The Harlem Renaissance

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Paul Laurence Dunbars We Wear the Mask We
wear the mask that grins and lies,It hides our
cheeks and shades our eyes,--This debt we pay to
human guileWith torn and bleeding hearts we
smile,And mouth with myriad subtleties.Why
should the world be overwise,In counting all our
tears and sighs?Nay, let them only see us,
while          We wear the mask.We smile, but,
O great Christ, our criesTo thee from tortured
souls arise.We sing, but oh the clay is
vileBeneath our feet, and long the mileBut let
the world dream otherwise,          We wear the
mask!
Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first
African-American to gain national eminence as a
poet. Born in 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, he was the
son of ex-slaves and classmate to Orville Wright
of aviation fame.
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The Harlem Renaissance

• 1920s Flourishing of the arts
• Harlem was the site where the modern Black
  identity was born
• http//www.biocrawler.com/encyclopedia/Harlem_Rena
  issance

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During the 1910s, a new political agenda
advocating racial equality arose in the
African-American community, particularly in its
growing middle class. Championing the agenda were
black historian and sociologist W.E.B. DuBois and
the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909
to advance the rights of blacks.
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This agenda was also reflected in the efforts of
Jamaican-born black nationalist Marcus Garvey,
whose Back to Africa movement inspired racial
pride among working-class blacks in the United
States in the 1920s.
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"Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for
group expression and self-determination." Alain
Locke, in The New Negro (1925) "Harlem is indeed
the great Mecca for the sight-seer the pleasure
seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the
enterprising, the ambitious and the talented of
the whole Negro world." James Weldon Johnson,
in Survey Graphic (1925) "One ever feels his
two-ness - an American, a Negro two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings two warring
ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength
alone keeps it from being torn asunder." W.E.B.
DuBois, in The Souls of Black Folks (1903) "The
Complex of color...every colored man feels it
sooner or later. It gets in the way of his
dreams, of his education, of his marriage, of the
rearing of his children." Jessie Redmon Fauset,
There is Confusion (1924)
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Harlem ... Harlem Black, black Harlem Souls of
Black Folk Ask Du Bois Little grey restless
feet Ask Claude McKay City of Refuge Ask Rudolph
Fisher Don't damn your body's itch Ask Countee
Cullen Does the jazz band sob? Ask Langston
Hughes
Nigger Heaven Ask Carl Van Vechten
Hey! ... Hey! ...
Say it brother Say it ..." -Frank Horne,
"Harlem"
Harlem is vicious Modernism. BangClash. Vicious
the way it's made, Can you stand such beauty. So
violent and transforming. - Amiri Baraka (LeRoi
Jones)
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What was The Harlem Renaissance?

• "From 1920 until about 1930 an unprecedented
  outburst of creative activity among
  African-Americans occurred in all fields of art.
  Beginning as a series of literary discussions in
  the lower Manhattan (Greenwich Village) and upper
  Manhattan (Harlem) sections of New York City,
  this African-American cultural movement became
  known as "The New Negro Movement" and later as
  the Harlem Renaissance. More than a literary
  movement and more than a social revolt against
  racism, the Harlem Renaissance exalted the unique
  culture of African-Americans and redefined
  African-American expression. African-Americans
  were encouraged to celebrate their heritage and
  to become "The New Negro," a term coined in 1925
  by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke.

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Alain Leroy LockePhilosopher, Author, Educator,
and Cultural Arbiter of Harlem Renaissance
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The Harlem Renaissance transformed
African-American identity and history, but it
also transformed American culture in general.
Never before had so many Americans read the
thoughts of African-Americans and embraced the
African-American community's productions,
expressions, and style. Even though the Harlem
Renaissance only lasted about a decade most of
its writings, art and music are still read,
looked at and listened to today.
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The progressboth symbolic and realduring this
period, became a point of reference from which
the African-American community gained a spirit of
self-determination that provided a growing sense
of both Black urbanity and Black militancy as
well as a foundation for the community to build
upon for the Civil Rights struggles in the 1950s
and 1960s.
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Why did the Harlem Renaissance happen in the
1920s?

• 1. Exodus North 1st wave of the Great Migration
  1900-1920 (over 1 million African-Americans moved
  out of the south --b/w wars over 2 mil)
• 2. Impact of the First World War over 380,000
  Blacks fought in WWI200,000 in Europe
• 3. A new sense of racial pride
• 4. Need to prove the Black contribution to
  American culture

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Political Changes

• Number of members in protest organizations
  increased
• 1909 NAACP founded The Crisis Magazine
• 1910 The Urban League founded Opportunity
  Magazine
• 1914, 1917 in Harlem UNIA-Universal Negro
  Improvement Association Marcus Garvey-Black
  Nationalist Martin Delaney in 19th century, T.
  126

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1919

• The world must be made safe for democracy.
  Pres. Wilson about US entry into WWI, 1917
• 369th Infantry regiment of Black soldiers returns
  from France
• Parade up Fifth Ave of Harlem Hellfighters
• http//www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/
  wwi_369th_infantry/wwi_369th_infantry.html
• Immediately after WWI unprecedented surge of
  racial violence

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1919

• U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launches
  "Red Scare" by creating a special division of the
  Justice Department, headed by J. Edgar Hoover, to
  combat and spy on Blacks and radicals, including
  Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro
  Improvement Association (UNIA), a militant
  organization founded in Jamaica in 1914
  launched in Harlem in 1917, whose aims including
  repatriating African Americans.

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1919

• 83 documented lynchings in 1919
• 14 Black soldiers were killed by public burnings
  11 while still in uniform
• RED SUMMER of 1919 25 race riots occur between
  the summer and the end of 1919 as Whites Blacks
  compete for postwar employment. The worst
  incidents occur in Charleston, SC Longview, TX
  Washington, DC Omaha, NE Chicago.
• http//images.google.com/images?q22Lynchings22
  ieUTF-8oeUTF-8hlenbtnGGoogleSearch

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SOUTHERN LYNCHINGSBetween 1882 and 1951 there
were a reported 4,730 incidents of vigilante
justice in the form of lynchings. 2,806 (59.3)
of these occurred in the following 10 southern
states. The racial breakdown of these victims is
White 289 (10.3), Black 2,462 (87.7), Unknown
50 (1.8) and Other 5 (0.2).
http//users.bestweb.net/rg/Lynchings.htm
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http//www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/african/2000/l
ynching.htm
Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol, 1939 sung by
Billie Holiday Southern trees bear a strange
fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the
root, Black body swinging in the Southern
breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar
trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant South, The
bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of
magnolia sweet and fresh, And the sudden smell of
burning flesh! Here is a fruit for the crows to
pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to
suck, For the sun to rot, for a tree to
drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop.
http//womhist.binghamton.edu/aswpl/doc1.htm
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http//www.youtube.com/watch?vhvW2wTLA5sY http//
www.youtube.com/watch?vh4ZyuULy9zs http//www.you
tube.com/watch?v7BHIKyCHGAw
Pearl Primus 1919-1994 Primus was equally
celebrated for her depiction of American life and
of the injustices inflicted on black Americans,
particularly in the American South. In one of her
best-known dances, "Strange Fruit," a woman
reacts in horror to a lynching. "The Negro Speaks
of Rivers" -- created, like "Strange Fruit," in
1943 and inspired by the Langston Hughes poem --
depicted the Mississippi and the hard lives of
blacks along its shores. "Dance has been my
freedom and my world," she said in 1991. "I dance
not to entertain but to help people better
understand each other."
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Alison Saar . Strange Fruit , 1995 . Rusted tin
roofing, wood, dirt, found objects, and rope . 76
x 21 x 14 in. The Baltimore Museum of
ArtLynchings, the illegal execution of an
accused person by a mob, carried out in a
carnival-like atmosphere with victims left
hanging for all to see, were rampant in the South
during reconstruction and beyond. Between 1880
and 1920, it's estimated that on average two
African Americans a week were lynched in the
United States.
The work entiteled Strange Fruit is by Alison
Saar, an American artist from California, and is
a sculpture of the figure of a black man hanging
by a foot, upside down and bound. The figure
itself is an amazing texture that seems to be
formed from rusty tin ceiling tiles and also
contains other bits of rusty hardware. This piece
of powerful sculpture is a commentary on
lynching, racism, and violence and also addresses
issues of our interaction with atrocities against
humanity. We are able to walk around this
life-size sculpture and we want to free this
bound figure, yet the exquisite texture and the
theme of the work are arresting.
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Jacob Lawrence. The Migration of the Negro
Series, 1940-41. "No. 15 Another cause was
lynching, the people who were reluctant to leave
at first left immediately after this." Tempera on
hardboard, 12 x 18. http//www.columbia.edu/itc/hi
story/odonnell/w1010/edit/migration/migration.html

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1919

• W.E.B. DuBois organizes the Pan-African Congress
  in Paris to lobby a/g the colonization of Africa.
  
• Claude McKay, a Jamaican émigré living in Harlem,
  publishes a poem, "If We Must Die," in The
  Liberator, a leftist journal.

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In 1919 there was a wave of race riots consisting
mainly of white assaults on black neighborhoods
in a dozen American cities. Jamaican-born writer
Claude McKay responded by writing this sonnet,
urging his comrades to fight back. It had a
powerful impact, then and later. For what reason
does McKay say even a doomed resistance is worth
while?
If we must die, let it not be like hogsHunted
and penned in an inglorious spot,While round us
bark the mad and hungry dogs,Making their mock
at our accursed lot.If we must die, O let us
nobly die,So that our precious blood may not be
shedIn vain then even the monsters we
defyShall be constrained to honor us though
dead!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!
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Political Changes The NAACP, founded in 1909,
holds a conference on lynching after repeated
incidents of lynchings of Blacks occur in 1918
1919 the government fails to stop the violence.
After the conference the NAACP published Thirty
Years of Lynching in the United States,
1889-1918.
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Points of Significance of the Harlem Renaissance

• It became a symbol and a point of reference for
  everyone to recall.
• The name, more than the place, became synonymous
  with new vitality, Black urbanity,and Black
  militancy.
• It became a racial focal point for Blacks the
  world over it remained for a time a race
  capital.
• It stood for urban pluralism Alain Locke wrote
  "The peasant, the student, the businessman, the
  professional man, artist, poet, musician,
  adventurer and worker, preacher, and criminal,
  exploiter and social outcast, each group has come
  with its own special motives... but their
  greatest experience has been the finding of one
  another."
• The complexity of the urban setting was important
  for Blacks to truly appreciate the variety of
  Black life. The race consciousness required that
  shared experience.

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JAMES VAN DER ZEE. Future Expectations. c. 1915.
Gelatin silver print. James Van Der Zee Estate,
New York.
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