The Black Art Movement And The Black Arts Movement

as "the New Negro Movement" later the Harlem renaissance." The art today isn't really memorable

The well known poet Langston Hughes was an inspiring character during the Harlem Renaissance to provide a push for the black communities to fight for the rights they deserved. Hughes wrote his poetry to deliver important messages and provide support to the movements. When he was at a young age a teacher introduced him to poets Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman, and they inspired him to start his own. Being a “darker brother,” as he called blacks, he experienced and wanted his rights, and that inspired him. Although literary critics felt that Langston Hughes portrayed an unattractive view of black life, the poems demonstrate reality. Hughes used the Blues and Jazz to add effect to his work as well as his extravagant word use and literary

The Black Arts movement refers to a period of “furious flowering” of African American creativity beginning in the mid-1960’s and continuing through much of the 1970’s (Perceptions of Black). Linked both chronologically and ideologically with the Black Power Movement, The BAM recognized the idea of two cultural Americas: one black and one white. The BAM pressed for the creation of a distinctive Black Aesthetic in which black artists created for black audiences. The movement saw artistic production as the key to revising Black American’s perceptions of themselves, thus the Black Aesthetic was believed to be an integral component of the economic, political, and cultural empowerment of the Black

Hughes was a great writer with much diversity in his types of writings. His poetry was a way for us to see a picture of urban life during the Harlem Renaissance, the habits, attitudes, and feelings of his oppressed people. These poems did more than reveal the pain of poverty, it also illustrated racial pride and dignity. “His main concern was the uplift of his people, whose strengths, resiliency, courage, and humor he wanted to record as part of the general American experience” (Wikipedia, Langston Hughes). Hughes was not ashamed of his heritage and his main theme, “black is beautiful,” was expressed and shared to the world through his poetry. During the literary movement, music was central to the cultural movement of the Harlem Renaissance, which was a main feature of Hughes’s poetry. He had an important technical influence by his emphasis on folk, jazz, and blues rhythms as the basis of his poetry of racial pride. Hughes used this unique style of writing because it was important to him to have the readers feel and experience what they were reading, “to recognize the covert rhetoric in lyric means to appreciate the overlap between emotive and discursive poetry. Rooted in song, the lyric reestablishes the ritual of human communion” (Miller 52).

Second, there was an event that occurred from the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age, which was called the Harlem Renaissance. During the Harlem Renaissance, a numerous amount of African American put forth their talents and intellect. This is a prime example of a form of expression or cultural expression because a trend was set for more African Americans to start “Expanding their horizons and embracing the concept of the “new Negro” movement (P. Scott Corbett, et al). Even though discrimination was still around, this progressive movement helped African Americans contribute to literature, music, politics and more. In which helped shape and form a path for African-Americans to rediscover their black culture, for African American artists, writers, and other famous leaders to “formulated an independent black culture and encouraged racial pride, rejecting any emulation of white American culture” (P. Scott Corbett, et al).

Langston Hughes was known for his poems of black activity in America since the 1920’s to the 1960’s, which was the time of the Harlem Renaissance. “My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.” Throughout Langston’s life he has seen and experienced racism. He used these experiences to give him ideas of things he could write about. Back then white people were the majority in Harlem, but then once the blacks started to come they dispersed. “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.” Langston knew that blacks should express themselves no matter what color they are and not be ashamed of it. Some white people may like that they are expressing themselves, on the other hand, some white people may not accept that the

The intersection of social movements and Art is one that can be observed throughout the civil right movements of America in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The sixties in America saw a substantial cultural and social change through activism against the Vietnam war, women’s right and against the segregation of the African - American communities. Art became a prominent method of activism to advocate the civil rights movement. It was a way to express self-identity as well as the struggle that people went through and by means of visual imagery a way to show political ideals and forms of resistance. To examine how a specific movement can have a profound effects on the visual art, this essay will focus on the black art movement of the 1960s and

As I said in my first paragraph, Douglass was an exception, not many people of color could read, nonetheless, write. So when an african american, or author of a minority was published, it was unheard of and almost given a “cold shoulder”. It was hard for white men and women to become

During the 1920’s a new movement began to arise. This movement known as the Harlem Renaissance expressed the new African American culture. The new African American culture was expressed through the writing of books, poetry, essays, the playing of music, and through sculptures and paintings. Three poems and their poets express the new African American culture with ease. (Jordan 848-891) The poems also express the position of themselves and other African Americans during this time. “You and Your Whole Race”, “Yet Do I Marvel”, and “The Lynching” are the three poems whose themes are the same. The poets of these poems are, as in order, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude Mckay.

From the 1920’s to the mid 1930’s a literary, intellectual, and artistic movement occurred that kindled the African Americans a new cultural identity. This movement became known as the Harlem Renaissance, which is also known as the “New Negro Movement”. With this movement, African Americans sought out to challenge the “Negro” stereotype that they had received from others while developing innovation and great cultural activity. The Harlem Renaissance became an artistic explosion in the creative arts. Thus, many African Americans turned to writing, art, music, and theatrics to express their selves.

Du Bois is concerned with three main ideas within his essay, those being beauty, art as propaganda and how African Americans and their art will be ultimately judged. Beauty, however, is not how you view something’s allure to Du Bois, but rather who is it that will describe what is classical and beautiful? Suggesting that African Americans fit this role perfectly, Du Bois states “pushed aside as we have been in America, there has come to us not only a certain distaste for the tawdry and flamboyant but a vision of what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world.” He is also interested in how Negro art will distinguish itself from the works of other non-black artists.

     A few of the notable writers and poets were Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston. Langston Hughes was the most popular and gifted of all poets during this movement. Many of his poems described the different everyday lives of working class African Americans by adapting the rhythms of their music to his poetry. Some of the poems moved to the tempo of jazz and the blues. Another major figure was poet Claude McKay, a Jamaican immigrant whose militant verses urged African Americans to resist prejudice and discrimination. His poems also expressed the pain of life in the black ghettos of the 1920's, and the strain of being black in a world dominated by whites.

I like to believe that art was a way for Blacks to express their pain, hopefulness, and love that everything Black wanted and could just outright say was put into art; therefore, art was a happy place even though it expressed pain but in pain there is its own beauty. DuBois (1925:53) stated that even though Black art has both personal and universal aspects, that those two things are “combined with certain groups compulsion.” meaning that there was a Black person that spoke for the group through art. His thoughts would lead to black Aesthetic.

In the 1970s Black people were facing many troubles because of the White race .For example, Blacks were working as servants for them, and they were living in miserable conditions along with the violence against them and many other encroachments .So that many Afro- American were struggling in order to get back there dignity and their civil rights through establishing movements, including Black Arts Movement and Black Power Movement.

Art is something that can only be achieved with the manipulation of the imagination. This is successful when using objects, sounds, and words. Richard Wright and Amira Baraka brought the power of art into the limelight. Wright’s perception of art was for it to be used as a means of guidance, one that could uplift the Negro towards bigger and better goals. Baraka’s perspective of art was for it to be used as an active agent, one that could kill and then imprint society permanently. Baraka and Wright both wanted the Negro to see that there was a much brighter future ahead of them. Both wanted art to leave a stain, a stain that could not be easily erased, washed, or bleached. Both believed that Black Art had no need to be silent but instead daring.