The Harlem Renaissance

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The Harlem Renaissance
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Definition

• Era of written and artistic creativity
• After WWI until middle of Depression
• Prompted by the migration of African Americans
  from the South to Northern cities for employment
  opportunities

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Harlem

• Harlem was not so much a place as it was a state
  of mind, the cultural metaphor for Black America
  itself.
• Henry Louis Gates
• Rhapsodies in Black
• 1997
• New York, Chicago and Washington

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W.E.B. Dubois

• Leader of The Crisis 1910-1934
• Believed that an educated Black elite should lead
  the Blacks to liberation
• Could not reach social equality by emulating
  white ideals equality could only be achieved by
  teaching racial pride with an emphasis on
  cultural heritage

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Major Figures

• Claude Mc Kay
• Countee Cullen
• Langston Hughes
• Zora Neale Hurston
• Jean Toomer

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Jazz

• the true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from
  convention, custom, authority, boredom, even
  sorrow, from everything that would confine the
  soul of man and hinder its riding free on the
  air J.A. Rogers Jazz at Home
• 1925

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The Sound
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Countee Cullen

• 1903-1946 born NYC
• Father was a minister
• Won poetry prizes while still in high school
• 1926 MA from Harvard
• 1926 Guggenheim fellowship allows him to go to
  Paris for a year

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• Marries Yolanda DuBoisdivorced the following
  year
• Teaches French in public schools of NY
• Resists Modernistsfavored 19th C tradition of
  stanza, rhyme and direct statement
• Juxtaposition of traditional form with
  non-traditional theme

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Langston Hughes

• 1902-1967 born Joplin, Missouri

• Parents divorced so he moved many times
• Father wanted him to be an engineer
• Attends Columbia University drops out after one
  year
• Ships out to Africa

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• Later to France spends year in Paris at odd jobs
• Returns to US works as a busboy in Washington
  hotel
• Leaves poems by the plate of Vachel Lindsay who
  reads them to his audience that night and Hughes
  becomes locally famous

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• 1929 BA Lincoln University in PA
• Sought to write poems in the spirit of
  jazzspirituals and blues
• Wrote free verse and dialect poetry
• Interested in the archetypal Black who has heard
  the sounds of the river from the Congo to the
  Mississipi

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• 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.

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Simon the Cyrenian Speaks By Countee Cullen

• He never spoke a word to me,And yet He called my
  nameHe never gave a sign to me,And yet I knew
  and came. At first I said, "I will not bearHis
  cross upon my backHe only seeks to place it
  thereBecause my skin is black."But He was
  dying for a dream,And He was very meek,And in
  His eyes there shone a gleamMen journey far to
  seek.It was Himself my pity boughtI did for
  Christ aloneWhat all of Rome could not have
  wroughtWith bruise of lash or stone.

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The Wise By Countee Cullen

• Dead men are wisest, for they knowHow far the
  roots of flowers go,How long a seed must rot to
  grow. Dead men alone bear frost and rainOn
  throbless heart and heatless brain,And feel no
  stir of joy or pain.Dead men alone are
  satiateThey sleep and dream and have no
  weight,To curb their rest, of love or
  hate.Strange, men should flee their company,Or
  think me strange who long to beWrapped in their
  cool immunity.

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