Block 2

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance1910 ~ 1940

Why? Where? How? Who?

Background:Terrible conditions, not just in the South:

lynching

1930, Marion, Indiana

Why?Billie Holliday singing Strange Fruit: by Lewis Allen

Southern trees bear strange fruit,Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Why?

• Blacks moving north to cities in search of work• Blacks victims of violence and prejudice• Segregation forced them to stick together• Educated Blacks finding their own voice• Artists, actors, writers and musicians wanted to work together

 

Where?

A VIEW OF HARLEM'S HOT SPOTS DURING THE TIME OF THE GREAT HARLEM RENAISSANCE

•Quite a sizeable chunk of real estate in Manhattan!

Where?

How?• 1909: NAACP founded

(National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)

• 1910: First issue of The Crisis, NAACP magazine, is published

• Editor is W.E.B. DuBois, first Afro-American to earn a PhD from Harvard University

• Blacks have a “Voice” for the first time

Crisis: the magazine

• The Crisis sold more copies than the “white” competition (The New Republic and The Nation)

• The Crisis supported women’s suffrage• The Crisis also published poems and

stories by Black authors

Who?

Artists:

Lois Mailou Jones

William H. Johnson

Palmer Hayden

Who?Actors/performers:

Josephine Baker

Paul Robeson

Bill “Bojangles” Robinson

Who?Musicians:• Louis Armstrong

• Billie Holiday

• Dizzie Gillespie

• Marion Anderson

• Charlie Parker

Take the “A” Train

Who?

Writers (among many!):• Jesse Redmon Fauset

• Claude McKay

• Richard Wright

• Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes• Born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902

• Lived in Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. before moving to Haarlem

• Published his first poem in The Crisis in 1922: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Langston Hughes: Influences

• Walt Whitman

• Carl Sandburg

• Paul Lawrence Dunbar

             

“Let America Be America Again”by Langston Hughes

• Form: meter, rhyme, stanzas?

• Setting, characters?

• Subject(s)

• Language, style

• Symbols, metaphors, abstractions

• Links to history