The Harlem Renaissance Movement - Essay Example

?Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance also known as the “New Negro Movement” which spanned the 1920s and 19250s. Although it was centered in theHarlem vicinity of New York lots of French-speaking black authors from Caribbean and African colonies that lived in France were likewise influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. This “flowering of Negro literature” as James Weldon Johnson defined shit phenomenon reached its zenith between 1924 (the year when Opportunity journal hosted a party for African-American writers where many of white publishers were present) and 1929 (the year when the Great Depression began). The origins of the Harlem Renaissance are usually traced as far back as the beginning of the 20th century when this district became settled predominantly by black Americans. In 1917 the premiere of Three Plays for a Negro Theatre was shown. These plays written by Ridgely Terrence, a white playwright were featured by black actors conveying yearnings and human emotions. They rejected the stereotypes of minstrel and the blackface show traditions (Hutchinson viii). Written in 1919 by Claude McKay “If We must Die” was another landmark of the movement. However the poem never alludes to race, to African-American readers it sounds rather defiantly in the face of racism and the countrywide lynchings and race riots then taking place. By the end of the World War I, James Weldon Johnson’s fiction and Claude McKay’s poetry had been describing the reality of contemporary Black life in the US (Bean, xii). In 1917 Hubert Harrison known as The Father of Harlem Radicalism established the liberty League and The Voice that became the first organization and the first New Negro Movement’s newspaper respectively. Both Harrison’s newspaper and organization were political, yet also emphasized the arts. The newspaper had book review as well as poetry sections. The Harlem Renaissance brought about by the changes that African-American community had endured since the slavery was abolished. Those changes grew greater as a result of the First World War. People from rural areas attracted by industrialization opportunities were coming to cities giving rise to the new mass culture. Furthermore Harlem Renaissance was contributed by such factors as the Great Migration of black Americans to the Northern cities which were concentrating ambitious people, and World War I that had created new jobs in industry for thousands of people. The Great Depression in its turn led Harlem Renaissance to its decline. During the Harlem Renaissance a new way of playing piano was introduced. This was called Harlem Style and helped much to blur the lines between black social elite and poor Negroes. While the classic jazz band was made up of brass instruments and was viewed as the symbol of the South, the piano was viewed as an instrument pertaining to culture of the wealthy. Such a modification once brought to already existing genre offered well-to-do blacks access to jazz. Popularity of that genre soon spread throughout United States and became eventually at an “all time high.” Its liveliness and innovation were significant characteristics of performers in jazz’s early years. Such outstanding musicians as Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Willie “The Lion” Smith and Jelly Roll Morton are considered to have laid the foundation for jazz music. It was time when jazz as the blacks’ musical style gained it s popularity among whites. White dramatists, novelists and composers began to exploit the musical themes and tendencies of African-American in their pieces of art. Composers began to imply African American motifs in their works, such melodies and harmonies of black music as spirituals jazz and blues into their own concert pieces. African-Americans began to merge with white musicians into classical world of composition. Soon Roland Hayes became the first black male to enjoy wide recognition as a concert performer in both his native country and worldwide. He attended the Fisk University in Nashville with Arthur Calhoun. Later he studied in Boston with Arthur Hubbard and with Amanda Ira Aldridge in London and in Boston with George Henshel. He started to sing in public when being a student and the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1911. Whilst Savoy Ballroom was a famous venue for jazz and swing dancing, the Apollo Theatre has become the most lasting Harlem Renaissance’s physical legacy. Opened on 26 January, 1914 in the premises of the former burlesque house it has become the true symbol of African-American identity. The club was the first place where lots of figures from the Harlem Renaissance had a venue to begin their careers. Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday launched their careers at the Apollo. African-American racial pride was the main idea of Harlem Renaissance. it was the idea of the New Negro, the man able to challenge the stereotypes and overwhelming racism to promote socialist or progressive politics as well as social and racial integration. The creation of African-American literature and art was supposed to “uplift” this race. Harlem Renaissance encompassed a variety of such styles and cultural elements as “hi-culture” and ”low-culture”, Pan-Africanist ideas, blues, jazz, traditional and experimental forms of music and literature, including modernism and the so-called jazz-poetry. Such diversity meant that lots of African-American artists defied black intellectuals as well as the conservatives (Wintz, 278). Although Harlem Renaissance relied predominantly on support of black sponsors, the movement also depended on patronage of such whites as Charlotte Osgood Mason and Carl Vechten who offered the movement different forms of assistance. The Harlem Renaissance contributed into the foundation of post-World War II Civil Rights Movement. Furthermore, many African-American artists who grew up to their creative maturity afterwards were inspired by this movement. Some aspects of the Harlem Renaissance were embraced without a scrutiny and without debate. The future of the “New Negro” was one of these aspects. Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and artists echoed American progressivism in its belief in democratic reform as well as in its hardly uncritical belief in its future and in itself. Such a progressivist Weltanschauung made African-American intellectuals as their White counterparts being absolutely unprepared for the shock of Great Depression so the Harlem Renaissance ended unexpectedly due to the naive assumptions about predominance of culture over social and economic realities. Works Cited Bean, Annemarie. A Sourcebook on African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements. London: Routledge, 1999; pp. vii + 360 Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. New York: Belknap Press, 1997 Wintz, Cary D. Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Houston: Rice University Press, 1988 Read More