The Rebirth and Revival of the Black Harlem Renaissance
By William Haynes, Year 3 History
For Black History Month, the Bristorian remembers the Harlem Renaissance. From the aftermath of the First World War until the mid-1930s, the Harlem neighbourhood in New York enjoyed an unprecedented boom in social and artistic African American culture, a golden age that echoed from Los Angeles to Paris.
Harlem also became the focal point of a revival of the Civil Rights Movement, which formed the foundations of the developments of the 1950s and 60s. However, it would be a mistake to view the Renaissance as a homogenous phenomenon, especially in regard to the treatment of LGBTQ+ African Americans, a study which shows the intersectional nature of the diverse experiences of individuals during this time.
The roots of the Harlem Renaissance can be traced to the ‘Great Migration’ at the turn of the 20th century, with the African American population of the Northern states experiencing an increase of 40% between 1910 and 1930. Fleeing segregation, Jim Crow laws and indentured servitude, African Americans moved north, and about 175,000 settled in Harlem, New York, which at the time was the most concentrated Black population in the world.
The ‘Great Migration’ was led by prominent Black figures, notably W.E.B. Dubois, the first Black man to receive a PhD in the USA and a leading civil rights figure. Other factors behind mass migration include the increased demand for industrial jobs in the North following falling immigration levels during and after the Civil War. So, with shared experiences of life in the segregated South, the troubled legacy of emancipation, and a myriad of unique stories, many of the greatest minds and talents in the African American community arrived in Harlem in the early 20th century.
The result can be described in the words of Alain LeRoy Locke - the first Black Rhodes Scholar and a man widely acknowledged as the ‘dean’ of the Harlem Renaissance - as “a spiritual coming of age” for African American culture. The mediums in which Black people revolutionised popular conceptions about African American culture were poetry and wider literature, jazz, theatre, art and many other artistic pursuits.
In literature, activist writers and poets such as James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes explored what it meant to be Black in modern America and, in Hurston’s case, the struggles of African American women. In the world of music, superstars such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington performed in Harlem’s speakeasies and bars, often to outside white audiences as well.
This interaction between these ground-breaking drivers of the Harlem Renaissance and the white men who held positions of power in fields such as publishing, and composing is essential to a complete overview of the Harlem Renaissance and its contingencies. White patrons such as Carl Van Vechten played an important role in funding artists.
The necessity for Black artists to achieve widespread influence was often through discourse with established authorities, which needs to be recognised in discussions of the topic. Historians and journalists such as Lisa Hix (2013) have argued that there was pressure from some groups to adopt mainstream conservative white values, at least superficially, in order to be successful. This meant LGBTQ+ figures of the Renaissance were often confined to the bars and cabarets rather than the wide music halls and dinners.
However, the Harlem Renaissance remained fundamentally an African American conception and one of mainly African American involvement. Historians, such as Allen Dunn and George Hutchinson (1997), have argued effectively that white patrons and values, whilst significant, played second fiddle to Black leaders and founders such as Du Bois and Hughes, who drove the movement. The Harlem Renaissance, despite inevitable contact and challenges with the white establishment, ultimately can be seen as a revival or rebirth of African American culture and arts, and one that did a great deal to increase collaboration between the Black and white communities in Northern America, despite of the institutional racism Black Americans experienced. This aspect of the Harlem Renaissance deserves more attention and a far lengthier discussion, one which this author encourages readers to research.
Ultimately, the Great Depression signalled the beginning of the decline of the Renaissance, followed by the end of Prohibition in 1933, driving wealthy patrons away from Harlem’s speakeasies and, finally, the tragic Harlem Race Riots of 1935. It is difficult to periodise broad cultural movements, but there seems to be a general historiographical consensus that by the mid-1930s, the momentum had fallen away, at least in Harlem.
However, the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance on African Americans and American culture is indelible and extremely significant. Harlem housed the creation of a proud, self-determining and vibrant activist African American culture on the world stage, laying the foundations that led directly to the later success of the Civil Rights Movement. There was both real and symbolic progress in bringing African Americans in collective social consciousness into an urban and sophisticated setting. Not only did the demographic makeup of New York and other Northern cities change, but so did the national conception of the Black community and its characteristics.