Harlem Renaissance

The following is taken from poets.org, which has a wonderful section on the Harlem Renaissance.

A Brief Guide to the Harlem Renaissance



In the decades immediately following World War I, huge numbers of African Americans migrated to the industrial North from the economically depressed and agrarian South. In cities such as Chicago, Washington, DC, and New York City, the recently migrated sought and found (to some degree) new opportunities, both economic and artistic. 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 in his influential book of the same name.

No place embodied this new aesthetic more than Harlem, home to a thriving artistic scene of literary magazines like The Crisis (published by the newly established NAACP), cafes, jazz clubs, and scores of reading venues. The major figures of this movement, known as the Harlem Renaissance, were enlightened by education and nourished by folk sources such as black music and the black church. More than a literary revolution or social activism, the Harlem Renaissance extolled African American culture and celebrated its singular, unique expression.

In 1922, James Weldon Johnson's anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt, 1922), introduced a national audience to those who would become the voices of the movement: Claude McKay, Jessie Fauset, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Other influential figures included Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Arna Bontemps, and Jean Toomer.

Langston Hughes, often referred to as the "unofficial Poet Laureate of the race," remains the central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. In his essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," he proclaimed his lifelong calling: "to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America." His achievements in poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction, as well as his role as editor of several collections of African American literature, produced a body of work that endures and offers a powerful portrait of the twentieth century artist.

James Weldon Johnson was both the elder statesman and the Renaissance Man of the Harlem Renaissance: in addition to his successful literary life as a poet, novelist, and editor, he served as secretary general of the NAACP and as a consul in the U.S. Diplomatic Corps. His God's Trombones, a sequence of sermons, captures the generic and at the same time highly individual voice of the Negro preacher. His "Lift Every Voice And Sing" was sung every morning by generations of children in segregated schools as "The Negro National Anthem."

Countee Cullen thought long and hard in his poems about his own and collective African-American identity. Some of his strongest poems question the benevolence of a Creator who has bestowed a race with such mixed blessings. Claude McKay, born and raised in Jamaica, wrote of the immigrant's nostalgia and the American negro's pride and rage. Jean (Eugene) Toomer remains a mystery. Light enough to "pass" and alone constituting the generation's Symbolist avant-garde, he appeared briefly on the Harlem Renaissance scene, became a follower of the mystic Gurdjieff, and disappeared into the white world.

Sterling Brown, for many years a professor at Howard University, emerged in the thirties with sometimes playful, often pessimistic poems in standard English and black vernacular and in African American and European forms. In many of Brown's poems strong men and women resist the oppression of racism, poverty, and fate.

The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance opened doors and deeply influenced the generations of African American writers that followed, including Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks. In the forties, fifties, and sixties, Hayden taught at Fisk University and the University of Michigan and served two terms as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Since the publication in 1945 of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks has combined a quiet life with critical success. Her second book, Annie Allen, won the 1950 Pulitzer prize, the first time a book by a black poet had won that coveted distinction, and the last time until Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, almost forty years later. Brooks was a virtuoso of technique, her exquisite poems exploring, for the first time, the interior lives of African American individuals. Brooks' perspective shifted mid-career, her later work influenced by the politically and socially radical Black Arts Movement of the sixties.