1918: The Harlem Renaissance and the New Black
Big Idea
As a result of the Great Migration and the changes that World War I brought to America, African American writers, poets, singers, and artists converged upon New York City with a different attitude toward life and their relationship to their country. What resulted was a great outpouring of artistic expression and Black pride.
What’s important to know?
The New Black: As a new generation of creatives gathered in Harlem, New York, they articulated a more aggressive and powerful view of Black agency and rights in American society and shared this through their prolific artistic expressions.
Art in Action: Some of the literary, artistic, and musical greats coming out of the Harlem Renaissance are listed below for further exploration.
1: The New Black
Dizzy Gillespie
Image Source: Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division.
African American art, literature, music, and performance grew as they moved North and West, united to discuss, create, and develop ideas for their future in the United States. Termed the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke’s The New Negro formed the initial anthology introducing their work and the new mindset behind this work to the wider world.
Scholar Elizabeth McHenry (2021) wrote about the significance of this work in the context of the early twentieth-century. White people expected (and worked toward) Black failure and so success was often a contested realm. As McHenry wrote of the system of success established by White culture, Black success was often not recognized as such because of their “failure to participate in a system of valuation that is predicated on exploitation and conformity” (p. 6).
Students
Listen to jazz artists Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong playing “Umbrella Man.”
Dizzy Gillespie & Louis Armstrong performing “Umbrella Man.”
Despite being excluded and blocked from participation in main stream literary and artistic venues, the success of the Harlem Renaissance then “must be seen as a remarkable historical record of the road maps of their rejection of this positioning” (p. 5).
His anthology represented a newly organized and empowered group of intellectuals who as historian Jonathan Scott Holloway (1995) noted, “believed they had proven their worthiness and deserved their place at the table. They no longer had to wait passively for white benefaction to fear their own ‘blackness.’ Compared to their predecessors, the New Negroes were politically aggressive, culturally articulate, and urbane” (p. 60).
Zora Neale Hurston
Image Source: Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Collection
2: Art in Action
Some of the more well known works by Black creatives in the Harlem Renaissance are listed below:
Writers:
Zora Neale Hurston
Langston Hughes
Claude McKay
Nella Larsen
Countee Cullen
Jean Toomer
Jessie Fauset
Aaron Douglas
Dancer: Josephine Baker
Political activist: Marcus Garvey
Jazz composer: Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie
Blues Singer: Bessie Smith
Students
Want to learn more? Watch the video below on the Harlem Renaissance.
Video from Crash Course Black American History.
Your Turn
Why does the Harlem Renaissance occur when it does? What did it represent in the African American communities?
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Explore “The New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance” from the National Museum of African and African American History.
Explore “Uncovering America” from the National Gallery of Art.
Poetry from The Poetry Foundation from the Harlem Renaissance.
The Harlem Renaissance from The MET
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National Gallery of Art teaching resources.
PBS: Lesson Plans
Classroom materials from the Library of Congress.
Learning for Justice: The Harlem Renaissance.
Classroom activities from The Kennedy Center. (Grades 9-12)
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General Resources:
Influential African American writers from Missouri.
Read about Josephine Baker who is associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and was born in St. Louis.
Read about Coleman Hawkins who moved to Harlem, NY from St. Louis.
Read about Langston Hughes from St. Louis.
Books & Articles:
Butler, K. (2023). Slavery, Religion, and Race in Antebellum Missouri: Freedom from Slavery and Freedom from Sin. Lexington Books.
Archives:
University of Missouri Library Collections: “Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance by African American Women.”
Museums & Parks:
View this bust at the Saint Louis Art Museum from August Savage, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Cooks, B. R. (2011). “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968.” Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum. University of Massachusetts Press.
Early, G. ed. (1999). "Ain't But a Place": An Anthology of African American Writings about St. Louis. Missouri Historical Society.
Jackson, L. P. (2011). The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton University Press.
McHenry, E. (2002). Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Duke University Press.
——-. (2021). To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship. Duke University Press.
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Holloway, J. S. (1995). Harlem Renaissance Scholars Debate the Route to Racial Progress. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 8, 60–63. https://doi.org/10.2307/2963052
McHenry, E. (2021).To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship. Duke University Press.