About the Harlem Renaissance

Read About the Harlem Renaissance

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.Excerpt from Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

The Great Migration was the mass relocation of Black Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, Midwest, and West during the early and mid-20th century. Black Americans migrated to escape discriminatory Southern Jim Crow laws and racial terror, and seek greater economic opportunities, particularly in industrial jobs. By the 1920s, Harlem had become the largest urban center of Black life in the United States and one of the largest concentrations of people of African descent in the world. Harlem was just over three square miles, yet its rapidly growing population set the stage for a flourishing African American cultural, artistic, and intellectual movement centered there.

The Harlem Renaissance was a vibrant artistic period and a cultural awakening. Led by artists such as Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Augusta Savage, Aaron Douglas, W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, and Duke Ellington, these remarkable artists and thinkers built a thriving creative community, making art and telling stories about the Black experience through music, dance, fashion, literature, and visual art. Artists collaborated, inspired, and influenced one another. Through music, poetry, essays, visual art, and theater, Black artists created works rooted in African heritage, Southern folklore, and modern Black life while celebrating what W.E.B. Du Bois called, “the right of black folk to love and enjoy.” Their work gave the world a profound appreciation of Black culture as a counter-narrative that helped reshape American arts and literature.

The cultural explosion of the Harlem Renaissance was not just about music, literature, and art—it was also a proclamation of humanity by Black people. Artists and scholars told stories that acknowledged both the beauty and the pain of the Black experience. They challenged dominant narratives of oppression and racism. They demanded civil and political equality. They reclaimed connections to African cultural traditions. They fostered a sense of pride, social consciousness, self-determinism, and dignity. The Harlem Renaissance challenged racial stereotypes and the US racial hierarchy, transformed American culture, and laid important intellectual and cultural foundations for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The art, music, and literature created during the Harlem Renaissance continue to inspire and influence artists today.

Questions

Write or discuss your responses.

• How did the art made during the Harlem Renaissance inspire future generations of artists? What responsibilities do artists have when representing their communities?
• How did the Harlem Renaissance set the stage for the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, the Chicano Movement, and student movements of the 1950s and 1960s?
• How can making art about your identity and experiences be a form of activism? What messages can be communicated through art that speeches or textbooks cannot?

Taking action to improve communities and society or to challenge injustice and inequality through activities such as organizing, protesting, educating others, or advocating for change.

The Chicano Movement was a civil rights movement during the 1960s and 1970s in which Mexican Americans fought for equal rights, better education, fair labor conditions, political representation, and pride in their cultural heritage. The movement sought to end discrimination and expand opportunities for Mexican American communities across the United States.

Relating to the needs and rights of citizens and the general public.

A story, perspective, or account that challenges and offers an alternative to a dominant, mainstream, or “master” narrative.

Refers to the stories or perspectives that are most widely accepted and repeated in a society, often reflecting the views of those with the most power or influence, while other perspectives may be ignored or marginalized.

The state of being equal, in which everyone receives equal treatment, rights, and opportunities.

The period roughly from the 1870s to the mid-1960s in the United States, particularly in the South, during which state and local laws enforced racial segregation and discrimination against Black Americans.

Historical, organized, and systemic mistreatment of and discrimination towards a group or community. Oppression can be ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized.

Prejudice and discrimination against people because of their race.

Having awareness of important social issues.