Harlem Renaissance

• 1. Introduction

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  The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural movement that remade African-American life in music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics, and scholarship. Its center was Harlem, Manhattan, but its reach spread across the Northeastern and Midwestern United States. At the time, participants called it the "New Negro Movement", a name drawn from a 1925 anthology edited by philosopher Alain Locke. James Weldon Johnson described it as "the flowering of Negro literature." Locke himself would become known as the "Dean" of the entire movement.

  The zenith of this creative period fell between approximately 1924 and 1929. That span begins with a party hosted by Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life for black writers, where white publishers were in attendance. It ends with the stock-market crash and the onset of the Great Depression. What drove hundreds of thousands of people to Harlem in the first place? What did they build there, and who tried to claim it, control it, or dismiss it? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Great Migration

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  The roots of the Harlem Renaissance reach back to 1865 and the end of the Civil War. By then, the majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived in the South. The Reconstruction era opened a brief window of civic participation: by 1875, sixteen African Americans had been elected and served in Congress.

  That window slammed shut. From 1890 to 1908, racist factions in the Democratic Party passed legislation that disenfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites. Jim Crow segregation locked in white supremacist regimes across the South. Convict labor systems forced many thousands of African Americans back into unpaid work in mines, plantations, and on public-works projects. Death rates among those laborers were extraordinarily high.

  Agriculture, the livelihood most Black families depended on, came under assault from a new direction: the boll weevil eventually destroyed 8% of the country's cotton yield annually. That economic blow hit Black communities first and hardest. As life in the South grew more dangerous and more precarious, African Americans began moving north in large numbers.

  Harlem itself had been built in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for white middle- and upper-middle-class residents, complete with stately houses, grand avenues, and amenities such as the Polo Grounds and the Harlem Opera House. When waves of European immigrants arrived in the late 19th century, white residents moved farther north. In 1910, a large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was purchased by African-American realtors and a church group. The neighborhood's transformation had begun. When the First World War cut off the flow of European immigrant labor while massively expanding demand for industrial workers, the Great Migration accelerated. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans arrived in Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and New York.

• 3. The Literary Surge

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  In 1917, Hubert Harrison, known as "The Father of Harlem Radicalism", founded both the Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper of the New Negro Movement. Harrison's publications were explicitly political but also made space for the arts, running a "Poetry for the People" column and book reviews.

  Also in 1917, the premiere of Ridgely Torrence's Granny Maumee, The Rider of Dreams, and Simon the Cyrenian: Plays for a Negro Theater took place. Though Torrence was a white playwright, the productions featured African-American actors conveying complex human emotions and rejecting the stereotypes of blackface and minstrel shows. James Weldon Johnson called those premieres "the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American Theater."

  Two years later, in 1919, the poet Claude McKay published his militant sonnet "If We Must Die". He had earlier published two poems in the United States, "Invocation" and "Harlem Dancer", under the pseudonym Eli Edwards. Although "If We Must Die" never alluded to race explicitly, African-American readers heard its note of defiance against the racism and the nationwide lynchings then taking place. McKay had immigrated from Jamaica and brought a Caribbean perspective into the movement.

  Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro became what writers of the period called the cornerstone of the cultural revolution. It gathered well-known figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay alongside lesser-known voices, including the poet Anne Spencer. Langston Hughes captured the mood when he wrote that Harlem gave Black artists the courage "to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame."

  The movement also saw Richard Bruce Nugent, born in 1906 and living until 1987, make a significant contribution with his experimental story "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade", which introduced LGBT themes to Harlem Renaissance literature. Harrison himself, writing in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1927, challenged the term "Renaissance" altogether, arguing that the so-called movement overlooked "the stream of literary and artistic products which had flowed uninterruptedly from Negro writers from 1850 to the present."

• 4. Music, Stage, and Sound

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  The Harlem Stride style of piano playing emerged during this period and did something culturally specific: it blurred the line between poor African Americans and the socially elite. Jazz had long been associated with brass instruments, which were seen as symbols of the South. The piano, by contrast, was an instrument of the wealthy. By folding the piano into jazz, the style opened the music to a broader Black audience, and its popularity spread nationally.

  The performers who shaped this world included Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Jelly Roll Morton, Luckey Roberts, James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Andy Razaf, Fats Waller, Ethel Waters, Adelaide Hall, Florence Mills, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Fletcher Henderson. According to the scholar Charles Garrett, Ellington was not only a gifted composer and bandleader but also "an earthly person with basic desires, weaknesses, and eccentricities." He remained calm and focused on his music even as his fame grew.

  The musical Shuffle Along, with a score by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle and a book by F.E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles, debuted at the Sixty-Third Street Music Hall in 1921. Produced, composed, directed, and written by African Americans, it ran for 504 Broadway performances and completed three tours. Langston Hughes wrote in his 1940 memoir The Big Sea that the 1920s were "the years of Manhattan's Black Renaissance" and that Shuffle Along gave "just the proper push - a pre-Charleston kick - to that Negro vogue of the '20s."

  Composers including William Grant Still, William L. Dawson, and Florence Price incorporated the rhythms and harmonies of blues, spirituals, and jazz into classical concert pieces. Roland Hayes became the first African-American male to gain wide recognition as a concert artist both regionally and internationally. He had trained with Arthur Calhoun in Chattanooga, studied at Fisk University in Nashville, and later worked with Arthur Hubbard in Boston and with George Henschel and Amanda Ira Aldridge in London. Hayes had toured with the Fisk Jubilee Singers as early as 1911.

• 5. Art, Image, and Sculpture

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  Aaron Douglas, born in Kansas in 1899, is often called the "Father of African-American Art." His paintings used color, shape, and line to collapse time, merging what he saw as the past, present, and future of African-American history into single compositions. His style featured fragmentation, geometry, and hard-edge abstraction, drawing on both ancient Egyptian and Native American motifs. Douglas had migrated to Harlem but, like many visual artists associated with the movement, had left the neighborhood by the end of World War II.

  James Van Der Zee's photographic studio served as both a portrait studio and a gathering place for Harlem residents. He photographed Marcus Garvey, the leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association; W. E. B. Du Bois; Langston Hughes; Countee Cullen; Josephine Baker; and Madam C. J. Walker, who became one of the first African-American women to become a self-made millionaire. Kelli Jones called Van Der Zee "the official chronicler of the Harlem Renaissance." His work gained renewed attention when the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized the 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968, which included more than 300 photographs.

  Augusta Savage was born in Florida in 1892. In 1932, she founded the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts, offering free classes in painting, printmaking, and sculpting. She secured government funding to train youths and adults, then helped launch the Harlem Artist Guild in 1935. Savage was the only African American commissioned to create an exhibit for the 1939 World Fair in New York. Her piece Lift Every Voice and Sing quickly became one of the most popular works in that fair.

• 6. Fashion, Gender, and Queer Life

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  Josephine Baker performed in Paris during the height of the Renaissance and became a major fashion trendsetter for black and white women alike. Her gowns from the couturier Jean Patou were widely copied, and Vogue magazine called her stage costumes "startling." Baker is also credited with highlighting the art deco fashion era after she performed the "Danse Sauvage" in a skirt made of string and artificial bananas.

  Fashion for Black women during this period moved away from prim restraint toward short skirts, silk stockings, drop-waisted dresses, and cloche hats. Women wore loose garments accessorized with long strand pearl bead necklaces, feather boas, and cigarette holders. By the 1930s, an egret-trimmed beret had become fashionable. Men wore loose suits that evolved into the "Zoot" style, with wide-legged, high-waisted trousers, long coats with padded shoulders, wide lapels, wide-brimmed hats, colored socks, and velvet-collared Chesterfield coats. A fad for leopard-skin coats expressed pride in African heritage.

  Queer life was woven into the culture. The Cotton Club and Rockland Palace both held gay drag shows. Gladys Bentley, who cross-dressed, owned the Clam House at 133rd Street in Harlem, a hub for queer patrons. The Hamilton Lodge hosted an annual drag ball that drew thousands of spectators. Ma Rainey, known as "The Mother of Blues", was the first person to introduce blues music into vaudeville. Her protégé Bessie Smith sang openly about same-gender relationships. Together with Lucille Bogan, Rainey and Smith were collectively known as "The Big Three of the Blues."

  Henry Louis Gates Jr., in a 1993 essay titled "The Black Man's Burden", wrote that the Harlem Renaissance "was surely as gay as it was black." Yet the safety was partial: even within Harlem, a person could be arrested for engaging in homosexual acts. Abyssinian Baptist Church's minister Adam Clayton Powell Sr. actively opposed homosexuality. Women's sexual freedom in particular drew pushback from some in the Black bourgeoisie, who feared it would fuel racist stereotypes and set back the broader community's progress.

• 7. Debate, Criticism, and Legacy

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  The Harlem Renaissance relied on a support system of Black patrons, Black-owned businesses, and publications such as The Crisis, the monthly journal of the NAACP, and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League. Both magazines employed Harlem Renaissance writers and offered annual literary prizes. But the movement also depended on white publishing houses and white-owned magazines, a dependence that generated real tension.

  W. E. B. Du Bois did not oppose the relationship between Black writers and white publishers outright, but he criticized Claude McKay's bestselling 1928 novel Home to Harlem for catering to white readers' appetite for portrayals of Black "licentiousness." Langston Hughes pushed back against that kind of policing in his 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," writing that Black artists intended to express themselves freely regardless of what either white or Black audiences expected.

  Du Bois also promoted the concept of the "Talented Tenth": the idea that the exceptional men of the Negro race would guide the broader community. He had explored the psychology of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk as early as 1903, describing a divided awareness of one's identity shaped by racial consciousness. That idea was later revived during the Black Pride movement of the early 1970s.

  Some critics argued that Harlem intellectuals, while proclaiming a new racial consciousness, ended up mimicking white counterparts in clothing, manners, and etiquette. The movement's progressivist worldview left its participants unprepared for economic catastrophe: the Great Depression ended the Renaissance abruptly, exposing what critics called naive assumptions about the power of culture alone to transform social realities.

  Yet the movement's concrete achievements outlasted its critics. The migration of Southern Black Americans to the North changed the image of the African American from rural peasant to urban, cosmopolitan figure. The spirit of self-determination built during the Renaissance gave the Black community a foundation for the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Augusta Savage's free art classes, the 504-performance run of Shuffle Along, Van Der Zee's archive of Harlem faces, and Hughes's declaration that Black artists would express themselves without fear or shame all contributed to something that outlasted the Depression: the fact, as James Weldon Johnson described it, of a flowering that could not be unflowered.