The Harlem Renaissance

1 452 CHAPTER13 Terms & NamesTerms & NamesMAIN IDEAMAIN IDEAOne American's Story Zora NealeHurston James WeldonJohnson Marcus Garvey HarlemRenaissance Claude McKay Langston Hughes Paul Robeson Louis Armstrong Duke Ellington Bessie SmithAfrican-American ideas,politics, art, literature, andmusic flourished in Harlemand elsewhere in the Harlem Renaissance provideda foundation of African-Americanintellectualism to which African-American writers, artists, andmusicians contribute IT MATTERS NOWWHY IT MATTERS NOWWhen the spirited Zora Neale Hurstonwas a girl in Eatonville,Florida, in the early 1900s, she loved to read adventure stories andmyths. The powerful tales struck a chord with the young, talent-ed Hurston and made her yearn for a wider PERSONALVOICEZORA NEALE HURSTON My soul was with the gods and my body in the just would not act like gods.

2 Raking back yardsand carrying out chamber-pots, were not the tasks of Thor. Iwanted to be away from drabness and to stretch my limbs insome mighty struggle. quoted in The African American Encyclopedia After spending time with a traveling theater company andattending Howard University, Hurston ended up in New York whereshe struggled to the top of African-American literary society by hardwork, flamboyance, and, above all, grit. I have seen that theworld is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more orless, Hurston wrote later. I do not weep at [being Negro] I amtoo busy sharpening my oyster knife. Hurston was on the move,like millions of others. And, like them, she went after the pearl inthe oyster the good life in Voices in the 1920sDuring the 1920s, African Americans set new goals for themselves as they movednorth to the nation s cities.

3 Their migration was an expression of their changingattitude toward themselves an attitude perhaps best captured in a phrase firstused around this time, Black is beautiful. THE MOVE NORTHB etween 1910 and 1920, in a movement known as theGreat Migration, hundreds of thousands of African Americans had uprootedJUMP AT THE SUN:Zora Neale Hurstonand the HarlemRenaissanceThe HarlemRenaissancethemselves from their homes in the South and moved north to the big cities insearch of jobs. By the end of the decade, million of the nation s 12 millionAfrican Americans over 40 percent lived in cities. Zora Neale Hurston docu-mented the departure of some of these African Americans. A PERSONALVOICEZORA NEALE HURSTON Some said goodbye cheerfully .. others fearfully, with terrors of unknown dan-gers in their mouths.

4 Others in their eagerness for distance said nothing. Thedaybreak found them gone. The wind said North. quoted in Sorrow s Kitchen: The Life and Folklore of Zora Neale Hurston However, Northern cities in general had not welcomed the massive influx of AfricanAmericans. Tensions had escalated in the years prior to 1920, culminating, in thesummer of 1919, in approximately 25 urban race GOALSF ounded in 1909, TheNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP) urged African Americans to protest racial violence. B. Du Bois, a founding member of the NAACP, led a paradeof 10,000 African-American men in New York to protest suchviolence. Du Bois also used the NAACP s magazine, The Crisis,as a platform for leading a struggle for civil rights. Under the leadership of James Weldon Johnson poet, lawyer, and NAACP executive secretary the organiza-tion fought for legislation to protect African-American made antilynching laws one of its main priorities.

5 In 1919,three antilynching bills were introduced in Congress,although none was passed. The NAACP continued its cam-paign through antilynching organizations that had beenestablished in 1892 by Ida B. Wells. Gradually, the number oflynchings dropped. The NAACP represented the new, moremilitant voice of African GARVEY AND THE UNIAA lthough manyAfrican Americans found their voice in the NAACP, they stillfaced daily threats and discrimination. Marcus Garvey, animmigrant from Jamaica, believed that African Americansshould build a separate society. His different, more radicalmessage of black pride aroused the hopes of 1914, Garvey founded the Universal NegroImprovement Association (UNIA). In 1918, he moved theUNIA to New York City and opened offices in urban ghettosin order to recruit followers.

6 By the mid-1920s, Garveyclaimed he had a million followers. He appealed to AfricanAmericans with a combination of spellbinding oratory, massmeetings, parades, and a message of PERSONALVOICEMARCUS GARVEY In view of the fact that the black man of Africa has con-tributed as much to the world as the white man of Europe,and the brown man and yellow man of Asia, we of theUniversal Negro Improvement Association demand that thewhite, yellow, and brown races give to the black man hisplace in the civilization of the world. We ask for nothingmore than the rights of 400 million Negroes. speech at Liberty Hall, New York City, 1922 The Roaring Life of the 1920s453 AVocabularyoratory: the art ofpublic speakingMAIN IDEAMAIN IDEAAA nalyzingEffectsHow did theinflux of AfricanAmericans changeNorthern cities?KEYPLAYERKEYPLAYERJAMES WELDON JOHNSON1871 1938 James Weldon Johnson workedas a school principal, newspapereditor, and lawyer in Florida.

7 In1900, he wrote the lyrics for LiftEver y Voice and Sing, the songthat became known as the blacknational anthem. The first stanzabegins as follows: Lift ever y voice and singTill earth and heaven ring,Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;Let our rejoicing riseHigh as the listening skies,Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. In the 1920s, Johnson strad-dled the worlds of politics andart. He ser ved as executive sec-retar y of the NAACP, spear-heading the fight against addition, he wrote well-knownworks, such as God s Trombones,a series of sermon-like poems,andBlack Manhattan, a look atblack cultural life in New York dur-ing the Roaring also lured followers with practical plans, especially his program topromote African-American businesses. Further, Garvey encouraged hisfollowers to return to Africa, help native people there throw off whitecolonial oppressors, and build a mighty nation.

8 His idea struck a chord inmany African Americans, as well as in blacks in the Caribbean and the appeal of Garvey s movement, support for it declined in themid-1920s, when he was convicted of mail fraud and jailed. Althoughthe movement dwindled, Garvey left behind a powerful legacy ofnewly awakened black pride, economic independence, and reverencefor Harlem Renaissance Flowers in New YorkMany African Americans who migrated north moved toHarlem, a neighborhood on the Upper West Side of New York s Manhattan the 1920s, Harlem became the world s largest black urban community, with res-idents from the South, the West Indies, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Haiti. James WeldonJohnson described Harlem as the capital of black PERSONALVOICEJAMES WELDON JOHNSON Harlem is not merely a Negro colony or community, it is a city within acity, the greatest Negro city in the world.

9 It is not a slum or a fringe, it islocated in the heart of Manhattan and occupies one of the most beautiful.. sections of the city.. It has its own churches, social and civic cen-ters, shops, theaters, and other places of amusement. And it containsmore Negroes to the square mile than any other spot on earth. Harlem : The Culture Capital Like many other urban neighborhoods, Harlem suffered from overcrowding,unemployment, and poverty. But its problems in the 1920s were eclipsed by aflowering of creativity called the Harlem Renaissance ,a literary and artisticmovement celebrating African-American AMERICAN WRITERSA bove all, the Harlem Renaissance was a lit-erary movement led by well-educated, middle-class African Americans whoexpressed a new pride in the African-American experience. They celebrated theirheritage and wrote with defiance and poignancy about the trials of being black ina white world.

10 W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson helped these youngtalents along, as did the Harvard-educated former Rhodes scholar Alain Locke. In1925, Locke published The New Negro, a landmark collection of literary works bymany promising young African-American McKay,a novelist, poet, and Jamaican immigrant, was a major fig-ure whose militant verses urged African Americans to resist prejudice and dis-crimination. His poems also expressed the pain of life in the black ghettos and thestrain of being black in a world dominated by whites. Another gifted writer of thetime was Jean Toomer. His experimental book Cane a mix of poems and sketch-es about blacks in the North and the South was among the first full-length lit-erary publications of the Harlem Hugheswas the movement s best-known of Hughes s 1920s poems described the difficult lives of working-class AfricanAmericans.