East Harlem Summary

Scruggs, Charles. “"All Dressed up but No Place to Go": The Black Writer and His Audience ……During the Harlem Renaissance”. American Literature 48.4 (1977): 543–563.

The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem, New York between the conclusion of World War I and the middle of the 1930s. During this period, Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars. Many had come from the South, fleeing its oppressive caste system in order to find a place where they could freely express their talents; this became known as The Great Migration. Among those artists whose works achieved recognition were Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. The Renaissance involved racial pride, fueled in part by the violence of the "New Negro" demanding civil and political rights. The Renaissance incorporated jazz and the blues, attracting whites to Harlem speakeasies, where interracial couples danced. However, the Renaissance had little impact on breaking down the rigid barriers of Jim Crow that separated the races; while it may have contributed to a certain slackening of racial attitudes among young whites, perhaps its greatest impact was to reinforce race pride among blacks. The importance of the social movement we refer to as the Harlem Renaissance cannot afford to be overlooked. Like the musicians of their day, Harlem Renaissance poets advocated for an equal society, and incorporated personal anecdotes and historical snippets into their compositions to make the

Gilbert Osofsky’s Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto paints a grim picture of inevitability for the once-exclusive neighborhood of Harlem, New York. Ososfky’s timeframe is set in 1890-1930 and his study is split up into three parts. His analysis is convincing in explaining the social and economic reasons why Harlem became the slum that it is widely infamous for today, but he fails to highlight many of the positive aspects of the enduring neighborhood, and the lack of political analysis in the book is troubling.

During the 1920s and early 1930s nearly half a million African Americans migrated to the northern cities, in a movement called the Great Migration. Many of the southern African Americans migrated to a city called Harlem in New York. They relocated due to dogmatism and intolerance of melanin diverging out the of pores of many white southerners. The African Americans who migrated found new opportunities both economic and artistic that resulted to the creation of a stable middle class Black –Americans (Dover, 2006). This was the Harlem Renaissance a cultural, social, and artistic explosion. The core of Harlem expressed by Alain Locke is that through art, “negro life is seizing its first chances for group expression and self-determination.” (The New Negro 1925) Harlem became the center of a literary movement and a “spiritual coming of age” in which Locke’s “New Negro” transformed “social disillusionment to race pride.” The Harlem Renaissance facilitated the rebirth of African American literature, identity, and the birth of black pride. The great works “Passing”, “Miss Cynthie”, and “The City of Refuge” depict this new Negro movement in different classes of Harlem that took place during this great cultural and artistic awakening.

In our cutting-edge world, urban areas have turned out to be critical in people's lives. Individuals regularly have an alternate impression of them. In the lyrics "Harlem Night Melody" and "The City is So Huge", Langston Hughes and Richard Garcia show altogether different pictures of the groups they depict. Break down the symbolism and metaphorical dialect in these two sonnets and examine how that symbolism influences the importance of every ballad. Think about how the writers' utilization of dialect makes the temperament and significance in their ballads. Make certain to refer to particular lines from the content.

Harlem was a three square mile neighborhood on the island of Manhattan in New York City. While it had once been a white upper class neighborhood,

When one thinks of Harlem, he or she typically associates the city with the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century, which celebrated the achievements of African American arts, and its correlation with the Great Migration of these individuals moving from the South to the North. According to sociologist Sharon Zukin in her article “Why Harlem Is Not a Ghetto,” “The first Harlem Renaissance was the period of extraordinary creativity in the 1920s and 1930s when African American and Caribbean writers, painters, and intellectuals joined with white literary critics to create a ‘capital of Black culture.’” (Zukin, 65). The city of Harlem highlights the strides African Americans have made, and today with the inclusion of chains such as Whole

New York metropolis, is the tale of the advent of African American urban society and way of life. Even though only one of the many examples of predominantly black neighborhoods in American towns, Harlem is unique in many approaches, most importantly due to the fact historically it has been perceived as the center of African American culture. Simultaneously, at precise ranges of its development, it had a reputation of a black ghetto with residing situations incomparably worse than the ones in different components of the metropolis.

In the New World, the Negros have had their fair share in being moved from place to place. In the 1920s’, African-Americans moved to Harlem, New York to start a new life for themselves. Harlem became a place where Negros felt free from the segregated South and had liberties to explore their artistic abilities. This movement was known as the Great Migration and although it appears this was a major step for African-Americans, there was still a lot of work to be done. The North had their targeted issues with their new neighbors and voiced it as well. It was an imperative part of the United States when the Harlem Renaissance came about because it created diversity in artistic culture. The Harlem Renaissance brought people of different ethnicities

These shooting are just two examples of how unsafe Harlem, as a community, is. The funny thing is, while searching for examples of these two specific shootings, I struggled in being able to search them. I typed in general topics at first because I didn’t think it’d be that hard to find. As I continued to search, my searchings began to become more narrow. It wasn’t until I typed in “man killed in harlem staircase 80 E 110th Street” that I found two, and only two, articles on the shooting that happened in my building. I couldn’t find any videos on the shooting of Michael Lewis except for one on the article I found. And even within these articles, not much information was shared. In doing research for this essay I learned that the government could

The poor people lived in one or two room huts with roofs made out of palm leaves. They would grow their own food.

Growing up in Harlem isn’t easy in the 1980’s. In this era, you were either selling crack or doing it. So far, I was the only boy on my block that was actually going to school. My mama always watched me out the window and yelled “Boy you better hurry up and get your behind to school”. She was on top of me because she didn’t want me to end up like my older brothers. My older brothers, Javon and Tyler, were good people until they hung around the wrong crowd. They took the easier way to get money but then they had a pretty rough downfall. Javon is doing 10 years in jail for murder and Tyler is doing 4 years for getting caught selling drugs. Mama wanted me to be the opposite of those fools and actually go to college and get a good job. My dad

The urban life in Harlem has being described by many authors, including James Baldwin. The life of an African American man in this place during the 1950’s was a “disaster”, “faces and bodies” […] were “trapped in the darkness” (Baldwin n.pag). It was a time prior to the Civil Rights Movement, the time of

This particular story gains power and resonance in its social context: the limited life in Harlem

Harlem is deeply associated with the vibrant life of African Americans for more than a century. It is black mecca and focal point advancing black America. When describing Harlem one must recognize its poetry of life, culture and. Harlem is the place where musician and bootleggers lived together, poet and pickpocket ate in the same dining room and preachers, physician all were aristocrats. Looking from a different perspective, Harlem is the paradigm of a deteriorated inner city neighborhood. From end of the civil war to World War I it has experienced a massive exodus of African Americans thus transforming the demographics to an all African Community. The quality of life began to degrade as due to racism, neglect and city’s role in shaping the housing stocks. In an effort to solve the everlasting housing problems of Harlem, the city has left this vibrant on the hands of gentrifies, thus destroying the culture and identity of the black capital.