The Harlem Renaissance : An Influential Movement Of African American Culture

Art has always been used to voice emotions or stories in a way that can easily be understood. Conquering nations used art to immortalize their leaders, warriors and conquests. Similarly, conquered nations used art to keep their cultures alive. This pattern of dueling voices, those in power versus the oppressed, is shown throughout American art. From slavery and the Civil War to World War II to the modern day, art has been there to stand up to oppressors and keep faith alive for the oppressed. No era better shows a revolution against oppression and cruelty through art than the Harlem Renaissance of the early 1920s.

There were many notable events taking place in the years 1900-1940, some being Pablo Picasso painting one of the first cubist paintings is 1907 , the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 , the 18th Amendment being added to the Constitution (prohibiting the use of intoxicating liquors) and then being repealed in 1933 , the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote in 1920 , Amelia Earhart becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic in 1928 , and the list continues. Undoubtedly one of the most influential of events during this time was the Harlem Renaissance. Even with its many leaders and innovators, it wouldn’t have been nearly as effective had it not been for Alain LeRoy Locke: black writer, philosopher, and teacher who influenced black artists to look to African sources for pride and inspiration. Without Locke’s contribution, the Renaissance would not have flourished as much as it did, and black pride would have taken longer to develop and accept.

The early 1900s was a time marked with tragedy in America. Started and ended with the Great Depression in between, it was not America 's finest moment. Prohibition was in place, the Klu Klux Klan was still marching, and the Lost Generation was leaving for Paris. But despite the troubling times, people still found beauty and meaning in the world around them. They still created art and celebrated life. The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic and literary movement that developed a new black cultural identity through artistic expression. It fused African traditions with slave history and American culture, and revealed to the world what life was like as a black person in America.

Because of the Harlem Renaissance, blacks experienced a breakthrough. They were able to move in a new and brighter path in which they were content. As a result of this big change, the Harlem Renaissance changed society for the better. Many of these acclaimed people during the Harlem Renaissance we still know of today because of the legacies they’ve left. Literature, music and art were sources in which those people used to express all sorts of feeling and pride. Furthermore, the Harlem Renaissance had impacted so many groups of people. African Americans were able to get jobs and be in a place in life were they weren’t pushed around and feeling

The time period that the fiction sets is the 1920s, when the society was experiencing significant transformations in every aspect of life. The Progressive Movement, which aimed at eliminating various means of political corruption and illegal business practices, had just abated. Harlem Renaissance, a new element of the 1920s, took place in City of New York and its effect swept across the country. Harlem Renaissance, a rebirth of African American culture and art, exerted substantial influence on black people, regardless of the social status and wealth they had. Nevertheless, such splendid cultural explosion could not conceal the limitations and inequality of the 1920s. Gender and race restrictions were not uncommon across the nation. Based on her own experience as a mulatto, Nella Larsen showcased the struggling and miserable life of mixed-blood people.

The Harlem Renaissance was a time period of innovative and hard-won artistic,cultural, and social freedom for african americans. It began about 1914 and continued into the early 1930s. There were some that embraced their people’s folk history and african roots and a few even exploited white america’s ideas of the black culture. While others set out to change the misconception of views about the lives of african americans. There were many prominent people during the Harlem Renaissance that helped to break barriers against african americans (Harlem Renaissance.Gale.)

The era in American history known as the Harlem Renaissance was a turning point in the lives of blacks in the United States. Harlem, a predominantly black urban community in New York, was the primary destination of the Great Migration. As such, it became the birthplace of a historic cultural movement. The movement of blacks from the southern states to the northern states after the Civil War kick-started the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement among blacks in the 1900’s that positively affected not only black Americans but the world around them.

The Harlem Renaissance, which is also known as the “New Negro Movement”, was a movement that was considered to have spanned throughout history from 1918and lasted until the mid-1930s. The main reason for the migration from the north to the south resulted from the Jim Crow Laws. Most Negroes felt they would be better off in the north than in the south. However the Ku Klux Klan was renounced by the republican whites but Democratic whites maintained power in the South by denying blacks the right to exercise their civil and political rights with lynch mobs and other forms of corporal punishment.

The “Harlem Renaissance” which we also refer to as “The Jazz Age” and/or “New Negro Movement” was the time where underprivileged African Americans migrated to the north mostly to Chicago and New York in search for a better life. This was a time of a cultural, social, and creative movement that enhanced the African American Community mostly in New York and Chicago between the years of 1917 and 1935. The Harlem Renaissance was the defining moment when African American photographers, writers, musicians, poets, artists, actors, scholars, dancers, composers and etc. migrated from the south to escape the oppression of Caucasian supremacy and poor conditions. They traveled in order to be able to express their talents freely. The movement allowed oppressed African Americans to express their creativity, skills, intelligence and determination. The Harlem Renaissance is the movement that contributed a fundamental part of the culture we know today. During this time African Americans started to embrace things of their culture such as music, theatre, and art.

The Harlem Renaissance showed a bizarre cultural change that helped the image of Africans around the world. The Renaissance’s purpose was to project the rebirth of the African American arts. Though, it originally wasn’t known as the Harlem Renaissance, but instead called the Negro Renaissance by Alain Locke. It all started with a insane migration of African Americans traveling north to pursue a new future for themselves and their families. With Harlem being the focus of where most of the African American migrate to, it also became where the America’s culture shifted. The Harlem Renaissance removed the old views of how blacks are supposed to be treated as slaves and gave them a way to show that they aren’t that different compared to other races.

The Harlem Renaissance was the first period in the history of the United States in which a group of black poets, authors, and essayist seized the opportunity to express themselves. The Great Migration was the movement of six million African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North during 1916 to 1970. Driven from their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregationist laws, many African Americans headed north in search for a better future. Due to the aftermath of World War One , it brought many African Americans into the thriving New York City. Moreover, during the early 1920s the African Americans developed their own culture by the creation of art, music, literature, including the battle in fighting for their civil rights and the effect of the Great Depression.

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.

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.

The Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that began in the 1920s and continued until the early 1930s, brought excitement and a new found freedom and voice to the African-Americans who had been silent and oppressed for far too long. “Centered on the Harlem district of New York City, the Harlem Renaissance was part of a nationwide urban revolution sparked by World War I. The cultural outburst, which followed the dramatic influx of Southern blacks into Northern cities during and after the war (the so-called Great Migration), brought the debate over racial identity and the future of black America to the forefront of the national consciousness” (Issues and Controversies in American History 2013). This was a time of political advancements, social criticism, and protest, as well as the growth of literature. During the Great Migration, Harlem, New York is where thousands of African Americans came to from the South because of the strong sense of racial pride and identity in this new place. “The Great Migration (get from book) was the mass movement of about five million southern blacks to the north and west between 1915 and 1960.” The economic motivations for migration were a combination of the desire to escape oppressive economic conditions in the south and the promise of greater prosperity in the north (Christensen 2008). Due to this, Harlem became known as the Negro Capital of the World and

The New Negro Movement, also known as the Harlem Renaissance, spanned in the 1920s in which African American culture attained unparalleled political and social recognition despite the ongoing horrors of being black in America. "New Negro" was coined during the Harlem Renaissance indicating a more open advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit to Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. The movement weakened the notion of the African diaspora as an event of forced migration isolated in the past and changed it into an ongoing practice in black internationalism. The New Negro Movement caused African Americans to claim their citizenship which stroked new boundaries within the communities and lead them to see the rise of jazz, powerful