The Harlem Renaissance And The Harlem Renaissance

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1912 , the 18th Amendment being added to the Constitution (prohibiting the use of intoxicating liquors) and then being repealed in 1933 , the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote in 1920 , Amelia Earhart becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic in 1928 , and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.

The Harlem Renaissance arguably lasted about 15 years and is said to have ended with the onset of the Great Depression. The European American infatuation with the Negro declined in the 1930s, in large part due to the collapse of the stock market. Also, the depression exposed the economic vulnerability of Harlem, given that much of the real estate in Harlem was owned by European Americans; and when the depression hit, African Americans lost their jobs at faster rates than European Americans, caused foreclosures on mortgages, evictions from rental properties, and a depression and alienation from the American Dream that was expressed violently in the first modem race riot,

Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote Their eyes were watching god, was an American famous folklorist, anthropologist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a social, cultural and artistic explosion and movement that kindled a new black cultural identity in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s. In 1926, Alain Locke declared that “Negro life is seizing its first chances for group expression and self-determination.” Harlem became the midpoint of a “spiritual coming of age” in which Lock’s “New Negro” altered social disillusionment to racial pride. According to the Project Muse (2015), The Harlem Renaissance also included the visual arts and cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Midwest and Northeast sides of the United States, and it was considered to be a reborn of African-American arts.

The Harlem Renaissance, originally called the New Negro Movement, was a movement that shook the 1920’s in the United States of America. The Harlem Renaissance spanned between the years of 1918 all the way to the mid 1930’s. This movement was a movement of the arts. It has been said that this time period was a rebirth to the African American arts. The Harlem Renaissance is an extremely important piece of history for America.

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.

These great numbers of blacks along with economic aggressive black businessmen is how Harlem's newly developed real estate was seized from the white middle-class and was converted into the biggest and most elegant black community in the Western world (Huggins p.14). With this acquisition, Harlem had become a great concentration of blacks from all over the country within the most urbane of American cities (New York) just feeling its youthful strength and posturing in self-conscious sophistication. The growth and flourishing of Harlem came at just the right time for black Americans to rekindle dreams of innocence and a new start in America . An essay written by one of Harlem's most prominent leaders Alaine Locke stated that "without pretense to their political significance, Harlem had the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia."(Knopf p.115). This idea spread like wildfire causing Harlem to be viewed by many as the "black metropolis or mecca".

The Harlem Renaissance started after World War I. Northern factories had a “huge demand” for workers; “southern blacks took this opportunity to leave the oppressive economic conditions in the South” (Great Migration). Most of them resided in Harlem, New York City. Artists in this movement had either painted pictures of everyday tasks, wrote poetry about freedom, and/or played jazz. It has highly themed of what it was like being a slave,

The Harlem Renaissance was a time for vast cultural celebration. The article “The Decade That Roared” (2014) explains that African Americans had sustained centuries of compelled slavery and the endeavor for abolition. Abolitioning slavery gave hope to many African Americans. It gave them high hopes for a new life, one lead by independence. The article says that instead, caucasian supremacy was quickly, legally, and violently restored to the New South, where ninety percent of African Americans lived. The text then says starting in about 1890, African Americans migrated to the North in great numbers. This great migration eventually relocated hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. According to the text, many discovered they had shared common experiences in their past histories and their uncertain present circumstances. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, the recently dispossessed ignited an explosion of cultural pride. Even though the African Americans had lost their short lived sense of freedom in America, they were not about to abandon all that they had worked for. This was known as the birth of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Great Migrations was the movement or relocation of over 6 million blacks from Southern rural regions to Northern urban areas. Looking to leave behind the racial tension of the south, and with hopes of new job opportunities in the north, many blacks moved in to urban cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Harlem. Out of these northern metropolises, the most popular was Harlem; “here in Manhattan (Harlem) is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse element of Negro life”(1050). Harlem became the mecca of black people, and between the years of 1920 and the late 1930s it was known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance, brought artiest, poets, writers,

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.

African Americans living in the south during the 1900s, still witnessed hardships even though they were free. African Americans showed not only their resiliency to want to fight for themselves, but showed that they are entertaining beings, using sports, music and different art forms to show white Americans that blacks have a culture of their own. The transition of African Americans from the Great Depression to World War II lead to another great migration where many black southerners moved to northern and western states for the demand of more workers for factories. African Americans a part of the U.S army were oppressed but still had a motive to fight. Various groups such as the NAACP, helped contribute to African American

Imagine the bustling streets of Harlem during the 1920s, African Americans are in finest clothing that they can buy going to their new jobs, people are chatting loudly as they walk down the stone streets; Harlem clubs were vivid during the night, as people danced to swing music and Jazz music. It was during this time where the african americans were free to work, to create, and to learn without any backlash. They were no longer considered slaves; but rather brothers and sisters of america who now held the power to change society and culture. They were no longer considered slaves; but now considered themselves brothers and sisters of america. The african american community were the ones that caused the phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance by showing their growth of unique talents in the ways of fine arts, literature, and music to change their society.

I always found the 1920’s a very interesting decade as it went from a lively moment to a depressing and struggling one within a split second. Therefore, I believe that I learned all of the concepts pretty well. For instance, I learned about the Harlem Renaissance, the cause and effect of The Dust Bowl, and the lasting political argument of the New Deal in the United States. First of all, the Harlem Renaissance was a time period where African Americans began to embrace their roots and create art/works to reflect their experience living in US society. However, during the Great Depression many Americans were left unemployed. In addition to drastic unemployment rates, the environmental disaster, also known as the Dust Bowl, contributed to many

The Harlem Renaissance took place between the 1920s and 1930s and was a boom of African-American cultural production that influenced the different arts, including music, poetry, activism, and literature. It began when some of the artists from the period took part in the Great Migration, when African Americans moved from the north to the south for a better life. The poem Harlem echoes the sentiments of the movement because it discusses the limitations of the dreams of African American during this time, which is why they wanted to move to the