Harlem Renissance

JORGE PASCUAL ESCODA

FRESHMAN ESSAY / PROFESSOR PROCTOR

04/07/2016

The impact of Harlem Renaissance in the black community

The Harlem Renaissance (1920’s) was a blossoming of African American creative arts associated with the larger New Negro movement, a multifaceted phenomenon that helped set the directions African American writers and artists would pursue throughout the twentieth century. The social foundations of the movement included the Great Migration of African Americans from rural to urban spaces and from South to North, dramatically rising levels of literacy, and the development of national organizations dedicated to pressing African American civil rights (the NAACP),  raising the race and opening up socioeconomic opportunities (the National Urban League), and developing race pride, including Pan-African sensibilities and programs (the United Negro Improvement Association and the Pan-African conferences). Black exiles and expatriates from the Caribbean and Africa crossed paths in metropoles like New York and Paris following World War I and had a motivational influence on each other that gave “Negro renaissance” (as it was then known) a profoundly important international cast.

The term Harlem Renaissance, which became popular in later years, particularly after the term Negro became taboo, derives from the fact that Harlem served as a symbolic capital of the cultural awakening, a place where different cultures were crossed and mixed, and a highly popular nightlife destination. Harlem was a relatively new black neighborhood becoming virtually a black city just north of Central Park, and it attracted a remarkable concentration of intellect and talent. More “liberal” in matters of race than most American cities (although, of course, racism was present), New York had an extraordinarily diverse black social world in which no one group could monopolize cultural authority, making it a particularly fertile place for cultural experimentation. In addition, being situated in New York put Harlem in a strategic position for developing black arts and sending them out to the world. Few of the well-known black writers or artists were born in Harlem, but almost all of them passed through it, were inspired by it, or achieved their reputations in part because of what happened there.

The Harlem Renaissance took place at a time when European and white American writers and artists were particularly interested in African American artistic production, in part because of their interest in the “primitive”, and trying to end with racism in art. They were presumed by some to hold the key to the renovation of the arts. Early in the twentieth century, European avant-garde artists including Pablo Picasso had been inspired in part by African masks to break from earlier representational styles toward abstraction in painting and sculpture. The prestige of these revolutionary experiments caused African American intellectuals to look on African artistic traditions with new appreciation and to imagine new forms of self-representation, a desire reinforced by rising interest in black history. Black History Week, now Black History Month, was first celebrated in 1928 thanks to the historian Carter G. Woodson.

The interest in black heritage coincided with a general interest, among American intellectuals and artists generally, in defining an “American” culture distinct from that of Europe and characterized by ethnic pluralism as well as a democratic background. So the concept of cultural pluralism inspired notions of the United States as the first “transnational” nation, in which diverse heritages should develop side-by-side in harmony rather than be “melted” together. W.E.B. Du Bois, the dominant black intellectual of the day, had already advocated something like this position in his famous book, The Souls of Black Folk, a defining text of the New Negro movement because of its profound effect on an entire generation that formed the core of the Harlem Renaissance.

As explained on the previous paragraphs, in the 1920’s Harlem became the spotlight of New York’s nightlife. Many questions arise to me from that fact: Why did white people chose a black ghetto to have fun? and How black people reacted seeing that their oppressors were invading their “comfort zone”?. As I red in Nathan Irvin Huggins’s book Harlem Renaissance, the 20’s were a prosperous time and Americans had a lot of money to spend, but they wanted to spend this money not only in material riches but in culture. At this time culture started to show interest in ancient african expressions, and this influence moved white americans to show interest in black culture. So answering the first question, white people chose Harlem as their new cultural center because there was where all the african inspired art was happening and where they could have the realest African American experience.

The second question is quite more controversial than the first one. Black community had two perceptions about the movement. While some black people were proud that white people, at that time their oppressors, were interested in their culture and they were spending money to read books written by black people, or to see perform black musicians in Harlem, others thought it was a cultural appropriation and that they were oppressing even more with this “invasion”. They felt that there was nowhere to be safe from white people.

Let’s focus on black community; the two positions adopted by them made appear two different ways of acting compiled in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s novel There is Confussion. One group tried to be friendly to the movement, support it and try to benefit from it, while the other group just vetoed it. This different ways to see the Harlem Renaissance also created a conflict between the sides and for the first time since Civil War black population in the United States was divided. The side which defended the movement was seen as betrayers by the other side, while defenders of Harlem Renaissance felt that vetoing it they were just making white people angry and the oppression will continue. Nevertheless, the only difference between both sides was that one side saw Harlem Renaissance as a way to be free and an opportunity to expand african-american culture, the other side had the perception of the movement as an increase of the oppression from white community and an attempt to kill their own culture.