally, during and after World War I, immigration to the U.s.a. vicious, and northern recruiters headed south to entice Black workers to their companies.
By 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the Southward had moved north, and Harlem was one of the nearly pop destinations for these families.
Langston Hughes
This considerable population shift resulted in a Blackness Pride movement with leaders similar Du Bois working to ensure that Black Americans got the credit they deserved for cultural areas of life. Two of the earliest breakthroughs were in poetry, with Claude McKay's collection Harlem Shadows in 1922 and Jean Toomer's Cane in 1923. Civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Homo in 1912, followed by God's Trombones in 1927, left their marker on the earth of fiction.
Novelist and du Bois protege Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1924 novel In that location Is Defoliation explored the idea of Black Americans finding a cultural identity in a white-dominated Manhattan. Fauset was literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crunch and developed a magazine for Black children with Du Bois.
Sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, who was integral in shaping the Harlem literary scene, used the debut party for In that location Is Confusion to organize resources to create Opportunity, the National Urban League magazine he founded and edited, a success that bolstered writers like Langston Hughes.
Hughes was at that party forth with other promising Black writers and editors, besides as powerful white New York publishing figures. Shortly many writers found their piece of work appearing in mainstream magazines similar Harper's.
Zora Neale Hurston
Anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston courted controversy through her interest with a publication chosen Fire!!
Helmed past white author and Harlem writers' patron Carl Van Vechten and filled with works from prolific Black writers including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Aaron Douglas, the magazine exoticized the lives of Harlem residents. Van Vechten's previous fiction stirred up involvement among whites to visit Harlem and take advantage of the civilisation and nightlife there.
Though Van Vechten's work was condemned by older luminaries like DuBois, it was embraced past Hurston, Hughes and others.
Countee Cullen
Poetry, too, flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. Countee Cullen was 15 when he moved into the Harlem abode of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the pastor of Harlem'due south largest congregation, in 1918.
The neighborhood and its culture informed his poetry, and as a higher student at New York University, he obtained prizes in a number of poetry contests before going onto Harvard's masters programme and publishing his first volume of poetry: Color. He followed it up with Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown Girl, and went on to write plays equally well as children's books.
Cullen received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry in and married Nina Yolande, the daughter of West.Eastward.B. DuBois. Their wedding was a major social outcome in Harlem. Cullen's reviews for Opportunity magazine, which ran nether the column "Dark Belfry," focused on works from the African-American literati and covered some of the biggest names of the age.
Louis Armstrong
The music that percolated in and then boomed out of Harlem in the 1920s was jazz, often played at speakeasies offering illegal liquor. Jazz became a corking draw for not but Harlem residents, but outside white audiences also.
Some of the about celebrated names in American music regularly performed in Harlem—Louis Armstrong, Knuckles Ellington, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, often accompanied by elaborate floor shows. Tap dancers like John Bubbles and Pecker "Bojangles" Robinson were also pop.
Ringlet to Go on
Cotton wool Club
With the groundbreaking new music came a vibrant nightlife. The Savoy opened in 1927, an integrated ballroom with 2 bandstands that featured continuous jazz and dancing well by midnight, sometimes in the form of battling bands helmed by Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford and Rex Oliver.
While it was fashionable to frequent Harlem nightlife, entrepreneurs realized that some white people wanted to experience black culture without having to socialize with African Americans and created clubs to cater to them.
The most successful of these was the Cotton Lodge, which featured frequent performances by Ellington and Calloway. Some in the customs derided the beingness of such clubs, while others believed they were a sign that Black culture was moving toward greater credence.
Paul Robeson
The cultural boom in Harlem gave Black actors opportunities for stage piece of work that had previously been withheld. Traditionally, if Black actors appeared onstage, it was in a minstrel prove musical and rarely in a serious drama with not-stereotypical roles.
At the center of this stage revolution was the versatile Paul Robeson, an actor, singer, writer, activist and more. Robeson starting time moved to Harlem in 1919 while studying law at Columbia University and continually maintained a social presence in the area, where he was considered an inspirational just approachable figure.
Robeson believed that arts and culture were the best paths forward for Black Americans to overcome racism and make advances in a white-dominated culture.
Josephine Baker
Black musical revues were staples in Harlem, and by the mid-1920s had moved south to Broadway, expanding into the white world. I of the primeval of these was Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's Shuffle Along, which launched the career of Josephine Baker.
White patron Van Vechten helped bring more serious lack phase work to Broadway, though largely the work of white authors. It wasn't until 1929 that a Blackness-authored play near Black lives, Wallace Thurman and William Rapp's Harlem, played Broadway.
Playwright Willis Richardson offered more serious opportunities for Blackness actors with a several 1-act plays written in the 1920s, as well as articles in Opportunity mag outlining his goals. Stock companies like the Krigwa Players and the Harlem Experimental Theater as well gave Black actors serious roles.
Aaron Douglas
The visual arts were never welcoming to Black artists, with art schools, galleries and museums shutting them out. Sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, a protégé of Auguste Rodin, explored African American themes in her work and influenced Du Bois to champion Black visual artists.
The most celebrated Harlem Renaissance artist is Aaron Douglas, oft called "the Male parent of Black American Art," who adapted African techniques to realize paintings and murals, as well as book analogy.
Sculptor Augusta Savage's 1923 bust of Du Bois garnered considerable attention. She followed that up with small, dirt portraits of everyday African Americans, and would later be pivotal to enlisting black artists into the Federal Art Project, a sectionalisation of the Work Progress Assistants (WPA).
James VanDerZee'south photography captured Harlem daily life, besides as by commissioned portraits in his studio that he worked to fill with optimism and separate philosophically from the horrors of the past.
Marcus Garvey
Blackness nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism motion Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica just moved to Harlem in 1916 and began publishing the influential newspaper Negro World in 1918. His shipping company, Black Star Line, established trade between Africans in America, the Caribbean, S and Central America, Canada and Africa.
Garvey is perhaps best known for founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association, or UNIA, which advocated for "separate but equal" status for persons of African ancestry with the goal of establishing Black states around the world. Garvey was famously at odds with W.E.B. DuBois, who called him "the virtually dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America." His outspoken views besides fabricated him a target of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.
Harlem Renaissance Ends
The stop of Harlem's creative boom began with the stock market crash of 1929 and The Groovy Low. It wavered until Prohibition ended in 1933, which meant white patrons no longer sought out the illegal alcohol in uptown clubs.
By 1935, many pivotal Harlem residents had moved on to seek work. They were replaced past the continuous flow of refugees from the South, many requiring public assistance.
The Harlem Race Riot of 1935 broke out following the arrest of a young shoplifter, resulting in iii expressionless, hundreds injured and millions of dollars in property damage. The riot was a expiry knell for the Harlem Renaissance.
Bear on of the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a gilt historic period for African American artists, writers and musicians. It gave these artists pride in and control over how the Blackness experience was represented in American culture and set the stage for the civil rights movement.
Sources
Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance. Laban Carrick Hill.
The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Civilization, 1920-1930. Steven Watson.
The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Lexicon For The Era. Bruce Kellner, Editor.
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/harlem-renaissance