Harlem Renaissance Essay Example

Harlem Renaissance Essay Example Harlem Renaissance Essay Harlem Renaissance Essay Essay Topic: The New Negro Summary of Book When Harlem was in Vogue. David L. Lewis’s celebrated history of the Harlem Renaissance. was published by Knopf in1981. The latest edition. a Penguin paper-back book with a aglow new foreword added by the writer. appeared in 1997. In Lewis’s position. the1919 Fifth-Avenue parade observing the return to Harlem from World War I of the celebrated 369th Regiment of the New York National Guard signaled the reaching of a black America ready for the phenomenon that became known as the Harlem Renaissance ; and the bloody 1935 Harlem public violence reflected the dramatic brusqueness with which the Great Depression had already prematurely extinguished the Renaissance’s brief starburst. The heroic 369th – wholly black except for the18 white officers who led it in combat – had so impressed the Gallic High Command that ( contrary to the uttered wants of senior American commanding officers ) they chose it among all Allied forces as the regiment to take the concl uding March to the Rhine. : It was the lone U. S. unit awarded the Croix de Guerre. Its lone black commissioned officer was Jim Europe – a widely-known bandleader – who conducted the regimental set. When America entered World War I. the most influential black rational – W. E. B. DuBois – counseled inkinesss of contending age to function their state unstintingly despite the nation’s acrimonious history of racism and a sequence of dissing determinations by the U. S. military demonstrating that they had small assurance that American Negroes had the bravery or intelligence to function in the armed forces in any but the most humble noncombat functions. DuBois emerged as the steering spirit of the Renaissance. Lewis describes him as the senior rational activist of his people. a symbol of brainy. complex. chesty uprightness. who. although short of stature towered over other work forces. defiant. sturdy ( but maddeningly inconsistent. ) DuBois was a ardent integrationist. His older challenger. Booker T. Washington. was non. Washington. a descendent of slaves who was born to poverty. had counseled American inkinesss to be patient. accepting. hardworking and low. He had led Tuskegee Institute in Alabama from its initiation as a one-room school to its development into a first-quality trade school developing American Negroes for success in the sorts of occupations they could anticipate to happen. Fisk University in Nashville was a black college more to DuBois’s gustatory sensation. Fisk’s end was to be for inkinesss a broad humanistic disciplines college in the finest American traditiion. Washington died in 1915. The following decennary and a half belonged to DuBois and his Talented One-tenth: the black clerisy ( novelists. poets. dramatists. painters. sculpturers. composers. faculty members and the like. ) And a absorbing batch they – and those they interacted with – were. DuBois believed that if educated. enlightened Whites were decently exposed to a go oning watercourse of first rate art from a broad array of black creative persons. they would come to acknowledge a black Talented Tenth every spot as intelligent. cultured and originative as the brightest. best educated. most cultivated Whites. And that. he believed. would be the accelerator for stoping racism and inequality non merely for the Talented Tenth but for inkinesss of all categories. He would turn out distressingly incorrect. During the daredevil mid-twentiess. there was a close bond between Manhattan’s black and white Bohemia: Harlem at the northern tip of the Island and Greenwich Village at the southern terminal. It was a clip. harmonizing to Langston Hughes: when at about every Harlem upper-crust dance or party. one would be introduced to assorted distinguished white famous persons at that place as invitees. . . . when about every Harlem Negro of any societal importance at all would be likely to state casually: As I was noting the other twenty-four hours to Heywood’ – intending Heywood Broun. Or: As I said to George’ – mentioning to George Gershwin. . . . [ a clip ] when local and sing royalty were non uncommon in Harlem. Not all of the creative persons. intellectuals and reformists consisting the Harlem Renaissance or the Lost Generation lived in Harlem or the Village. The two black writers whose fiction launched the Renaissance – Claude McKay and Jean Toomer – were Harlem foreigners who chose to populate anyplace else. Iconoclast H. L. Mencken who set much of the rational tone for both Bohemias lived in Baltimore. Several white authors from the South. including DuBose Heyward. writer of the novel Porgy that Gershwin adopted and adapted. were accepted as satellite members of the elect fraternity of black creative persons and intellectuals that black author Zora Hurston impishly dubbed the Niggerati. Lewis’s point is that the two Bohemia. Harlem and the Village. were besides topographic points in the head – concepts of civilization to be encountered [ at black colleges located elsewhere. ] the Algonquin Hotel dining room or. . . the Left Bank of the Seine. Lewis calls intolerant. anti-intellectual America the common antagonist of the two Bohemia: The black Talented Tenth and the white Lost Generation shared the common premiss that humanistic disciplines and letters had the power to transform a society in which. until deeply altered. there was no topographic point for. . . [ them ] . He concludes. nevertheless. that the two motions drew diametrically opposite decisions from their common premiss. In the Village. Bohemia was a value ; in Harlem it was a scheme. [ The Lost Generation ] were lost in the sense that they had no wish to happen themselves in a mercenary. Mammon-mad. homogenising modern America. [ The ] . . . New Negroes really much wanted full credence by mainstream America. Many of the movers and Shakerss who led the Renaissance were among the really most elegantly educated Americans – white or black. DuBois was an early black alumnus of Harvard. His protege . Howard Professor Alain Locke. graduated from Harvard Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude and went on to Oxford as the first ( and. for 60 old ages. the lone ) Afro-american Rhodes Scholar. Locke. harmonizing to Lewis. was overzealous on civilization. and by culture’ [ Locke ] . . . intend all that was non common. vulgar or racially unsavory. Locke yearly told Howard freshers that the highest rational responsibility is the responsibility to be cultured. Charles Johnson. a masterful booster of African American authors. was a grad pupil at the University of Chicago when he emerged into public position by authoring a 700-page study for a select Commission appointed to analyze the violent 1919 Chicago race public violence which had left 38 dead. 537 wounded and more than 1. 000 homeless. The National Urban League hired Johnson as editor of Opportunity. the League’s new monthly. Johnson’s end for Opportunity was to redeem through art the standing of his people. In Lewis’s position. although Johnson had considerable self-importance. it was his nature – and passion – to work in secret and patiently behind the scenes. recruiting and steering others into the limelight. It was Johnson who orchestrated the 1924 dinner sponsored by Opportunity magazine that resulted in the Harlem Renaissance being foremost recognized as a motion and having its name. Johnson chose as locale for the dinner Manhattan’s Civic Club. The lone upper-crust New York nine without colour or gender limitations. the Civic Club had become an of import meeting land for black and white progressives. The apparent ground for the dinner was to observe the publication of There Is Confusion. a novel by Jesse Fauset. a immature Afro-american adult female who was adjunct editor to DuBois of The Crisis. the NAACP’s monthly magazine. Fauset. like Locke from an established old-Philadelphia black household. chose as her topics for the novel educated. upper category inkinesss. Johnson’s program for the jamboree. nevertheless. extended good beyond honouring Fauset. He asked Frederick Allen. so Harper and Brothers editor. to choose and ask for a representative group of noteworthy white authors and intellectuals. including Mencken. Eugene O’Neill and Carl Van Doren. Johnson himself invited non merely the best known black authors and intellectuals. including DuBois. James Weldon Johnson. Locke. McKay and Toomer. but besides a broad array of talented but still vague black authors. including Hughes. The event was a immense success. The victors of Opportunity’s first literary competition received money awards. Carl Van Doren forecast a sparkling hereafter for Afro-american authors who. he thought. would convey sorely needed energy and verve to a slightly pale American literary landscape. Reasoning the evening’s celebrations. Johnson announced that Opportunity would patronize another competition and feast the undermentioned twelvemonth. After the plan. the editor of Survey Graphic magazine offered to give an full issue to the work of gifted black authors. Survey Graphic’s particular edition entitled: Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro appeared the following twelvemonth to rave reappraisals. Gross saless exceeded twice the magazine’s normal circulation. Opportunity’s 2nd feast was even more successful than the Civic Club matter. 316 invitees attended. At the banquet’s terminal. Johnson announced that support for the undermentioned year’s competition and feast was already in manus from a man of concern: Casper Holstein. Holstein’s concern was the Numberss racket. a concern he had invented in New York and would entirely command until the 30s when Dutch Schultz shouldered him to the side. During the four old ages following the Civic Club dinner. there was an avalanche of black creativeness: novels. poesy. dramas. picture. sculpture. music. the acting humanistic disciplines and unfavorable judgment. DuBois. Locke. James Weldon Johnson. Fauset. Walter White ( the NAACP’s Assistant Executive Secretary ) and a host of others – white every bit good as black – provided advice. and leading and led the cheers. The magazines of the two civil rights organisations. Opportunity and The Crisis. played cardinal functions. printing poesy. short narratives. essays and exposure of pictures and sculptures eve ry bit good as critics’ pieces measuring the literary. acting and other artistic work of Renaissance creative persons. When the work of a author or other creative person appeared in The Crisis. that work received broad circulation. DuBois’s editorship of The Crisis had been so successful that. by 1919. it was selling 100. 000 transcripts monthly. Lewis notes that during a clip of rampant illiteracy when harsh demands on their laboring hours left black workers small clip. the magazine someway found its manner into sharecroppers’ cabins and cramped mill workers’ tenements. frequently lying following to the household Bible. Among the many white authors who gave support to the Negro Renaissance were Sherwood Anderson. Theodore Dreiser. John Dos Passos. Malcolm Cowley. Lewis Mumford. Lincoln Steffens. Robert Benchley and Fanny Hurst. Generous support and sponsorship for Renaissance creative persons and for the civil rights organisations every bit good. came from a figure of foundations and besides from affluent persons. Chicago concern leader Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Foundation were among the most generous. The Garland Foundation did much to promote Afro-american artistic accomplishment. patronizing awards competitions. doing money grants and confabulating gifts. among other things. Another foundation. the Harmon. sponsored a Traveling Exhibition of the Work of Negro Artists. which shipped a big aggregation of pictures and sculpture to 50 metropoliss. accompanied by many transcripts of a thick expensively illustrated catalog with text by Locke. More than 150. 000 viewed the Exhibition. The most colourful of the single frequenters was Charlotte Mason Osgood. a enormously affluent Park Avenue socialite dowager fascinated by the crude and alien in art. Among her many black proteges were Locke ( whom she called her precious brown boy and was her emissary to the Talented Tenth ) ; Langston Hughes ( whom she called her most cherished child ) ; the immature novelist. Zora Hurston ; and painter Aaron Douglas. Promoting them to name her Godmother. she liberally subsidized their day-to-day lives with monthly stipends. autos and the similar and amply rewarded their artistic accomplishments. She thought this entitled her to give way to their work. She repeatedly instructed Langston Hughes to be primitive in more of his authorship. Finally he demurred. inquiring her to release him from her imperium [ and ] attempt to accept his new thoughts. and showing the hope that her friendly relationship that had been so beloved to him would go on. With acrimonious maledictions. the old lady cast him for all clip from her Park Avenue Eden. From the beginning DuBois. Charles Johnson. patrician James Weldon Johnson and other civil rights organisation leaders sought to promote black creative persons to take as their topics educated. upper category inkinesss and to avoid picturing Negro life as crude. alien. animal or titillating – properties frequently associated with the poorly-educated Afro-american lower class life in utmost poorness. They were non peculiarly successful in this enterprise. although they themselves limited their ain originative authorship to the portraiture of decorous upper category Afro-american life. Lewis captures the ultimate result of this contretemps in his treatment of painter Palmer Hayden’s still life. Fetich et Fleurs: It gave back absolutely the ethos of the Renaissance – natural seeming appositions if non perfect brotherhood of refined esthesia and dark powers. One of the more utmost attempts to sensationalize the underbelly of Afro-american life was the fresh Nigger Heaven by white author. Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten. who had earlier been the New York Times music critic. had famously played a cardinal function as an of import white affair between Harlem authors and Greenwich Village elite. On countless occasions. he had introduced talented immature black creative persons to publishing houses. esteemed creative persons and other movers and Shakerss in the white community who could be helpful toward progressing their callings. He and his married woman. poet Fania Marinoff. hosted legion parties to which they invited both Harlem Renaissance and white creative persons and intellectuals. They besides attended infinite black-hosted. mixed-race parties in Harlem and were familiar figures at the Harlem nines and speakeasies that white New Yorkers were progressively patronizing. In effect. Van Vechten. prior to authoring Nigger Heaven. had been heartily welcomed into the clique of elect inkinesss and their particular white confidants that immature black novelist Hurston had dubbed the Niggerati. Nigger Heaven’s blunt word picture of the Negro lower class made it clearly controversial for the black clerisy. However. in a parallel narrative line. the novel besides portrayed the refined life style of the urbane. sophisticated black clerisy. Many taking Harlem Renaissance figures could easy place themselves among the book’s characters. On the whole. they were depicted rather sympathetically. which likely persuaded many of them. including Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. to praise the book. Other inkinesss. including more than a few Renaissance intellectuals. thought the book repugnant. Arch image breaker George Schuyler. Harlem’s opposite number to Mencken. deplored the ever-present need of white authors in portraying the Negro. to demo that even when he appears to be civilized. it is merely necessary to crush a tom Tom or beckon a rabbit’s pes and he is ready to deprive off his Hart Schaffner A ; Marx suit and sit away wild-eyed on the dorsum of a crocodile. Renaissance authors repeatedly visited the affair of black individuality – peculiarly as impacted by the forced crossbreeding all excessively common to slavery and the attendant pick confronting light-skinned African americans of whether to traverse over and base on balls as white. The writer’s ain tegument colour could deeply impact his position on these affairs. Although Lewis does non expressly say so. possibly mostly mute. but invariably vibrating on the fringe. was an overarching paradox. Expressed at its most utmost: Is a individual – all of whose ascendants are white save one octoroon gramps – black? If so – by that definition – are virtually all of us who consider ourselves white. in fact black. Another common yarn running through much Renaissance authorship was the position that slavery-era hybridization and other facets of the Negro’s debatable history in the U. S. had become insurmountable obstructions to any meaningful go oning connexion to African inkinesss. In Hughes’s short narrative. Burutu Moon. the storyteller. an Afro-american visiting Africa in hunt of his roots. asks his African host to see a Ju-Ju dance. No. him excessively atrocious! White adult male neer go. But I’m non a white adult male. the storyteller objected. You no black adult male neither. Lewis provides a hoarded wealth trove of intriguing item about Harlem life in the 20s. Did you know. for illustration. that Harlem’s celebrated Cotton Club did non acknowledge inkinesss as invitees. but merely as performing artists? Particularly gratifying is Lewis’s colourful description of the rent parties that flat renters threw to raise money for their monthly rent: Saturda y darks were terrific in Harlem. but rent parties every dark were the particular passion of the community. Their very being was avoided or hardly acknowledged by most Harlem authors. like that other rare and challenging establishment. the counter level where varied and frequently perverse sexual pleasances were offered cafeteria -style. With the exclusion of Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. about noone. . . admitted go toing a rent party. These were times. Willie ( the Lion ) Smith callbacks. when the mean Negro household did non let the blues. or even raggedy music. played in their places. In fact. though. it often came about that. after a staid parlour assemblage and after the nightclubs closed. poets and authors ( and even an NAACP functionary ) would follow instrumentalists to one of these every night rent-paying rites. If sweet mamma is running wild. and you are looking for a Do-right kid. merely come about and linger – crooned a printed invitation preserved by Langston Hughes to one of the more luxuriant personal businesss. Or Cora Jones’s at 187 West 148th Street : Let your dad drink the whiskey/Let your mamma drink the wine/ But you come to Cora’s/And make the Georgia swot. . . . Rent parties began anytime after midnight. ululation and stomping sometimes good into morning in a miasma of fume. liquor. collard leafy vegetables. and hot music. Willie the Lion Smith called them jumps. ’ shouts. ’ or struts. ’ where. for a one-fourth. you would see all sorts of people doing the party scene ; officially dressed society folks from down- town. police officers. painters. carpenters. mechanics. truckmen in their workingmen’s apparels. gamblers. tribades. and entertainers of all sorts. . . . At the more luxuriant prances. along approximately 3 a. m. pacing would accelerate when Willie the Lion. James P. Johnson. Claude Hopkins. Fats Waller. or Corky Williams – and even Edward Kennedy ( Duke ) Ellington – arrived palm-slapping and tuning up. The Great Depression blew out the visible radiations of the Harlem Renaissance. The awards competitions. grants and gifts dried up. Circulation of The Crisis and Opportunity turned aggressively down. their budgets were reduced and they struggled to last. The two Samuel johnsons left the civil rights organisations for chairs at all-black Fisk University in Nashville. The end product of Talented Tenth authors and other creative persons declined to a drip. And the proposition that racial bias in America could be extinguished by dazing literature and art produced by the Talented Tenth was exposed as the myth it had ever been. Lynchings increased – making a sum of 28 in 1934. Lesser Acts of the Apostless of dogmatism appeared to be distributing. non decreasing. As the White House made agreements to implement a Congressional grant to pave the manner for World War I gold-star female parents to go by ocean line drive to Europe for a graveyard circuit. angry letters from white female parents poured in objecting to its program to hold white and black adult females travel on the same vas. The disposal reversed class. The white female parents sailed off quickly in self-respect on a excellent ship. The black female parents followed well subsequently in a second-class vas. The Renaissance had non even improved the batch of the Talented Tenth. Paul Robeson and his married woman were turned off from the Guild Room of London’s Savoy Hotel after protests by other American tourers. The Robesons had often gone at that place in the yesteryear. and he was about to return to America for a concert circuit beginning in Carnegie Hall. On this eventide. nevertheless. the direction informed Robeson that the Hotel did non allow Negroes to come in the suites any longer. ’ Similarly. the founder-publisher of Chicago’s Defender and his married woman were asked to go forth their London hotel after one twenty-four hours because other American invitees had protested their presence and threatened to blacklist the hotel by word of oral cavity. They eventually found lodging in a private place. Carl Van Vechten’s married woman. Fania Marinoff. was quoted as stating that after tast [ ing ] all the drinks in all the speakeasies and traveling to hundreds of parties in flats. dark nines. honky tonks and speakeasies in Harlem and the Village. it all seemed very hollow. I neer liked it. she observed. observing more significantly that Van Vechten was equally weary of that life. Reacting in choler. The Pittsburg Courier. a newspaper widely circulated to the black community. announced: Let that be a warning to Negroes who bow and scrape to sponsoring Whites. Most dramatic. possibly. was the instance of W. E. B. DuBois. DuBois outraged his Talented-Tenth adherents by printing essays in The Crisis. recommending what he provokingly called segregation. which he described more specifically as voluntary action to increase our separation from our fellow work forces. He advocated it as a step toward the ultimate interrupting down of barriers. For Walter White. so the NAACP’s Executive Secretary. this was the last straw. He demanded that DuBois recant or go forth the NAACP. DuBois left. On March 19. 1935. Lewis concludes. the public violence expecting its immediate cause swept down Lenox Avenue with 10 thousand angry Harlemites destructing two million dollars in white-owned commercial belongings. By the following forenoon. three inkinesss had died. 30 people were hospitalized and one hundred were in gaol.