The Harlem Renaissance: A Cultural Movement

The social landscape at the dawn of the 20th century, was wrought with political antipathy, economic depression, and cultural instability. The New Negro Movement (as it was conventionally coined) or the Harlem Renaissance was in part the culmination of the Red Summer, a summer of race-related riots, lynching and carnage in 1919.

Jacob Lawrence: Lines of Influence

The history of Harlem Renaissance

It was the Jim Crow era, a tumultuous period which bore the same white supremacist antagonisms as those that plagued society since the onset and abolition of slavery. It was also the period that many African American soldiers had returned from Europe having fought in the war. Many were disillusioned, seeking job opportunities, looking for change and adventure.

In the aftermath of WWI, New York City witnessed an influx of African Americans en masse having migrated to the city from the rural South as the Great Depression increased its stronghold on disparate communities and cities. Many settled in the Harlem neighbourhood which quickly bloomed into a Black cultural capital. The district became the bedrock of more than a decade’s long identity movement and cultural revolution.

There was no singular mode of artistic expression and representation that defined the Harlem Renaissance but an array of styles and forms which coalesced into a patchwork of creativity that celebrated African American culture and identity. The Harlem Renaissance inaugurated a new generation of African American writers, publishers, playwrights, artists, and musicians who vindicated the aspirations and angst of the people. 

Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction, 1934

Musicians in the Harlem Renaissance

Louis Armstrong

In the music scene, singers, musicians, bandleaders, and entertainers spearheaded the ascendance of jazz from Cotton Club in Harlem to America. Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) revolutionised jazz during the Harlem Renaissance. Aside from being the “world’s greatest trumpet player” he also brought a soloist's art into the ensemble nature of Jazz. His gravelly vocal improvisations distinctively decorated voiceless instrumentals with his style of scat singing. His impact inspired his peers including prolific writer and poet Langston Hughes.

Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, & Billie Holiday

The genre, fronted by Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, and Billie Holiday, soared in popularity with its offshoots in ragtime, stride, and swing and vaudeville, allowing Black musicians to pursue opportunities that they did not have before. Meanwhile leading performers such as Josephine Baker, a cabaret dancer and singer, distinguished the African American experience to local and international audiences.

Gladys Bentley

Gladys Bentley (1907-1960), further platformed underrepresented members of the Black community. Her headline shows at Harlem's Ubangi Club incorporated a chorus of drag queens. As an openly lesbian, her career skyrocketed at Harry Hansberry's Clam House in New York where she debuted as cross-dressing performer.

Artists in the Harlem Renaissance

The visual arts witnessed the largest mobilisation of the avant-garde movement. Sculptors, painters, and illustrators casted their own influences on modernism and cubism, experimenting with geometric patterns, abstracts, and African prints to collage imagery from African American history with scenes from contemporary life in Harlem.

Augusta Savage, The Harp, commissioned in 1939

Aaron Douglas

Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) pioneered the fusion of African carvings, Egyptian-style profiles, and African American history. In 1934, he created a 4-panel mural titled, “Aspects of Negro Life” for the New York Public Library, which commissioned by the government’s Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). His first mural, The Negro in an African Setting, carries its own symbolism with popular music (jazz and blues) is part of the imagery. The last mural, Song of the Towers, again places a saxophone at centre against the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty.

Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) witnessed first-hand the convergence of the Great Migration, the Great Depression, the Jazz Age, and the Harlem Renaissance. Inspired by the community’s interest in public heritage, Lawrence became the artist-reporter of the neighbourhood. Between 1940 and 1941, Lawrence created sixty panels that made up the “Migration of the Negro” series – a feat that required extensive research, involving oral histories and historical documents.

Other artists during the Harlem Renaissance

Other prominent artists included Augusta Savage, Hale Woodruff, James Lesesne Wells, Archibald John Motley, Beauford Delaney, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, James van der Zee and Allen Lohan Crite. Together these visual griots captured the essence of daily life and ordinary people.

Beauford Delaney, Jazz Quartet, 1946

Authors in the Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes

Meanwhile leading writers and intellectuals stylised colloquial expressions of African American sensibilities to subvert preconceived notions of racism and discrimination. Langston Hughes (1901-1967) polemically wrote about Black music, racial injustice, and Black male psychology in his blues-inspired poetry, plays and novels. His major works include The Weary Blues (1926) and Not Without Laughter (1930) - a feat that would become blueprint for the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin a few decades later. Hughes also pioneered jazz poetry, the infusion of rhythm and improvisation in poetic form. The sound of jazz, along with the admiration he had for musicians such as Armstrong, heavily shaped Hughes as a writer.

Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen (1891-1964) boldly explores the psychology of race amongst urban sophisticates in her novels: Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). The pervasive issues of classism, skin colour, the one drop rule, and the idea of passing as white are heavily excavated in these pages. Her novels explore the intersections of social mobility and respectability politics in response to the emergence of the Black middle class. Her dominant of theme of passing prefigures the modern concept of colourism, or racism from inside the Black community, and its offshoots: featurism and texturism.

Other authors in the Harlem Renaissance

Together they are lauded alongside Claude McKay, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, and Wallace Thurman. Collectively, their work defied stereotypes and derogatory caricatures of Blackness while reifying the social exclusion, alienation, and oppression of the Black community. Each contributor’s refusal to cater to the white male gaze continues to be a blueprint among newer generations of writers, intellectuals, activists, and artists.

Allan Rohan Crite, Parade on Hammond Street, 1935

The impact of the Harlem Renaissance

In its 20-year span, the Harlem Renaissance distilled new interpretations on contemporary life, cultural pride, and collective esteem, birthing legendary artists, prolific writers, and musical genres in the process - paving the way for modern legends such as Quincy Jones and Toni Morrison.

The rich cultural and intellectual traditions borne in Harlem have never lost relevance or potency regarding its revolutionary potential. The Harlem Renaissance set the stage for the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and most recently the worldwide mobilisation of Black Lives Matter.

Today, a century has passed since the era-defining movement gained momentum, centring the Black experience to ultimately redefine how America, and the world, view African Americans and their place in society and history.