Harlem Renaissance (1 gen 1918 anni – 1 gen 1940 anni)

Descrizione:

Harlem Renaisance: A flourishing of African American artists, writers, intellectuals, and social leaders in the 1920s, centered in the neighborhood of Harlem, New York City.
Jazz: Unique American musical form with an improvisational style that emerged in New Orleans and other parts of the South before World War I. It grew in popularity during the Harlem Renaissance. (p. 694)
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA): A Harlem-based group, led by charismatic, Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, that arose in the 1920s to mobilize African American workers and champion black separatism.
pan-Africanism:The idea that people of African descent, in all parts of the world, have a common heritage and destiny and should cooperate in political action.

Amidst these clashes over religion, morality, and Americanism, black artists and intellectuals staked a claim to unapologetic pride in their own identity. They questioned long-standing assumptions about civilization, progress, and the alleged superiority of Western cultures over so-called primitive people. A vibrant new black cultural movement took shape, centered in New York City, where the Great Migration had tripled the black population in the decade after 1910 (Map 21.2). The black neighborhood of Harlem stood as “the symbol of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere,” as one minister put it. Talented African Americans flocked there and forged a literary and artistic culture rooted in the everyday lives and experiences of black people.

Poet Langston Hughes voiced the upbeat spirit of the Harlem Renaissance when he asserted, “I am a Negro — and beautiful.” Other writers and artists also championed black racial identity and pride. Claude McKay and Jean Toomer wrote poetry and novels that portrayed black people with a realism and sympathy uncommon in American letters. Painter Jacob Lawrence, who had grown up in crowded tenement districts of the urban North, used bold shapes and vivid colors to portray the daily life, aspirations, and suppressed anger of African Americans. These artists, among many others in the Renaissance, represented what philosopher Alain Locke called, in an influential 1925 book, the “New Negro”: proud and unapologetic chroniclers of the multifaceted black experience.

No one embodied the energy and optimism of the Harlem Renaissance more than Zora Neale Hurston. Born in the prosperous black community of Eatonville, Florida, Hurston had been surrounded as a child by examples of both black achievement and anti-black discrimination. After enrolling at Barnard College and studying with anthropologist Franz Boas, Hurston traveled through the South and the Caribbean for a decade, documenting folklore, songs, and religious beliefs. She incorporated this material into her short stories and novels, celebrating the humor and spiritual strength of ordinary black men and women. Like other work of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston’s stories and novels sought to articulate what it meant, as black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “to be both a Negro and an American.”

Augusta Fells Savage, African American Sculptor

Born in Florida in 1892, Augusta Fells Savage arrived in New York in 1921 to study and remained to take part in the Harlem Renaissance. Widowed at a young age and struggling to support her parents and young daughter, Savage faced both racism and poverty. Much of her work has been lost because she sculpted in clay and could not afford to cast in bronze. Savage began to speak out for racial justice after she was denied, on the basis of her race, a fellowship to study in Paris.

To millions of Americans, the most famous symbol of the Harlem Renaissance was the musical form known as jazz. Though the origins of the word are unclear, many historians believe it was a slang term for sex — an etymology that makes sense, given the music’s early association with urban vice districts. Borrowing from blues, ragtime, and other popular forms, jazz musicians developed an ensemble style in which performers, keeping a rapid ragtime beat, improvised around a basic melodic line. The majority of early jazz musicians were black, but white performers, some of whom had more formal training, injected elements of European concert music.

Jazz had first emerged in New Orleans and other parts of the South before World War I. As the sound spread nationwide in the 1920s, musicians refined what became its hallmark: the improvised solo. A key figure in this development was trumpeter Louis Armstrong. A native of New Orleans, Armstrong learned his craft playing in the saloons and brothels of the city’s vice district. Like countless other African Americans, he moved north, settling in Chicago in 1922. In his recordings and live performances, Armstrong showed an inexhaustible capacity for melodic invention, and his dazzling solos inspired other musicians. By the late 1920s, soloists were the celebrities of jazz, thrilling audiences with their improvisational skill.

As jazz followed the routes of the Great Migration from the South to northern and midwestern cities, the music found eager fans. Dance halls for both black and white audiences put jazz bands on, and leading artists toured all over the country. As New Yorkers flocked to ballrooms and clubs to hear Duke Ellington and other stars, Harlem became the hub of commercially lucrative jazz performances. Many whites who thrilled at the “primitive” black music did not abandon their racial condescension: visiting a mixed-race club became known as “slumming.”

Archibald Motley, Blues, 1929

Painter Archibald Motley (1891–1981) was born in New Orleans but arrived in Chicago as a small child, when his family — like thousands of other African Americans — moved north in search of opportunity. Motley studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and by the 1920s also showed his work in New York City. Many of his paintings depicted life in the predominantly African American neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side that was widely known as the Black Belt. This piece, Blues, was painted when Motley was living in Paris.

Radio also helped popularize the new sound, and the emerging record industry sold the latest tunes on 78 RPM discs. Many of those discs were so-called race records, specifically aimed at urban working-class African American listeners. In 1920, Otto K. E. Heinemann, a producer who sold immigrant records in Yiddish, Swedish, and other languages, recorded singer Mamie Smith performing “Crazy Blues.” This breakthrough hit prompted big recording labels like Columbia and Paramount to copy Heinemann’s approach. Even as its reception reflected the segregation of American society, jazz moved black music to the center stage of American culture. It became the signature music of the decade, so much so that novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the 1920s the “Jazz Age.”

The creative energy of the Harlem Renaissance also generated broad political aspirations. The Harlem-based Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), led by charismatic Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, arose in the 1920s to mobilize African American workers and champion black nationalism. Garvey urged followers to move to Africa, arguing that people of African descent would never be treated justly in white-run countries.

The UNIA soon claimed four million members, including many recent migrants to northern cities. It published a newspaper, Negro World, and solicited funds for the Black Star Line, a steamship company Garvey created to foster trade with the West Indies and carry black Americans to Africa. Garvey may have advocated a return to Africa, but he was outspoken about black rights in America, and this outspokenness made him a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation. Once Hoover turned his agents on the UNIA, it declined as quickly as it had risen. In 1925, Garvey was imprisoned for mail fraud because of his solicitations for the Black Star Line. President Coolidge commuted his sentence but ordered him deported to Jamaica. Without Garvey’s leadership, the movement collapsed.

However, the UNIA contributed to an emerging, and ultimately more lasting, pan-Africanism in America. This idea held that people of African descent, in all parts of the world, shared a common destiny and should cooperate in political action. Several developments contributed to this idea: black men’s military service in Europe during World War I, the Pan-African Congress that had sought representation at the Versailles peace talks, and protests against U.S. occupation of Haiti. One African American historian wrote in 1927, “The grandiose schemes of Marcus Garvey gave to the race a consciousness such as it had never possessed before.”

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