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African American Literature and the Harlem Renaissance

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The early post–Civil War promise of equal protection and increased civil rights for African Americans was eviscerated by decades of Jim Crow laws, culminating in the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that sanctioned legalized racial segregation. This “separate but equal” doctrine—which was used to make African Americans second-class citizens—remained America’s governing policy until the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Spanning the years of the two world wars, African American writers, working within an already complex formative literary tradition, continued to respond to the daunting inequities of their times in voices that were defiant and conciliatory, political and personal, measured, celebratory, and transcendent. The works of the Harlem Renaissance, varied and numerous, reflect the suffering provoked by the lingering status quo, pose disparate social and moral solutions to the cruelties of systemic injustice, and demonstrate a historically aware, conscious movement toward aesthetic vitality and freedom.

Social reform leaders such as Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) and Progressive Era writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911), who came of age during the Civil War and its aftermath, established protocols for public action and autobiographical frankness that served as models for a new politically vigilant generation of artists and activists, many of whom joined the burgeoning black populations that reshaped urban areas during the years of the Great Migration (roughly 1910–1940 or beyond).

The uptown section of New York City called Harlem became an artists’ mecca, a vibrant, thrilling “race capital” in the words of philosopher Alain Locke. As rapturously expressed by James Weldon Johnson in his essay, “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” in the “New Scene” section of Locke’s landmark 1925 anthology, The New Negro, Harlem was a “city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world.”

The cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s was predicated on the work of artists and activists who broke new ground in previous generations. The last decade of the nineteenth century through to America’s entrance into World War I (1917) is often characterized as the Progressive Era when social reform movements helped set new standards for labor, education, public safety, and women’s rights.

Black writers were acutely concerned with problems of “uplifting” the race, with exposing the exclusionary hypocrisy of the ethical ideals of the supposedly United States, and with offering platforms for integration or rebellion. Though writers, intent on offering correctives to derogatory, degrading images of black life presented to the white reading public, disagreed on what constituted appropriate subjects, language, politics, and the fundamental relevance of color was an inescapable constant in the literary mix.

A Harlem Renaissance writer such as Nella Larsen found a literary grandmother in the prolific Harper, whose popular 1892 novel, Iola LeRoy, provided a counterpoint to the then-stock image of the tragic mulatta and depicted an array of characters engaged in the formation of the rising black middle class. Larsen’s work is also thematically centered on middle class aspirations and values, on “passing” and racial identity.

Charles W. Chesnutt turned the reductive stereotypes of white-supplied plantation literature into an affirmation of black culture, individual resolve, and community survival and triumph. His dialect tales, collected in The Conjure Woman (1899), anticipate Zora Neale Hurston’s collections of folklore and her fictional dignifying of the multidimensionality of African American life.

Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872–1906), called “the Poet Laureate of the Negro race” by educational reformer Booker T. Washington, wrote poems in both dialect and standard English, auguring the work of Jamaican sonneteer, Claude McKay.

The debate on what constituted the best path to racial equity continued unabated into the “Renaissance” years. Artists were as often combative as they were collaborative, but the intellectual excitement of hashing out different perspectives characterized the debate. How equal rights were to be achieved was a serious, often contentious, matter of much spirited and public literary wrangling.

The lines were drawn in the previous century, after the gross inequities of the Reconstruction era provoked the need for systemic reform. The key factions were divided along the opposing philosophies of the conservative Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), founder of the black-run Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (1881), and the radical W. E. B. Du Bois, organizer of the Niagara Movement, which, in 1910, developed into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Washington, who supported black economic independence through commitment to labor and self-sufficient community-building, argued that accommodation to separatist attitudes and policies, along with patience, diligence, and industry would permit African Americans to prosper and eventually integrate into the mainstream. He directly appealed to the white, moneyed readership who might help finance his school and other ventures. Black artists necessarily relied upon white producers, publishers, critics, and patrons for support, and the dicey problem of negotiating and appeasing white benefactors vexed later writers such as Langston Hughes and Hurston.

Vehemently opposed to Washington’s platform of patient acceptance and compromise, Du Bois advocated more deliberate, immediate action. His emphasis on intellectual achievement and racial pride helped set the standard for the writers and artists who flourished in what would be termed the New Negro Renaissance, centered in New York’s Harlem. His long career extended through and beyond the years between the world wars, and he edited the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, which published and encouraged such writers as Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Arna Bontemps.

What is commonly referred to as the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920s and 1930s was part of a larger cultural emergence of writers, musicians, painters, dancers, publishers, and scholars from newly formed urban black communities in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and, notably, New York.

Cootie Williams plays his trumpet in a crowed Harlem ballroom with Duke Ellington’s band, circa 1930. Bettmann / Bettmann Archive

The Great Migration of Southern blacks to the urban north was instigated by untenable living conditions, Jim Crow laws and lynchings, mechanization and decreased need for agricultural labor, along with increased need for labor in northern manufacturing centers after the U.S. entry into World War I. Blacks in America struggled with problems of poverty, literacy, and self-definition in the urge toward fully realized citizenship and fully respected humanity; the writers of the Renaissance chronicled and debated the progress and setbacks in this ongoing struggle.

In 1925, Locke edited a special issue of the national magazine Survey Graphic, expressly devoted to showcasing “the progressive spirit of contemporary Negro life” and subtitled, “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.” Included in the issue were writers such as Du Bois and the multifaceted James Weldon Johnson. There were poems by Anne Spencer, Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay, Cane (1923) author Jean Toomer, Angelina Grimke, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes.

There were articles on jazz, the visual arts, race relations, religion, spirituality, and heritage, including “The Negro Digs Up His Past” by Arthur (Arturo) Schomburg. In the same year, Locke anthologized most of the work in this landmark publication with additional material—including Hurston’s story, “Spunk”—in The New Negro, often considered the manifesto of the New Negro movement.

Black-run magazines, notably The Crisis and the National Urban League’s Opportunity, supported the work of young artists and helped rally the black community around urgent political issues. In 1921, The Crisis published the hauntingly powerful poem—dedicated to Du Bois—“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” by the gifted young, blues-inspired Hughes, who became one of the leading figures of the Renaissance era and one of the most innovative, versatile writers in American letters.

His gifts were recognized by the literary editor of The Crisis, Jessie Redmon Fauset, a novelist as well as a mentor to younger artists, such as Hughes and Nella Larsen, author of the novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Washington, D.C.–based poet, playwright, and short-story writer Georgia Douglas Johnson fostered community among artists by holding literary salons at her home. Visitors to what became known as the S Street Salon included Fauset, Du Bois, Locke, Grimke, Hughes, Spencer, Toomer, Cullen, Marita Bonner, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and the formidable anthropologist/author Hurston, whom Alice Walker reveres as a literary mother.

Hurston’s work—most notably, her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)—ranks among the most significant achievements in American literature.

Of continuing concern was the incendiary issue of how black writers represented black life to the eager, often appreciative, but jaundiced and possibly patronizing eye of the white reading public. A writer such as Hurston, who was in many ways ahead of her times, was controversial within the circle of her artist peers, in part because of her shifting ideas on social reform but also because of her expansive and challenging views on identity politics.

In the 1940s, the harsh urban realism of Richard Wright (1908–1960) and his graphic literature of social protest anticipated the postwar work of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and the militant writers of the Black Arts Movement. Wright’s substantial body of work includes novels, poems, stories, essays, and his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy. The impact of his signal 1940 novel Native Son resonated with a new generation of writers whose work both reflected the immediate need for civil rights and helped foment the long-awaited reforms.

Harlem Renaissance

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH

  1. A focus on children was essential to the creation of a black national identity, therefore many prominent Harlem Renaissance figures, including Jessie Fauset, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Arna Bontemps, and Langston Hughes, wrote expressly for African American children. Fauset and W. E. B. Du Bois published a children’s magazine called The Brownies’ Book, copies of which can be found online in the Library of Congress’s rare book digital collection (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=rbc3&fileName=rbc0001_2004ser01351page.db [accessed 8 September 2009]). The second inside page of the magazine announces: “Designed for all children, but especially for Ours.” Read through the material included in The Brownies’ Book and consider how African American culture is presented to its audience of children. As a starting point, read Annette Browne’s poem, “The Wishing Game” and Annie Virginia Culbertson’s dialect poem, “The Origin of White Folks” on page 7 in the January 1920 issue and discuss how each work presents positive images of black identity. See Katharine Capshaw Smith’s Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance for help in contextualizing the thematic emphases of African American children’s literature.

  2. Jazz Age musical innovations influenced many African American poets, including Helene Johnson, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett. Research the ways that jazz and blues rhythms and the images of Harlem’s nightlife were used by one or more of these poets. You might start by reading aloud Brown’s “Ma Rainey” (1932), Johnson’s “Poem” (1927), and Hughes’s “Jazzonia” (1926), all of which can be found in Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey’s Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (2001). How do the poems celebrate and rhythmically replicate the intensity and improvisational spirit of jazz? Focus on identifying the subjects of each poem and the effects of each poet’s use of slang or colloquial language and rhythmic repetitions. See also Hurston’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” available online at http://mapsites.net/gotham/Docs/Hurston.htm [accessed 8 September 2024] for her descriptive response to a Harlem cabaret jazz band.

  3. Much of the work of the Harlem Renaissance is directly concerned with protesting racial oppression and countering dehumanizing images of African Americans that pervaded popular culture. Compare Claude McKay’s 1919 “If We Must Die” with Countee Cullen’s 1927 “From the Dark Tower” and/or Langston Hughes’s 1922 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” How do these poems express racial pride and resistance to oppression? For social and historical context, see Alain Locke’s 1925 essay “The New Negro” in his classic anthology of the same title.

  4. Many women writers of the period were deeply concerned about the double oppression of racism and sexism. Compare the presentation of African American women’s lives in Marita Bonner’s “To Be Young—a Woman—and Colored” (1925) and Marion Vera Cuthbert’s “Problems Facing Negro Young Women” (1936), both available in Patton and Honey’s Double-Take.

  5. Jessie Fauset’s The Plum Bun (1929) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) are both thematically centered on “passing” for white. What social constraints and internal conflicts do the protagonists of these novels experience in their quests and struggles for selfhood? See Cheryl Wall’s Women of the Harlem Renaissance (1995) and Sharon L. Jones’s Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West (2002) for background on race and gender, and James Weldon Johnson’s novel from an earlier period, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), for another literary treatment of this subject.

RESOURCES

Criticism

  • Arna Bontemps, ed., The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972). Twelve critical essays on key Harlem Renaissance literary figures such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jessie Redmon Fauset, and a memoir of the period by poet and novelist Arna Bontemps.

  • Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). Comprehensive study of African American literature from the end of Reconstruction to World War I, the era preceding the Harlem Renaissance.

  • Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995). Argues that post–World War I New York became the epicenter of historical change as black and white artists and intellectuals defined a new, non-Eurocentric American culture.

  • Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Discusses the subversive use of the marriage plot in works such as Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and explores the multidimensionality of black women’s fiction from 1853 to 1948, and its thematic preoccupation with race and identity.

  • Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett, eds., The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Collects one hundred essays on art, music, politics, and literature from the period 1892 through 1938 by such writers as W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Hurston, and Richard Wright, focusing on the crucial issues of race and representation as epitomized in the conception of the “New Negro.”

  • George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995). Contextualizes the Harlem Renaissance within a broader, pluralistic cultural context, focusing on interracial exchange, nationalism, and the genesis of literary Modernism.

  • Sharon L. Jones, Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002). A comprehensive overview of Harlem Renaissance history and aesthetics focusing on how Fauset, Hurston, and Dorothy West resist race, class, and gender oppression and how their work defies reductive categorizations.

  • Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (New York: A. & C. Boni, 1925). One of the signal texts of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke collects fiction, poetry, and critical essays about art, literature, and culture by such prominent voices as Hurston, Hughes, Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, and Locke himself.

  • Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey, eds., Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (Livingston, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001). An expansive collection of essays, literature, and period artwork with inclusiveness as its goal. The book features a balanced selection of work by men and women and by well-known and lesser-known writers and focuses attention on themes related to gender and sexual orientation.

  • Katharine Capshaw Smith, Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). A critical analysis of the essential place of black children in the formation of a new black national identity. The writers, educators, and activists, including Du Bois, Bontemps, and Hughes, who made children a prime concern, created a new tradition of African American children’s literature.

  • Cheryl Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). An intellectual history that traces the devaluation of women artists within the “New Negro” ranks, focusing on Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston; including discussions of Anne Spencer, Marita Bonner, and Georgia Douglas Johnson; and making connections to musical artists Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker.

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