African American Culture And Identities During The Harlem Renaissance

African Americans which had been widely concentrated in the South had experienced discrimination, mistreatment and segregation under the Jim Crow Laws. The detrimental effects these laws had cause African Americans to seek a better life in the North in West(Document 6). This movement of African Americans to North and West is referred to as the Great Migration. This migration is a racial demographic change that displays the blacks no longer will allow themselves to be subject to the oppression and injustice of the South, as well as it provides them with an opportunity for a better life. As a result of the Great Migration, a time of musical, intellectual, and artistic creation called the Harlem Renaissance occurred during the 1920’s in Harlem, New York.

The Harlem Renaissance took place soon after the “Great Migration.”At this time, African Americans had endured centuries of slavery and the struggle for abolition. The Great Migration was a time period, that began in 1910, that African American people moved out of the Southern parts of the United States to other parts where they were more excepted. This movement was made by over six million African American people. These people moved to a variety of different places around the states, but the largest movement was to the Harlem neighborhood of the borough of Manhattan in New York City, New York.

The early 1900s was a very challenging time for Negroes especially young women who developed issues in regards to their identities. Their concerns stemmed from their skin colors. Either they were fair skinned due mixed heritage or just dark skinned. Young African American women experienced issues with racial identity which caused them to be in a constant struggle that prohibits them from loving themselves and the skin they are in. The purpose of this paper is to examine those issues in the context of selected creative literature. I will be discussing the various aspects of them and to aid in my analysis, I will be utilizing the works of Nella Larsen from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Jessie Bennett Redmond Fauset,

This relocation led to the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920’s. The Harlem Renaissance was a rebirth in African American culture through art,music,dance, and poetry. The Great Migration influenced the Harlem Renaissance by attracting African Americans to the North where they felt that they had more power and equality there, so they expressed it. Writers like, James Weldon Johnson contributed

The Harlem Renaissance was also known as the Negro Movement. It was a time where African Americans were beginning to find themselves. They moved to the North to find better paying jobs and to carve out better lives for themselves. Harlem Renaissance is the name given to the time from the end of World War II and through the middle of the 1930s depression. The Harlem Renaissance was successful in that it brought the Black experience clearly within the corpus of American cultural history. Not only through an explosion of culture, but on a sociological level,

Harlem Renaissance was undoubtedly a cultural and social-political movement for the African American race. The Renaissance was many things to people, but it is best described as a cultural movement in which the high level of black artistic cultural production, demanded and received recognition. Many African American writers, musicians, poets, and leaders were able to express their creativity in many ways in response to their social condition. Until the Harlem Renaissance, poetry and literature were dominated by the white people and were all about the white culture. One writer in particular, Langston Hughes, broke through those barriers that very few African-American artists had done before this

The Harlem Renaissance was a movement that spanned the 1920s. It was the name given to the cultural, social and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem, New York. During this time, it was known as the “New Negro Movement” named after the 1926 anthology by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African American Cultural expression across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United State affected by the Great Migration of which Harlem was the largest. The Harlem Renaissance was considered to be a rebirth of African American Literary Movement arose from generation that lived through the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the American civil war. Art and music also flourished during Harlem’s golden age. Plays and concerts

The Harlem Renaissance was the most powerful movement for African Americans in the 1920’s. The Harlem Renaissance represent the rebirth of African Americans in the United States. It took place in a section of New york city called the Harlem neighborhood. They called this time the Great migration because between the late 18th and early 19th century 6 million blacks migrated to the northern cities(Kelly). The Harlem Renaissance started at the end of World War 1 and the beginning of the Great Depression(hall ). The Harlem Renaissance was full of all kinds of creative people like songwriters/singers, athletes, and novelist.

The Harlem Renaissance was a movement of new works in art and literature from African Americans in New York from about 1910 to about 1940. Harlem was originally a neighborhood consisting of white upper class people until the Great Migration, when large numbers of African Americans flocked to Harlem, causing some Whites to leave. The government in the South had made laws which stated that Blacks could now own their own lands but instead, former laws were reestablished, resulting in these blacks that had now owned land, in debt to former owners, causing the creation of Sharecroppers. They were given a choice between labor contracts which would fundamentally mean they were slaves once more or to be evicted from their homes. Eventually, this caused the Great Migration. These African Americans started migrating to the urban areas of the North to look for better lives and to seek work from businesses looking for cheap labor. (“Sharecropping”, 2010.)

It was time for a cultural celebration. African Americans had entered hundreds of years of slavery and the struggle for abolition.The end of slavery did not bring them their promised land like they thought they were getting.Ninety percent of the African American culture lived in the South,but during the 1890s they started migrating to the North.That’s when the Harlem Renaissance started.Violence of the whites started to become legally and publicly.That’s kinda the reason why African Americans started migrating.

The Harlem Renaissance was a significant historical movement that originated in Harlem, New York and helped establish the city as an African American cultural center. This period, which lasted from the 1910s to the mid 1930s, is considered a golden age for African American music, art, literature, and performance. As a resurgence of African American art and urbanization began to form, new artistic and social expression began to simultaneously develop in other urban areas as well. The Harlem Renaissance soon became the epitome of a culture that already existed in America, but that never fully developed into its own centralized productive mecca. Previously, African Americans used art as a method to escape discrimination and persecution, but

In order to get a better understanding on how the Harlem Renaissance began, one must start with the Great Migration from the South to the North. Considered the largest migration in U.S. history, record numbers of African Americans started arriving in large numbers in urban areas from many parts of the rural South. This period was also known as the period of economic growth. Due to poor conditions in the South, the North represented hope and progress. As America was in conflict from World War I, the goal of the nation was to support the fight for democracy. And as the war progressed, there was a growing need to fill jobs due to labor shortages in the North. The North being the primary industrial, caused many jobs to become available, and large

Many African Americans had been enslaved and remained living in the south. After the end of slavery, the emancipated African Americans, started to act for civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural independence. Right after the civil war had ended many African American Congressmen began to give speeches after the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. 6 of the congressmen were black by 1875 as part of the Republican Party’s reconstruction legislation By the 1870s, the predominately white Democratic Party managed to regain power in the South. Between 1890 and 1908 the Democratic Party proceeded to pass legislation that were not favorable for

The Harlem Renaissance represents the rebirth and flowering of African-American culture. Although the Harlem Renaissance was concentrated in the Harlem district of New York City, its legacy reverberated throughout the United States and even abroad, to regions with large numbers of former slaves or blacks needing to construct ethnic identities amid a dominant white culture. The primary means of cultural expression during the Harlem Renaissance were literature and poetry, although visual art, drama, and music also played a role in the development of the new, urban African-American identity. Urbanization and population migration prompted large numbers of blacks to move away from the Jim Crow south, where slavery had only transformed into institutionalized racism and political disenfranchisement. The urban enclave of Harlem enabled blacks from different parts of the south to coalescence, share experiences, and most importantly, share ideas, visions, and dreams. Therefore, the Harlem Renaissance had a huge impact in framing African-American politics, social life, and public institutions.

Credited as being the most recognizable figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes played a vital role in the Modernist literary movement and the movement to revitalize African American culture in the early 20th century. Hughes’s poems reflect his personal struggle and the collective struggle of African Americans during this cultural revival.