The Harlem Renaissance :: American History

Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s that was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Also cognise as the New Negro movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, the movement emerged toward the end of World War I in 1918, blossomed in the mid- to late 1920s, and so faded in the mid-1930s. The Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously and that African American literature and arts attracted substantive attention from the nation at large. Primarily music, theater, art, and politics.The Harlem Renaissance emerged amid social and intellectual upheaval in the African American community in the early twentieth century. Several factors laid the groundwork for the movement. A black middle class had developed by the turn of the century, fostered by increased education and concern opportunities by-line the American Civil War (1 861-1865). During the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of black Americans moved from an economically depressed rural South to industrial cities of the North to take advantage of the employment opportunities created by World War I. As more and more educated and socially conscious blacks settled in New Yorks neighborhood of Harlem, it developed into the policy-making and cultural center of black America. Equally important, during the 1910s a new political agenda advocating racial equality arose in the African American community, particularly in its growing middle class. Championing the agenda were black historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909 to advance the rights of blacks. This agenda was also reflected in the efforts of Jamaican-born black nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose Back to Africa movement inspired racial pride among blacks in the United States.African American lite rature and arts had begun a ravisher development just before the turn of the century. In the performing arts, black musical theater featured such accomplished artists as songwriter bottle cork Cole and composer J. Rosamond Johnson, brother of writer James Weldon Johnson. Jazz and blues music moved with black populations from the South and Midwest into the bars and cabarets of Harlem. In literature, the poetry of capital of Minnesota Laurence Dunbar and the manufacture of Charles W. Chesnutt in the late 1890s were among the earliest works of African Americans to receive national recognition. By the end of World War I the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and the poetry of Claude McKay anticipated the literature that would follow in the 1920s by describing the reality of black life in America and the struggle for racial identity.