the harlem renaissance research paper

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A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance

With the end of the Civil War in 1865, hundreds of thousands of African Americans newly freed from the yoke of slavery in the South began to dream of fuller participation in American society, including political empowerment, equal economic opportunity, and economic and cultural self-determination.

Unfortunately, by the late 1870s, that dream was largely dead, as white supremacy was quickly restored to the Reconstruction South. White lawmakers on state and local levels passed strict racial segregation laws known as “Jim Crow laws” that made African Americans second-class citizens. While a small number of African Americans were able to become landowners, most were exploited as sharecroppers, a system designed to keep them poor and powerless. Hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) perpetrated lynchings and conducted campaigns of terror and intimidation to keep African Americans from voting or exercising other fundamental rights.

With booming economies across the North and Midwest offering industrial jobs for workers of every race, many African Americans realized their hopes for a better standard of living—and a more racially tolerant environment—lay outside the South. By the turn of the 20th century, the Great Migration was underway as hundreds of thousands of African Americans relocated to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York. The Harlem section of Manhattan, which covers just three square miles, drew nearly 175,000 African Americans, giving the neighborhood the largest concentration of black people in the world. Harlem became a destination for African Americans of all backgrounds. From unskilled laborers to an educated middle-class, they shared common experiences of slavery, emancipation, and racial oppression, as well as a determination to forge a new identity as free people.

The Great Migration drew to Harlem some of the greatest minds and brightest talents of the day, an astonishing array of African American artists and scholars. Between the end of World War I and the mid-1930s, they produced one of the most significant eras of cultural expression in the nation’s history—the Harlem Renaissance. Yet this cultural explosion also occurred in Cleveland, Los Angeles and many cities shaped by the great migration. Alain Locke, a Harvard-educated writer, critic, and teacher who became known as the “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance, described it as a “spiritual coming of age” in which African Americans transformed “social disillusionment to race pride.”

The Harlem Renaissance encompassed poetry and prose, painting and sculpture, jazz and swing, opera and dance. What united these diverse art forms was their realistic presentation of what it meant to be black in America, what writer Langston Hughes called an “expression of our individual dark-skinned selves,” as well as a new militancy in asserting their civil and political rights.

Among the Renaissance’s most significant contributors were intellectuals W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Cyril Briggs, and Walter Francis White; electrifying performers Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson; writers and poets Zora Neale Hurston, Effie Lee Newsome, Countee Cullen; visual artists Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage; and an extraordinary list of legendary musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ivie Anderson, Josephine Baker, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and countless others.

Josaphine Baker

At the height of the movement, Harlem was the epicenter of American culture. The neighborhood bustled with African American-owned and run publishing houses and newspapers, music companies, playhouses, nightclubs, and cabarets. The literature, music, and fashion they created defined culture and “cool” for blacks and white alike, in America and around the world.

As the 1920s came to a close, so did the Harlem Renaissance. Its heyday was cut short largely due to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and resulting Great Depression, which hurt African American-owned businesses and publications and made less financial support for the arts available from patrons, foundations, and theatrical organizations.

However, the Harlem Renaissance’s impact on America was indelible. The movement brought notice to the great works of African American art, and inspired and influenced future generations of African American artists and intellectuals. The self-portrait of African American life, identity, and culture that emerged from Harlem was transmitted to the world at large, challenging the racist and disparaging stereotypes of the Jim Crow South. In doing so, it radically redefined how people of other races viewed African Americans and understood the African American experience.

Most importantly, the Harlem Renaissance instilled in African Americans across the country a new spirit of self-determination and pride, a new social consciousness, and a new commitment to political activism, all of which would provide a foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In doing so, it validated the beliefs of its founders and leaders like Alain Locke and Langston Hughes that art could be a vehicle to improve the lives of the African Americans. 

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The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters

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Clare Corbould, The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts, and Letters, Journal of American History , Volume 98, Issue 3, December 2011, Pages 853–854, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jar427

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For more than twenty years scholars have been revising canonical interpretations (which were not all that old) of the phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance. Feminist literary studies led the way, insisting on the legitimacy of including in that canon the domestic novels of Jessie Redmon Fauset, the studies of mulatto identity in Nella Larsen's fiction, and the supposedly bourgeois poetry of Georgia Douglas Johnson, to name a few. Those revisionist scholars and others argued for extending the geographic and temporal boundaries of the movement to include other East Coast cities, and more recently Chicago and the West Coast, and to define its parameters as roughly 1919 to 1940. In the last eight years or so, the focus has expanded once again to take in the internationalist, transnational, and diasporic dimensions inherent to the cultural production of the era and to consider more fully output other than literature, including visual arts and imagery, music, and drama. Still others have sought to consider the Harlem Renaissance in relation to black culture and politics more generally, in treatments of the history of black identity and of early civil rights activism.

This collection of fourteen essays reflects clearly this broadening of approaches. It addresses not only the literary production of Harlem's “New Negroes,” the traditional focus of scholarly inquiry, but also music and drama. The essays that treat literature focus on the little-known works of well-known figures rather than on standard texts. Echoing recent critical attention to fields beyond the Harlem of the book's title, several of the essays pursue their subjects beyond uptown New York, to the South, Africa, Haiti, Paris, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere in Europe. The collection focuses also on aesthetics, gender, sexuality, and radical politics. Among the collection's highlights is an essay by Claire Oberon Garcia, which examines Fauset's nonfiction and early short stories to argue spiritedly that Fauset deserves consideration as an intellectual committed to discussions of race and belonging. Myriam J. A. Chancy's analysis of Zora Neale Hurston's adaptation of Haitian Kreyol phrases and ideas is another revelation, providing evidence of rich connections between black Americans and others in the diaspora.

The collection makes its most substantial contribution to the field in its attention to the social history of the era in “Class and Place in Harlem,” one of the book's five sections. Jacqueline C. Jones's article on the marriage of the preeminent young poet Countee Cullen to Yolande Du Bois, the only child of W. E. B. Du Bois and Nina Du Bois, uses black newspaper articles to reveal, at least implicitly, the broad contexts that made the ill-fated marriage seem like a good idea and to describe a culture of celebrity that explains the presence of thousands of black New Yorkers on the streets hoping to glimpse the bride and groom. Jacob S. Dorman's article, “Back to Harlem: Abstract and Everyday Labor during the Harlem Renaissance,” makes similar good use of newspaper reports, as well as sociological analyses from the era. Dorman argues that the “Harlem” of the Harlem Renaissance was always a symbolic abstraction that has dazzled scholars who have neglected the history of working people who lived alongside the glitterati of the cultural movement. His descriptions of everyday life in Harlem are vivid and compelling.

As in most collections, the essays are uneven in quality and some suffer particularly from a lack of context. Many spelling and typographical errors further mar the book. Taken together, however, and with a strong concluding statement from the editor, the articles suggest rich avenues for further research.

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The Harlem Renaissance: A Cultural, Social, and Political Movement

• Sarah Ritchie Eastern Mennonite University

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A series about the 100th anniversary of a movement that changed american culture — and its legacy..

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“Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick” collects 21 stories from throughout her career, including eight that illuminate the Great Migration north.

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Harlem Renaissance

By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 14, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as 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 golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art.

Great Migration

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

In the early 1900s, a few middle-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.

How Did the Harlem Renaissance Start?

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

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

By 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the South had moved north, and Harlem was one of the most popular destinations for these families.

Langston Hughes

This considerable population shift resulted in a Black Pride movement 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 poetry, 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 Man in 1912 , followed b y 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 Confusion explored the idea of Black Americans finding a cultural identity in a white-dominated Manhattan. Fauset was the literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis and developed a magazine for Black 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 as powerful white New York publishing figures. Soon many writers found their work appearing in mainstream magazines like Harper’s .

Zora Neale Hurston

Anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston courted controversy through her involvement 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’s previous fiction stirred up interest among whites to visit Harlem and take advantage of the culture and nightlife there.

Though Van Vechten’s work was condemned by 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 on to Harvard’s master's program and publishing his first volume of poetry: Color. He followed it up with Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown Girl and went on to write plays as well as children’s books.

Cullen received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry and married Nina Yolande, the daughter of W.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.

Harlem Renaissance Musicians

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 great draw for not only Harlem residents but outside white audiences also.

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

Cotton Club

With the groundbreaking new music came 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 battling 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 Club, which featured frequent performances by Ellington and Calloway. Some in the community derided the existence of such clubs, while others believed they were a sign that Black culture was moving toward greater acceptance.

Paul Robeson

The cultural boom in Harlem gave Black 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, singer, writer, activist and more. Robeson first moved to Harlem in 1919 while studying law at Columbia University and continually maintained a social presence in the area, where he was considered an inspirational but 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 earliest of these was Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s Shuffle Along , which launched the career of Josephine Baker .

White patron Van Vechten helped bring a more serious lack of stage work to Broadway, though largely the work of white authors. It 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 several one-act plays written in the 1920s, as well as articles in Opportunity magazine 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 Black 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 , often called “the Father of Black American Art,” who adapted African techniques to realize paintings and murals, as well as book illustrations.

Sculptor Augusta Savage ’s 1923 bust of Du Bois garnered considerable attention. She followed that up with small, clay portraits of everyday African Americans, and would later be pivotal to enlisting black artists into the Federal Art Project, a division of the Work Progress Administration (WPA) .

James VanDerZee ’s photography captured Harlem's daily life, as well as commissioned portraits in his studio that he worked to fill with optimism and separate philosophically from the horrors of the past.

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 trade between Africans in America, the Caribbean, South and Central America, Canada and Africa.

Garvey is perhaps best known for founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association, or UNIA, which advocated for “separate but 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 also 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 Great Depression . It wavered until Prohibition ended in 1933, which meant white patrons no longer sought out illegal alcohol in uptown clubs.

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

The Harlem Race Riot of 1935 broke out following the arrest of a young shoplifter, resulting in three dead, hundreds injured and millions of dollars in property damage. The riot was a death knell for the Harlem Renaissance.

Why Was the Harlem Renaissance Important?

The Harlem Renaissance was a golden age for African American artists, writers and musicians. It gave these artists pride in and control over how the Black experience was represented in American culture and set the stage for the civil rights movement .

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.

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A History of the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms – from the roman à clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations – this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression. It aims to re-frame conventional ideas of the New Negro movement by presenting new readings of well-studied authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, alongside analysis of topics, authors, and artists that deserve fuller treatment. An authoritative collection on the major writers and issues of the period, A History of the Harlem Renaissance takes stock of nearly a hundred years of scholarship and considers what the future augurs for the study of 'the New Negro'.

Rachel Farebrother ,  University of Swansea Rachel Farebrother is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at Swansea University. She is the author of The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance (2009), which was awarded honourable mention in the 2010 British Association of American Studies book prize. Her essays have appeared in Journal of American Studies, MELUS, and Modernism/Modernity and various edited collections including Fionnghuala Sweeney and Kate Marsh's Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem, and the Avant-Garde (2013) and Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker's The Oxford Cultural and Critical History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North America (2012).

Miriam Thaggert ,  University of Iowa Miriam Thaggert is Associate Professor of English, Department of English, SUNY-Buffalo. She is the author of Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (2010). Her essays have appeared in African American Review, American Quarterly, American Literary History, Feminist Modernist Studies, and Meridians. Her second book is a social and literary history of African American women and the railroad in American culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Contributors:

Rachel Farebrother, Miriam Thaggert, Daniel G. Williams, Clare Corbould, Kathleen Pfeiffer, Caroline Goeser, Sonya Posmentier, Sinéad Moynihan, Fionnghuala Sweeney, Maureen Honey, Katharine Capshaw, James Smethurst, Jak Peake, Noelle Morrissette, Jonathan Munby, Mariel Rodney, Hannah Durkin, Andrew Warnes, Wendy Martin, Shane Vogel, Deborah E. McDowell

Farebrother, Rachel, and Miriam Thaggert, eds. A History of the Harlem Renaissance . Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021. https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/history-harlem-renaissance?format=HB .

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 10, 2020 • ( 0 )

Between 1919 and 1934 African-American artists flocked to New York City, specifically to Harlem. This era was to become one of the most prolific periods of African-American writing. What Alain Locke called in 1925 a “New Negro Movement” was later defined by historians as the Harlem Renaissance. Among the poets who gained popularity during this era were Langston Hughes, Claude Mckay, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, Anne Spencer, Gwendolyn Bennett, Helene Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimké, and James Weldon Johnson. Many leading fiction writers also emerged during this period, including Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, Jessie Redmond Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Wallace Thurman. Moreover many of the poets of this era also wrote fiction. The Harlem Renaissance also included the creative works produced by brilliantly talented, prolific dancers, musicians, visual artists, and photographers.

Several conditions enabled this renaissance: Booker T. Washington’s death, World War I, deteriorating southern racial conditions, greater publishing opportunities, and Marcus Garvey’s influence on racial pride. When Booker T. Washington, a former slave and founder of Tuskegee Institute, died in 1915, W. E. B. DuBois, the first African American to take a Ph.D. from Harvard and one of the principal organizers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), replaced him as the principal spokesperson for African Americans. Although he held tremendous respect for Washington, DuBois disagreed strongly with his conciliatory attitude toward racial injustice in the South. DuBois endorsed more urgent demands for social change.

Langston Hughes

When World War I ended in 1918, returning black soldiers, especially those who had been recognized in France for their heroic achievements, were angered by racial conditions that remained unchanged in the United States. When in 1917 Woodrow Wilson proclaimed U.S. involvement in the war as a means to make the world safe for democracy, many African- American soldiers had felt certain that U.S. discrimination would be dismantled. Confronted by the same racial injustice and violence they left, many black veterans joined their anger with a rising spirit of unrest that was beginning to pervade the country.

Racial conditions in the South were becoming unbearable for African Americans, especially in rural areas. Workers faced unfair sharecropping arrangements, lynching, and segregation, as well as inferior schools and living conditions. Many began moving north with the hope of finding greater economic opportunity in the industrial cities of New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh. Soon African-American professionals followed. This huge influx of African Americans to the North became known as the Great Migration. Many of these people settled in Harlem, which was rapidly becoming known as a center for artistic opportunity.

In his essay “The New Negro,” Alain Locke, the first African-American Rhodes scholar, attempted to direct the spirit of unrest he saw rising in many black communities as a result of these changing conditions. Riots were breaking out across the country. McKay’s famous sonnet “If We Must Die” (1919) addresses this revolutionary spirit: “If we must die, O let us nobly die, / . . . Pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back!”

Locke’s solution was the creation and display of talented art, which would become the black ticket into the social fabric of white America. Placing the future in the hands of young artists like McKay, Locke charged them to produce the uncompromising art essential to the reconstruction of African-American identity. Johnson agreed that “nothing will do more to change [the] mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through his production of literature and art” (9).

In this art blacks would be more authentically represented. No more minstrel figures, such as the mammy and coon, comic grotesque figures that represented black females as asexual nurturers and black males as comic buffoons. Crisis, a publication of the NAACP, as well as Opportunity, the publishing arm of the Urban League, held writing contests to inspire young artists. Other outlets included the black socialist publication the Messenger , and white publishers and patrons who became more receptive to black art as well.

A variety of styles and literary devices, including dialect, strict standard English, high and low culture, parody, irony, and satire, fill the pages of Harlem Renaissance writings, creating a window into the rich diversity of perspectives alive in African-American communities. Yet artists continued to debate the best way to represent blacks, which classes to foreground in their work, and whether or not to use dialect. In addition writers struggled against the mean-spirited images of blacks as promiscuous. Some artists considered downplaying the theme of sexuality, which, when used unwisely, could only fuel the harmful effects of this stereotype. Others, like Hughes, insisted that artists must not be servants to outside approval. In his famous essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), Hughes responds to a fellow artist’s dismissal of his own culture in favor of uncritical acceptance of white Western culture as standard. Declaring the artist’s inability to realize full creative potential without respect for his own culture, Hughes issues a bold mandate to all young black artists:

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. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. . . . If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. (309)

Toomer was the first artist to enjoy widespread critical acceptance of his first work, Cane (1923), success that charged the confidence of other Harlem Renaissance writers. The collection, containing a novella, poetry, and short fiction, as well as drawings, is most noted for its focus on the strength and beauty of rural black women, such as Fern. In his free verse Hughes treats themes of black pride, black unity, racial violence, black poverty, black womanhood, African heritage, and integration. He also transcribed blues, jazz, and gospel into poetic verse. Such innovation gained him the reputation of “poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance.” In one of his most famous poems, the musician and his sounds come alive on the page: “Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. / He played the chords then he sang some more.” Johnson explored the sermonic tradition in his poetry, maintaining black verbal art forms, while McKay and Cullen cast their poetry in the traditional form of the sonnet. Cullen, perhaps more closely aligned with European-inspired poetic verse, nonetheless indulged in social protest with his poems “Hritage” (1925) and “Yet Do I Marvel” (1925), which questions God and the paradox of a black poet: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing; / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” Although Bontemps once collaborated with Hughes on a literary project, his poetry, influenced by his religious upbringing, is meditative and spiritual with a deep sense of racial pride.

While the movement often seemed to be dominated by men, women also managed to leave their enduring mark on the poetry of the era. Georgia Douglas Johnson attended to racial themes, yet was equally drawn to romanticism, sentimentalism, and issues concerning the human condition. Angelina Weld Grimké treated racial themes with a lyric sensibility. Much of Anne Spencer’s work is concerned with gender more than race. Race-conscious Gwendolyn Bennett wrote lyrics that focused on the “grace and loveliness” of the descendants of Africans (Gates 1227). Helene Johnson was described as “one of the younger group who has taken . . . the ‘racial’ bull by the horns” (Johnson 279).

Other important writers of the period include Eric Walrond, Sterling A. Brown, and Dorothy West. Walrond wrote of his experiences as a West Indian in Harlem, Brown continued Hughes’s emphasis on the poetics of blues culture, and West examined the wealthy class of blacks, writing and publishing well into her nineties.

In opposition to the radical modernist movement and such poets as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Harlem Renaissance poets did not view the entire modern world as a wasteland (see THE WASTE LAND ). Instead a sense of optimism pervaded their work, unlike the fatalism and pessimism found in many works of modernism . Like blues music, the poetry transformed hopelessness with love and laughter, the words and images infused with the power of persistence.

Historians David Levering Lewis and Nathan Huggins argue that the Harlem Renaissance failed in its mission to challenge inequitable conditions for blacks in North America through art. Literary critic Houston A. Baker, Jr., disagrees: He insists that such faith in the power of art could be “a mark of British and American modernism,” but that British and white American scholars would dismiss such efforts by labeling the movement a failure (14). Certainly if the success of the movement can be gauged by its influence on generations to follow, the Harlem Renaissance was a tremendous success. Not only did the movement have an impact on individual artists, but the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT of the 1960s looked to the Harlem Renaissance for guidance and direction.

An Introduction to the Black Arts Movement

An Introduction to the Beat Poets

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baker, Houston A., Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., et al., eds. “The Harlem Renaissance.” Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Nathan Huggins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. “The Weary Blues.” In Norton Anthology of African- American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Johnson, James Weldon, ed. The Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1922. Karenga, Maulana. Introduction to Black Studies. Los Angeles: Kawaida Publications, 1982. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. McKay, Claude. “If We Must Die.” In The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1922. ———. A Long Way from Home. New York: Lee Furman, 1937. Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Liveright, 1923. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins, 1980.

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‘The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism’ Review: Centre and Margin

Jenny Wu Reviews 22 May 2024 ArtReview

The new show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York revives a time in which collaborative cultural production thrived not only from consensus but also from debate

Two figures in fur coats pose for James Van Der Zee with their gleaming Cadillac V-16 parked in front of brownstones in Couple, Harlem (1932), an intimate and nostalgic gelatin silver print. A studio portrait from the same oeuvre, Person in Fur-Trimmed Ensemble (1926), captures the glamorous countenance of an individual likely dressed for a drag ball at the Hamilton Lodge. Van Der Zee, whose work is a mainstay in The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism , documented a period of cultural revival that blossomed in Upper Manhattan and internationally during the 1920s. His photographs were by nature collaborations between himself and the Black cosmopolitan urbanites he encountered on the streets or hosted in his studio. Running through the 160-work survey of Van Der Zee’s milieu is, likewise, a palpable sense of the collectivity that sparked what is now called the Harlem Renaissance.

From the start of the Great Migration (1910–70), when six million Black Americans fled the Jim Crow South for the Northeast and other parts of the US, to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, approximately 175,000 African Americans lived and prospered in Harlem, an eight-square-kilometre neighbourhood north of Central Park, where they threw interracial soirées and published periodicals highlighting Black intellectuals, some of which, including The Crisis (1910–) and Opportunity (1923–1949), appear in vitrines among the show’s ample selection of printed matter.

In Harlem, collaborative cultural production thrived not only from consensus but also from debate. According to the exhibition materials, Black literati of the 1920s were split between two divergent strategies for racial equality. The first, proposed by W.E.B. Du Bois, who founded The Crisis , deployed Black art as a rhetorical weapon against existing racist propaganda. The second, spearheaded by Alain Locke, who wrote for Opportunity , urged for art to be treated as autonomous self-expression rather than as rhetoric. The shortlived but radical magazine Fire!! (1926) charted a third course. Founded by a cohort of writers and artists who sought to address heterogeneity within the Black community, Fire!! featured writings on colourism, prostitution and queerness. Its first and only issue appears here with the scowling Sphinx on its red-and-black, Aaron Douglas-designed cover facing, as if to challenge, the demure, leashed lion on the cover of the more conservative Crisis ’s September 1924 issue, illustrated by Laura Wheeler Waring.

Throughout the exhibition, paintings, sculptures, photographs and films are grouped in ways that underscore competing visual idioms, such as those of Archibald Motley’s Portrait of a Cultured Lady (1948), an oil painting that depicts the gallerist Edna Powell Gayle in an elegant interior and a naturalistic style, and William H. Johnson’s Woman in Blue (c. 1943), one that monumentalises an unnamed Black sitter in a folk art-inspired idiom, with bold outlines, exaggerated proportions and thick impasto. One of the subtler arguments the layout evinces is the inversion of traditional hierarchies of centre and margin. Works by white modernists such as Henri Matisse and Roland Penrose supplement, rather than overshadow, those of Black luminaries and are limited to those depicting convivial interracial relationships: actress Aïcha Goblet sits smiling with the Italian model Lorette in Matisse’s painting Aïcha and Lorette (1917), while model Ady Fidelin dozes with three white contemporaries in Penrose’s C-print Four Women Asleep (1937).

Perhaps because it carries the weight of The Met’s infamous 1969 exhibition ‘Harlem on My Mind’: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968 , which presented the neighbourhood through the lens of photojournalism and, according to reviews at the time, without sufficient didactics, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism offers no shortage of conscientiously positioned and meticulously plotted visual arguments. The thoroughness produces, paradoxically, a longing for anomalous and unruly artworks that might prompt viewers to engage actively in interpretation. A spark of potentially unsettled meaning arises in Friends (1942), a lithograph made by Margaret Taylor Goss-Burroughs over a decade after the Wall Street Crash. It shows two women, one of whom appears Black and the other white, seated shoulder to shoulder, facing forward. According to the wall text, their mirrored poses convey how ‘human commonalities transcend racial difference’, but the image implies a more complex camaraderie. The women in fact both sit with their lips pursed and their arms crossed, as if they’ve been arguing. In light of the interpersonal negotiations that were required to produce the cultural renaissance in Harlem, one suspects their friendship was likewise tempestuous and hard-earned.

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through 28 July

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87 Harlem Renaissance Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best harlem renaissance topic ideas & essay examples, ⭐ good research topics about harlem renaissance, 👍 simple & easy harlem renaissance essay titles, ❓ harlem renaissance research questions.

• Harlem Renaissance: “Dream Boogie” Poem by Langston Hughes Therefore, the selected work represents the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance and can be used for improving the understanding of the movement.
• Harlem Renaissance: Historical and Social Background It was a period of social integration and the development of literary and artistic skills by the African Americans. The Harlem Renaissance was a period of artistic explosion of the African Americans and an opportunity […]
• The Harlem Renaissance and American Culture The Harlem Renaissance was born as a result of the significant events which occurred in the lives of Afro-Americans at the beginning of the 20th century.
• Harlem Renaissance: Historical Roots and Climate Harlem Renaissance is, undoubtedly, a phenomenon unmatched in the strength of its impact both on the contemporary culture of the 1920s and 1930s, but also on the very identity of all African-Americans to this day.
• Harlem Renaissance and African American Culture The Harlem Reissuance grew after the abolition of slavery and later culminated into a greater force with the consequences brought about by WWI and the change in the cultural and social structure in the American […]
• Harlem Renaissance Influence on Afro-American Culture The Harlem Renaissance is widely known as a period in the history of the United States that greatly influenced the general development of American society and in particular the development of Afro-American culture.
• Harlem Renaissance Movement Analysis It was around this time that they began to advocate racial equality with the Americans and with the birth of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 their struggle for the […]
• Harlem Renaissance and Its Role for Afro-Americans The movement also helped to pave the way for the further struggle of the African-American population for their rights because now they emerged as educated and talented people.
• The Harlem Renaissance and the Struggle for a Black Identity The failure of Reconstruction and the implementation of the racial segregation threw the Afro-Americans into a difficult dilemma. Booker Washington was a prominent figure of the Post-Reconstruction Era and the leader of the Afro-American community.
• Harlem Renaissance: African American Art The use of OBSCURA cameras was one of the strategies that advanced the works of art that several artists of the time executed.
• Harlem Renaissance’ History: Issues of Negro Writers The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the ‘New Negro Movement,’ refers to the blossoming of African American intellectual and cultural life in the decade of the 1920s.
• Harlem Renaissance Poets Overview The poet describes how the musician sways to the rhythm of the blues and the emotional uplifting he gets out of the experience.
• Literary Works of Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance was a term used collectively by social thinkers to represent the efforts by African-Americans to transcend the white-favored government systems in the new states, especially New York, from the southern states where […]
• Angelina Grimke’s Contribution to the Harlem Renaissance Grimke’s play was one of the first to be written by black authors highlighting the plight of blacks in the US.
• Harlem Renaissance: The Cultural Movement In 1931, she collaborated with Langston Hughes in the production of the play “Mule Bone,” which was never published because of the tension between the two writers, and in 1934, she authored her first novel, […]
• Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance Within a short period, Harlem was transformed in to one of the trendiest neighborhoods in the whole of New York. Although Langston’s poems, spoke of the experiences of black Americans in light of a white […]
• Creative Movement, Harlem Renaissance, Helped Black People Express Themselves
• Harlem Renaissance Poets: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen
• The Harlem Renaissance: Creation of a New Nation
• Self Identity During the Harlem Renaissance
• Description, Analysis, Interpretation, and Judgment of the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance and Zora Neale Hurston
• The Harlem Renaissance and the Golden Age for African
• Coleman Hawkins’ Reign During the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance: The Center of the Urban Black Life
• Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance Summary
• Exploring African American Culture: The Harlem Renaissance
• James Langston Hughes and the Influence of the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance Art and the Birth of Black Identity
• The Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement
• Harlem Renaissance and White Literary Movements
• The Modernist Movement Harlem Renaissance Emerged Early 20th Century Both
• Surrealism and Harlem Renaissance Two Historical Art Periods
• The Harlem Renaissance and Its Role in American Literature
• The Poets and Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
• Colorism Within the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance Promotes Creative Development Among African-Americans
• African Drumming and Dance, Spirituals, Minstrel Shows and Harlem Renaissance
• The Harlem Renaissance and the Literature of Black America
• Harlem Renaissance and the Example of Duke Ellington, a Jazz Musician
• Black Music During the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance and the Influence of the Irish Renaissance
• The Harlem Renaissance Changed America Through Literature
• Slave Culture Into the Harlem Renaissance: Finding a Home in Modernism
• Christianity Through Harlem Renaissance Literature
• Langston Hughes, Prolific Writer of Black Pride During the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance and the Surrealism Historical Periods
• The Harlem Renaissance Popularized American Vernacular Dance
• The Past and Present Influence of the Harlem Renaissance
• Modern Day Racial Passing of the Harlem Renaissance
• Hurston and Her Novel’s Critics: Racism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Disputed Merits of the Eyes Were Watching God
• Beauty, Strength, and Intelligence of African Americans in the Harlem Renaissance
• Black Art Movement and the Harlem Renaissance
• The People, Art, and Literary Movement of the Harlem Renaissance
• Harlem Renaissance Period Transformed African-American Identity and History in the US
• African American Paintings During the Harlem Renaissance
• What Are Key Aspects of the Harlem Renaissance?
• How Did the Great Migration Impact the Harlem Renaissance?
• Did the Harlem Renaissance Make Important Contributions to the African American Experience?
• What Was the Overall Impact of the Harlem Renaissance?
• How Did Harlem Renaissance Lead to Many Social Changes?
• Was the Harlem Renaissance a Failure or Not?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Shape Literature?
• Did the Harlem Renaissance Represent Everyone or Was It an Elitist Movement?
• How Was the Harlem Renaissance Reflected in Toni Morrison’s Jazz?
• Who Did the Harlem Renaissance Movement Appeal to and How?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Writer Zora Neale Hurston Influence America?
• What Historical, Social, and Cultural Forces Shaped the Harlem Renaissance?
• How Did the Irish Renaissance Influence the Harlem Renaissance?
• Why Was Harlem the Center of the Renaissance of African American Arts in the 1920s and 1930s?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Affect Future African American Artists in America?
• Who Do You See as the Most Major Player in the Harlem Renaissance, and Why?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Impact American Society During the 1920S and Beyond?
• What Similarities and Differences of Theme, Imagery, Tone and Style Are Demonstrated in the Works of Harlem Renaissance Authors?
• How Did the Creative Expression of African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s Lead to a New Black Cultural Identity?
• What Does the Harlem Renaissance Reveal About U.S. History?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Help Americans to Understand the History and Culture of African Americans?
• What Were the Key Concerns of the Harlem Renaissance?
• Why Did the Harlem Renaissance End?
• How Did the Harlem Renaissance Influence Art Today?
• Who Was the Most Important Contributor to the Harlem Renaissance and Why?
• Why Is the Harlem Renaissance Important to America?
• How Did Harlem Become Black?
• Why Did Harlem Become the Capital of Black America?
• How Did Jazz Influence the Harlem Renaissance?
• Where Did the Harlem Renaissance Get Its Name?
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The Enduring Legacy of Langston Hughes: Key Achievements and Impact on American Literature

This essay about Langston Hughes highlights his significant contributions to literature through the lens of his role in the Harlem Renaissance. It discusses how his poetry, infused with jazz and blues rhythms, reflects the African American experience and broader human conditions. Hughes’s work is portrayed as a mirror to society, emphasizing themes of social justice and equality. The essay also notes his ability to bring characters to life in his prose, pushing readers to confront societal issues and inspiring future generations to advocate for change.

How it works

Langston Hughes, often hailed as the poet laureate of the African American soul, left an indelible mark on literary history through his masterful blend of artistry and social awareness. Born in 1902 in the gentle breezes of Joplin, Missouri, Hughes rose like a mythical creature from the depths of societal constraints, reaching the zenith of his influence during the Harlem Renaissance. This vibrant era of the 1920s and 1930s, characterized by a flourishing of artistic and intellectual life, nurtured Hughes’s burgeoning talents, allowing his poetic works to flourish and resonate through the ages.

Hughes’s poems resonate with the cadences of jazz and blues, embodying the spirit of the streets and mirroring the pulse of America. His seminal works, such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Harlem (Dream Deferred),” delve deep into the heart of the African American narrative, creating a rich mosaic of desire, endurance, sorrow, and victory that touches a diverse audience.

Hughes transcended the boundaries of race with his poetic prowess, casting a wide net over the expanse of the human saga. His poetry serves as a societal mirror, sharply reflecting its splendors and blemishes alike. Through his eloquent language, Hughes challenges his readers to view the world through a different lens, to feel the struggles of the marginalized, and to dream of a realm ruled by fairness and justice.

In his narrative works, Hughes demonstrated a keen ability to animate his characters with extraordinary liveliness. In books like “Not Without Laughter” and “The Ways of White Folks,” he expertly strips away societal facades to expose the visceral humanity underneath, urging his readers to examine their own prejudices and preconceptions.

Hughes’s enduring legacy is perhaps most evident in his unshakeable dedication to social justice and equality. In an era marred by deep-seated racial animosity, his writings were a beacon of hope and a powerful summons to those committed to the cause of a brighter future. His literary contributions have inspired countless advocates for justice to continue the struggle for a society where every individual is accorded respect and dignity.

Reflecting on Hughes’s enduring influence reminds us of literature’s capacity to alter perceptions, bridge gaps, and forge a more inclusive and equitable world. His words still reverberate, a testament to the transformative impact of literature to enlighten, elevate, and reshape our collective reality.

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The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism , at New York’s Metropolitan Museum: Rewarding, incomplete look at contributions of African-Americans to art and culture in first half of 20th century

Clare hurley , fred mazelis 17 may 2024.

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Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, February 25-July 28, 2024

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism  is an imposing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York of 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film and ephemera from the period of cultural awakening in the US between 1920-1940 that has come to be called the Harlem Renaissance.

These works of art, in a variety of styles, were part of a flowering that included not only the visual arts but also literature, essays, drama, dance and—perhaps most famously—jazz. The Harlem Renaissance indelibly influenced the art of the early 20th century in America and in much of the rest of the world. The influence of African folk art on European and American artists beginning in the late 19th century helped establish a new idiom befitting the radical transformation of the modern era.

Important as this exhibition is, however, it falls considerably short of doing full justice to its subject matter. The cultural transformations are not examined in their social and historical context, not understood as the complex product of material life. They are instead for the most part presented in isolation, as the product simply of the consciousness of their creators. The introduction to the exhibition itself, after correctly explaining that the Harlem Renaissance was “the first African American-led movement of international modern art,” declares, in the jargon of identity politics, that the exhibition “explores how artists…visualized the modern Black subject.” This is thoroughly inadequate and misleading.

The exhibition opens with two striking portraits, one of historian, sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and the other of Alain Locke (1885-1954), the writer, philosopher and the first black Rhodes Scholar, who is often called the “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance. Both portraits were done in 1925 by Winold Reiss, a German-born artist not widely enough known and acknowledged today. These men elaborated the theoretical basis of the movement, first championed by Locke as the “New Negro Movement,” and then renamed the Harlem Renaissance to signal a greater emphasis on its cultural and aesthetic aspects.

Some of the writers who became prominent in the early years included Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Jean Toomer (1894-1967), Countee Cullen (1903-1946) and Langston Hughes (1901-1967). Claude McKay (1890-1948), the Jamaican-American poet and writer, joined the revolutionary movement for a number of years, and attended the 4th World Congress of the Communist International in 1922 in Moscow.

Charles Alston (1907-1977), Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), Horace Pippin (1888-1946) and William H. Johnson (1901-1970) were among the better-known visual artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance, while others who feature prominently in the Met exhibition, like Archibald J. Motley, Jr. (1891-1981) and Olivia Wheeling Waring (1887-1948), are less familiar.

The exhibition is divided into sections including street life, the European connection, photography and, perhaps most vividly, portraits. These run the stylistic gamut from sensitive, traditionally realist paintings by Waring, such as  Girl in a Pink Dress  (1927), of a young flapper, and  Girl with a Green Cap  (1943), reminiscent of the society portraits of American expatriate John Singer Sargent, to Alston’s mesmerizing  Girl in a Red Dress  (1934), with her elongated neck and semi-stylized features evoking an African sculptural archetype as much as a young girl.

By contrast, the thoroughly modern, flat and brightly colored forms of Johnson’s  Street Life  (1939-40),  Man in a Vest  (1939-40) and  Woman in Blue (1942) wholeheartedly embrace abstraction over realistic representation. Johnson, in fact, did not live in Harlem, but in Europe and North Africa from 1926 until 1938 and in Denmark after the war, until he died in a New York hospital, a victim of mental illness.

Several of the portraits are of Harlem Renaissance figures: one of writer and NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson (1943) by Waring, a rather demure one of the outspoken Hurston, by Douglas (1926), and one of Douglas himself (1930) with his palette, by Edwin Harleston. Finally, there is another Reiss portrait of Hughes, likewise created in 1925, looking dreamily over an open page while a Constructivist background in blue suggests his thoughts.

The exhibition conveys the spirit of Harlem’s legendary cabarets and barrooms, with figures hunched excitedly over poker games and pool tables (one by Lawrence) or jitterbugging to the wail of saxophones (several by Johnson). The style of these paintings tilts more to the modern; some, like Hale Woodruff’s  The Card Players  (1930), have a Post-Impressionist feeling, reflecting a European, specifically Parisian kinship.

Though the Harlem Renaissance had its origins very much in Harlem, the Met show also includes work done in other US cities. A number are by Motley, a Chicago resident, another artist who deserves more serious appreciation. In addition to his lively, lavender-infused scenes of working class leisure time, his portraits of his father (1922), his Uncle Bob (1928) and his grandmother (1922), the latter included only in the catalog, are exceptionally moving.

The exhibition’s selection of sculpture includes a powerful bronze head of actor Paul Robeson by Jacob Epstein (1928) and another thoughtful-looking Hughes by Teodoro Ramos Blanco (1930s), as well as standout pieces by Augusta Savage— Gamin  (1929) and  Lift Every Voice and Sing   (The Harp) (1939), the latter based on James Weldon Johnson’s hymn of the same name, christened the black national anthem in the era of struggle against Jim Crow segregation.

The Harlem Renaissance cannot be understood apart from a detailed examination of the Great Migration. The exhibition makes brief mention of the latter, but without explaining its significance. Until 1910, going all the way back to colonial times, both before and after the abolition of slavery, 90 percent of the black population remained in the South, in general in rural areas. With the Great Migration, there was a movement from South to North; there was a movement from country to city, even in the south; and there was a movement to wage labor. All this took place alongside the emergence of socialism as a mass movement in Europe, and the first successful socialist revolution, in Russia in 1917.

The battlefields of the First World War may have been in Europe, but the impact of the war was also felt across the United States. The closure of borders to new immigrants during the war intensified the demand for labor. As soldiers returned, many of them radicalized not only by the carnage of modern warfare but also by contact with socialism, they joined masses of black, white and Latino laborers who had moved to the cities, including those millions who began to flee the Jim Crow South.

Moreover, to speak of the “white” population in the big US cities is a gross oversimplification. In the large Jewish, Italian and other immigrant neighborhoods of New York, little English was spoken in 1920. It was the relative freedom and cross-pollination of these cultures—including new audiences for music of the rural South, for instance—that provided the basis for the exhilarating developments in culture and in art of which the Harlem Renaissance is one of the greatest expressions.

The Renaissance was a heterogeneous movement, encompassing artists who were politically engaged and others who were not, some who espoused a somewhat nationalistic outlook, as well as those who focused on the fight against Jim Crow and for full integration and first-class citizenship. It included those whose aim was that of joining the middle class or developing a black elite, and others who, especially as the artificial boom of the so-called Jazz Age was followed by the Great Depression, turned to the left, to the working class.

Much of this, however, is simply passed over in the present exhibition.

There is almost no mention of the political ferment that dominated the US during the 1920s and 30s. The exhibition becomes as significant for what it leaves out as for what it includes. The political and industrial struggles of the working class, the fight to build the labor movement in the 1930s, are almost entirely absent, although they were far from absent in the lives and work of some of the prominent representatives of the Harlem Renaissance. There are only two works by Lawrence, for instance, the most famous African American painter from the 1940s onward, but none from his famous “Migration Series.”

The left-wing political associations of many of the artists, principally in the orbit of the Communist Party, are also entirely ignored.

Du Bois, correctly acknowledged by the exhibition as one of the key intellectual spokesmen of the Harlem Renaissance, was a founder of the NAACP in 1909, but was fired by that organization in 1948, one of the early victims of the rapidly developing anti-communist Cold War atmosphere. Du Bois’ political views were inconsistent over his long life, but he insisted on the fight for equality and integration and maintained some sympathy for Marxism, and he joined the Communist Party a few years before he died.

Robeson, the most famous victim of McCarthyism, was blacklisted because of his sympathy for the Soviet Union. He also had his passport withdrawn, thus effectively destroying his career as one of the most acclaimed bass-baritones in the world. The exhibition makes no mention of his treatment.

Catlett, the American-born sculptor and graphic artist, is also represented in the exhibition, but the lengthy caption accompanying her  Head of a Woman  (1942-44) simply concludes that “Catlett spent much of her career as an arts instructor, working throughout the United States and Mexico at a time when many other Black American expatriate artists opted for Paris.” Omitted is the reality that Catlett, who went to work in Mexico in 1946, several years later was declared an “undesirable alien” by the US embassy in Mexico City. She was unable to visit her mother before she died, and was unable to return to the US until a protest on her behalf in 1971.

Hughes, another one of the half dozen most famous figures in the Harlem Renaissance, was sympathetic to the Communist Party for much of the 1930s and 40s. He was part of a group of 22 African Americans who toured the USSR in 1932. In 1953, he was hauled before Joe McCarthy’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and grilled on his political associations. Hughes, fearing for his career, supplied McCarthy with a denunciation of communism, and for the rest of his life mostly stayed away from political subjects.

While all of these figures were tragically misled or misguided by Stalinism, essentially accepting the lie that the bureaucratic regime in the Soviet Union was building socialism, their left-wing sympathies form an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance, and they paid a significant price for their political principles.

Providing descriptions of the work and role of Du Bois, Hughes, Catlett and others without mentioning their political views or victimization amounts to intellectual and historical dishonesty. The reason for this selective account of their careers is the near-universal tendency within art and curatorial circles to see culture in racial or ethnic categories, along with the disparagement of the history of the struggle for socialism.

This reactionary and bankrupt outlook finds a reflection in the rather sorry-looking, small gallery labeled “Activism” toward the close of the exhibit. The half-dozen or so works include a well-known photograph of an NAACP march in New York City in 1917 against Southern lynchings. A particularly glaring example of historical falsification is a caption for a drawing of the Scottsboro Boys by Douglas, which fails to mention that the Communist Party played the leading role in the legal defense and political campaign against this notorious racist frame-up in the mid-1930s, after the NAACP refused to touch the case.

At the same time, the indisputable impact of African folk art on European art as a whole—Picasso’s  Demoiselles d’Avignon  (1907) being the most iconic example—is presented only by a few drawings by Picasso and Matisse, of black sitters. The impact of African art on Harlem Renaissance artists, rather than seen as part of the broader transformation of modern art as a whole, is instead presented as more authentic in the case of African-American artists—because they were black.

The exhibition does not deny the collaboration, in subject matter and technique, between black and white artists, as in the examples of Matisse, Man Ray and others. Underlying this, however, is the idea that the aim and final destination of the African-American artists was for the most part a separate “black art,” a contention belied by the actual history of the Harlem Renaissance.

By reducing the Harlem Renaissance to a movement in which “Black artists created art about Black subjects,” the exhibition does a serious disservice to the international character and enduring impact of this cultural movement. In spite of these drawbacks, however, the exhibition is well worth seeing, keeping its gaps and its weaknesses very much in mind. It should be a starting point for further study of the work of the artists, writers and intellectual figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

• Marcus Garvey and the reactionary logic of racialist politics 2 March 2023
• Photographer Roy DeCarava, chronicler of African-American life (1919-2009) 7 January 2010
• Jacob Lawrence dead at 82: a major American painter 16 June 2000
• The painter Jacob Lawrence 31 May 2002