How Did Art of the 1920s Influence the 1950s

The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York Metropolis equally a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a gilded age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and fine art.

SEE More:

Great Migration

The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem was meant to be an upper-class white neighborhood in the 1880s, simply rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and drastic landlords seeking to fill them.

In the early 1900s, a few center-class Black families from another neighborhood known as Black Bohemia moved to Harlem, and other Black families followed. Some white residents initially fought to keep African Americans out of the area, but failing that many whites eventually fled.

Outside factors led to a population boom: From 1910 to 1920, African American populations migrated in big numbers from the S to the North, with prominent figures like W.E.B. Du Bois leading what became known as the Neat Migration.

In 1915 and 1916, natural disasters in the due south put Blackness workers and sharecroppers out of work. Additionally, during and afterwards World War I, immigration to the United states fell, and northern recruiters headed south to entice Black workers to their companies.

Past 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the South had moved due north, and Harlem was one of the nearly pop destinations for these families.

Langston Hughes

This considerable population shift resulted in a Black Pride motility with leaders like Du Bois working to ensure that Black Americans got the credit they deserved for cultural areas of life. Two of the earliest breakthroughs were in poesy, with Claude McKay's collection Harlem Shadows in 1922 and Jean Toomer's Cane in 1923. Civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Homo in 1912, followed by God's Trombones in 1927, left their mark on the world of fiction.

Novelist and du Bois protege Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1924 novel There Is Defoliation explored the idea of Blackness Americans finding a cultural identity in a white-dominated Manhattan. Fauset was literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crunch and adult a magazine for Blackness children with Du Bois.

Sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, who was integral in shaping the Harlem literary scene, used the debut party for There Is Confusion to organize resources to create Opportunity, the National Urban League magazine he founded and edited, a success that bolstered writers like Langston Hughes.

Hughes was at that party along with other promising Black writers and editors, as well every bit powerful white New York publishing figures. Soon many writers found their piece of work appearing in mainstream magazines like Harper's.

Zora Neale Hurston

Anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston courted controversy through her interest with a publication called FIRE!!

Helmed by white author and Harlem writers' patron Carl Van Vechten and filled with works from prolific Black writers including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Aaron Douglas, the magazine exoticized the lives of Harlem residents. Van Vechten'due south previous fiction stirred up interest among whites to visit Harlem and take reward of the civilization and nightlife there.

Though Van Vechten's piece of work was condemned past older luminaries like DuBois, it was embraced by Hurston, Hughes and others.

Countee Cullen

Poetry, too, flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. Countee Cullen was 15 when he moved into the Harlem home of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the pastor of Harlem's largest congregation, in 1918.

The neighborhood and its culture informed his poetry, and as a college student at New York University, he obtained prizes in a number of poetry contests before going onto Harvard's masters programme and publishing his first book of poesy: Color. He followed it upwardly with Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown Daughter, and went on to write plays every bit well as children'south books.

Cullen received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry in and married Nina Yolande, the girl of West.E.B. DuBois. Their wedding was a major social event in Harlem. Cullen's reviews for Opportunity magazine, which ran under the column "Dark Tower," focused on works from the African-American literati and covered some of the biggest names of the age.

Louis Armstrong

The music that percolated in and then boomed out of Harlem in the 1920s was jazz, often played at speakeasies offering illegal liquor. Jazz became a not bad draw for not only Harlem residents, only outside white audiences as well.

Some of the nigh celebrated names in American music regularly performed in Harlem—Louis Armstrong, Knuckles Ellington, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, often accompanied by elaborate floor shows. Tap dancers like John Bubbles and Beak "Bojangles" Robinson were also popular.

Curl to Continue

Cotton Club

With the groundbreaking new music came a vibrant nightlife. The Savoy opened in 1927, an integrated ballroom with two bandstands that featured continuous jazz and dancing well past midnight, sometimes in the form of contesting bands helmed by Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford and King Oliver.

While it was fashionable to frequent Harlem nightlife, entrepreneurs realized that some white people wanted to experience black culture without having to socialize with African Americans and created clubs to cater to them.

The most successful of these was the Cotton Social club, which featured frequent performances past Ellington and Calloway. Some in the community derided the beingness of such clubs, while others believed they were a sign that Blackness culture was moving toward greater credence.

Paul Robeson

The cultural boom in Harlem gave Blackness actors opportunities for stage work that had previously been withheld. Traditionally, if Black actors appeared onstage, it was in a minstrel show musical and rarely in a serious drama with non-stereotypical roles.

At the center of this stage revolution was the versatile Paul Robeson, an actor, vocalist, author, activist and more. Robeson first moved to Harlem in 1919 while studying police force at Columbia University and continually maintained a social presence in the expanse, where he was considered an inspirational just approachable figure.

Robeson believed that arts and culture were the best paths forward for Black Americans to overcome racism and make advances in a white-dominated culture.

Josephine Baker

Black musical revues were staples in Harlem, and by the mid-1920s had moved south to Broadway, expanding into the white world. One of the primeval of these was Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's Shuffle Forth, which launched the career of Josephine Baker.

White patron Van Vechten helped bring more serious lack phase work to Broadway, though largely the work of white authors. Information technology wasn't until 1929 that a Black-authored play about Black lives, Wallace Thurman and William Rapp's Harlem, played Broadway.

Playwright Willis Richardson offered more serious opportunities for Black actors with a several ane-act plays written in the 1920s, equally well every bit articles in Opportunity mag outlining his goals. Stock companies like the Krigwa Players and the Harlem Experimental Theater also gave Black actors serious roles.

Aaron Douglas

The visual arts were never welcoming to Blackness artists, with art schools, galleries and museums shutting them out. Sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, a protégé of Auguste Rodin, explored African American themes in her work and influenced Du Bois to champion Black visual artists.

The most celebrated Harlem Renaissance artist is Aaron Douglas, frequently called "the Begetter of Black American Art," who adapted African techniques to realize paintings and murals, every bit well as volume illustration.

Sculptor Augusta Savage's 1923 bust of Du Bois garnered considerable attending. She followed that up with pocket-sized, clay portraits of everyday African Americans, and would afterward be pivotal to enlisting blackness artists into the Federal Fine art Projection, a division of the Piece of work Progress Administration (WPA).

James VanDerZee's photography captured Harlem daily life, equally well every bit past commissioned portraits in his studio that he worked to fill with optimism and split philosophically from the horrors of the by.

Marcus Garvey

Black nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism movement Marcus Garvey was born in Jamaica but moved to Harlem in 1916 and began publishing the influential newspaper Negro World in 1918. His shipping company, Black Star Line, established merchandise betwixt Africans in America, the Caribbean, Southward and Cardinal America, Canada and Africa.

Garvey is maybe all-time known for founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association, or UNIA, which advocated for "separate only equal" status for persons of African ancestry with the goal of establishing Black states around the world. Garvey was famously at odds with W.E.B. DuBois, who called him "the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America." His outspoken views likewise made him a target of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

Harlem Renaissance Ends

The end of Harlem's creative boom began with the stock market crash of 1929 and The Dandy Low. It wavered until Prohibition ended in 1933, which meant white patrons no longer sought out the illegal alcohol in uptown clubs.

By 1935, many pivotal Harlem residents had moved on to seek work. They were replaced past the continuous menstruum of refugees from the S, many requiring public assistance.

The Harlem Race Riot of 1935 bankrupt out following the abort of a young shoplifter, resulting in iii dead, hundreds injured and millions of dollars in property damage. The anarchism was a death knell for the Harlem Renaissance.

Impact of the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a aureate age for African American artists, writers and musicians. It gave these artists pride in and command over how the Black feel was represented in American civilization and prepare the phase for the ceremonious rights motion.

Sources

Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance. Laban Carrick Hill.
The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930. Steven Watson.
The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary For The Era. Bruce Kellner, Editor.

Share this post