Harlem Rennaissance

During the Harlem Renaissance a new feeling of racial pride emerged in the Black Intelligencia. The Black Intelligencia consisted of African-American writers, poets, philosophers, historians, and artists whose expertise conveyed five central themes according to Sterling Brown, a writer of that time: "1) Africa as a source of race pride, 2) Black American heroes 3) racial political propaganda, 4) the "Black folk" tradition, and 5) candid self-revelation." Two of the main people responsible for this new consciousness were W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Du Bois laid a foundation for this dawn of racial pride in his essays. Locke took Du Bois' initial idea one step further with his writings and aiding younger writers and artists that appeared during the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes was one of the writers that Locke mentored. Hughes was a devote believer of exhibiting pride in the Black race; this theme was often exhibited in his writing. These three men have each contributed and advanced the sentiment of racial pride in their own unique way during the Harlem Renaissance. In order to fully understand the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes it is imperative to know their backgrounds. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23rd, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee where he was an editor for the school newspaper. Du Bois was admitted to Harvard in 1888, and in 1891 he received his M.A. in History. After Harvard, Du Bois traveled to Europe and studied in Berlin for a year. In 1894, he went to Wilberforce University and worked as a Professor of Classics. In 1895, Du Bois acquired his Ph.D. from Harvard thus becoming the first African-American to earn a doctorate. The following year Du Bois married Nina Gomer. In 1897, unable to find an academic position anywhere in the North, Du Bois and his new wife moved to Georgia where Du Bois taught at Atlanta University for over a decade. They had two children together: a son named Burghardt Gomer, who died when he was two years old, and a daughter, NinaYolande. Between the years of 1897 and 1914 while Du Bois was a professor at Atlanta University he published sixteen research monographs analyzing the sociological conditions of African-Americans in America. He also published The Philadelphia Negro, a Sociological Study in 1899, the first case study done in the United States about an African-American community. Du Bois began focusing more on African-American life in 1899 after he witnessed the lynching of an African-American male. He wrote letters and petitions against discrimination in travel facilities and schools. In 1900, Du Bois went to the Paris Exposition and Pan-African Congress in London. Du Bois' most recognized work, The Souls of Black Folk, was published in 1903. He gained critical acclaim as well as national fame with that publication. In that same year "The Talented Tenth", an essay in the anthology The Negro Problem was published. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter formed the Niagara Movement in 1905. The organization scattered in five years, and in 1909 Du Bois, with several other eminent African-American and Caucasian men and women, formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people (NAACP). Du Bois became the Director of Publications and Research for the NAACP based in New York. For the next twenty-four years Du Bois was the editor of its journal, The Crisis. By the first ten years The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races was in circulation it had achieved a monthly gross of one hundred-thousand dollars. Needless to say it was a very influential journal in the Black community. Du Bois said in his editorials "...[it was] a critical time for the advancement of men" and that "...tolerance, reason and forbearance can today make the world-old dream of human brotherhood approach realization...." Du Bois wanted The Crisis to be a magazine of great substance that published issues related to the Caucasian and African-American public, but he had a special interest in African-American racial problems and their solutions. In his editorial "Agitation," Du Bois stated that this agitation, this raising consciousness of racial issues in America, was necessary in order to point out the problems in the nation. He knew that this agitation would cause disruption in American society, but Du Bois believed this disruption was essential in order to find the solution to race discrimination and prejudice. The Crisis also reviewed and supported African-American literature and art, giving the African-American public a forthright piece of literature that spoke about problems and issues that plagued them. This magazine was also influential because it exhibited pieces of literature by young African-American writers who wrote about racial pride. The Crisis was an excellent way to boost African-Americans' sense of self-regard because they saw people of their own race writing distinguished and important articles that related to their plight and accomplishments as a race. It was during this time that Du Bois was furthering the development of racial pride in the African-American community. In his essay "The Talented Tenth" Du Bois stressed the importance of education amongst the Black race. He believed that the most promising African-Americans (roughly 10% of the population), which he called "The Talented Tenth," should be educated in order to guide and teach the uneducated Blacks; "The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the mass away from the contamination and the death of the Worst, in their own and other races." This essay rose awareness about the need for higher education of African-Americans, the importance of Black role models, and the concept of self-motivation for the African-American race. Du Bois believed that the African-Americans who exhibited the best abilities needed to be educated to uplift the Black race as a whole. Alain Locke is an example of this educated African-American Du Bois talked of. Locke agreed with Du Bois' ideas about education and racial pride and reapplied them to African-American artists in his book The New Negro. Alain Locke was born on September 13, 1886 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received his undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Harvard in 1907 and became the first African-American Rhodes Scholar. He studied at Oxford from 1907 to 1910 and then at the University of Berlin from 1910 to 1911. Locke became the head of the Philosophy Department at Howard University in 1912; meanwhile, he earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1918. He edited a number of volumes including Four Negro Poets (1927), Plays of Negro Life (1927), Negro

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