ENG 2233 Patterson

UNIT II

Notes on the Harlem Renaissance (1920-1931)

· The 1920's was a decade of extraordinary creativity in the arts for black Americans and much of that creativity found its focus in the activities of African Americans living in New York City, particularly in the district of Harlem. Thus this period in American literature became known as the Harlem Renaissance.

· There was an irresistible impulse among black artists to create boldly expressive art of high quality as a primary response to their social conditions and as an affirmation of their dignity and humanity in the face of poverty and racism.

· Harlem and New York City had become a powerful magnet for the thousands of blacks fleeing the South in the aftermath of the entrenchment of segregation following the end of the Reconstruction era, which followed the Civil War, and the segregationist rulings of U.S. Supreme Court, notably the landmark case Plessy vs Ferguson in 1896. This case endorsed separation in transportation.

· The first glimmerings of a new day in literature came with the work of the white writer Ridgely Torrence, who wrote Three Plays for a Negro Theatre. James Weldon Johnson called the premiere of these plays in 1917 ''the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American Theatre." Overturning the tradition of depicting blacks in stereotypical minstrel forms, Torrence's plays featured black actors representing complex human emotions and yearnings.

· Another landmark came in 1919, a year marked by several antiblack riots nationally, with the publication of the Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay's militant sonnet, "If We Must Die." Although the poem never alludes to race, to black readers it sounded a note of defiance against racism and racist violence unheard in black literature in many years.

· Among major American poets after Whitman, only E. A. Robinson and Carl Sandburg would exert any particular degree of influence on the Harlem Renaissance.

· In 1922, James Weldon Johnson's anthology of verse Book 0/ American Negro Poetry emphasized the youthful promise of the new writers and established some of the terms of the emerging movement.

· Even more important than Johnson's anthology as a text helping to define the emerging spirit of the movement was the anthology, The New Negro, by Alain Locke. Locke's anthology combined essays, stories, poems, and artwork by older as well as younger writers, white as well as black, into a book that defined with incomparable clarity and flair the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance.

· Between the appearance of Johnson's anthology and Locke's, the publication of Jean Toomer's Cane independently illustrated several of the peculiar challenges and opportunities of the nascent movement. Opening with brief but hauntingly evocative portraits of the black South, then moving to a powerful rendition of blacks in northern cities, before returning to the South with a shrouded drama about a black northerner of troubled, fatalistic consciousness terrorized by the threat of violence at the hands of whites, Cane is a text that few of the young writers could resist.

· Langston Hughes, who became the leader of the Harlem writers, expressed his freedom by insisting on racial commitment on the part of the black artist. In his landmark 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," Hughes insisted that the black artist must recognize that his or her link to Africa was a precious resource. Also, Hughes was the first African American to support himself as a professional writer, who produced more than sixty books, and he was one of the first American writers to receive serious critical attention for realistic portrayals of blacks in the United States.

· The outstanding black talent was probably Willis Richardson, whose best-known play, The Chip Woman's Fortune (1923), was the first serious play by an African American to be staged on Broadway.

· Although it is convenient and even accurate to include Hurston's lyrical 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, about one woman's growth into mature self-confidence and self-fulfillment, within the boundaries of the movement, it is also clear that by that year the movement was absolutely finished, although the talent of many of its writers was hardly exhausted.

· The crash of Wall Street in 1929 was the beginning of the end for the movement, which swiftly declined as the country lurched toward the Great Depression in the early 1930's.