Harlem Renaissance: Alain Locke`s The New Negro
With racism still at liberty and economic opportunities limited, creative expression was one of the few avenues available to African Americans in the early twentieth century. Primarily literary, the Harlem Renaissance, according to Alain Locke, transformed “social disillusionment into race pride.” The Harlem Renaissance was comprised of poetry and prose, painting and sculpture, jazz and swing, opera and dance. What united these diverse art forms was their authentic presentation of what it meant to be Black in America, what writer Langston Hughes called an “expression of our individual dark-skinned selves,” as well as a new militancy in proclaiming their own civil and political rights. The Harlem Renaissance catapulted African American visibility in American society. African American writers, musicians, and intellectuals artistically “matured” thereby marking the beginning of an eternal cultural celebration. The “New Negro” movement as Alain Locke coined it, pushed African Americans to reconstruct their image on their own terms. With African Americans now looking inwards and to the future they needed a source from which to gain strength. Harlem Renaissance writers thus relayed authentic experiences to their Black audiences. African Americans would no longer submit to degrading practices. The New Negro was not just a logical outgrowth of prior African American activists, but a whole different approach to social activism. Harlemites fought the alluring practice of respectability Therefore, the Harlem Renaissance marked the beginning of a departure; a deviation from conciliatory activism, and the commencement of an inextinguishable intellectual fire.
Post Civil War, hundreds of thousands of African Americans newly freed from the yoke of slavery in the South began to dream of a fuller participation in American society, together with political authorization, and equal economic chance. The historical “place” of African Americans was in the South, where sharecropping and tenant farming locked them into peonage of the Post-reconstruction era. Violence and economic strife pushed them from the South; and the war, which caused an increase in industrial demands, pulled Blacks into the North. They gathered in industrial towns like East St. Louis, Illinois, as well as in larger cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. By 1930, the population of foreign-born African Americans in New York had grown to seventeen percent. This was a new and unusual phenomenon since most Blacks in the United States were descendants of involuntary immigrants.
Although many Black people migrated to various urban settings up North, not just any city would suit a Black renaissance. New York City was the perfect place. There was a large and growing Black presence, a relatively long history of Black performance in the arts and an exciting community —Harlem— which had just been open to Black residents. New York City was also the center of American publishing, art, music, and drama. New York was America’s cultural capital, accustomed to currents from around the world.
As Blacks from the British empire were using London as their stage for promoting their futures. Others from Martinique, Haiti, and Senegal were delivering manifestos from Paris. It would seem that the entire universe of colored people was in recalibration.
Blacks were arriving not only from the South but also from the French and the British West Indies and Africa. Most West Indians came from a culture in which class distinction played a more important role in their life than the color line. In this manner, the West Indian immigrant was constantly trying to improve their economic position. They were also unlikely to accept racial slurs without protest, for the West Indians believed one should be judged more by their talents than by color. From this heightened class consciousness came a small group of political and economic radicals; such as Marcus Garvey a powerful political leader who was a staunch proponent of the Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements. Marcus Garvey exerted a romantic and magical hold on the imagination of Black people in America. Marcus Garvey came to the United States and began to initiate his movement at a time of great disenfranchisement among African Americans who had pursued the American dream until they had to confess that the dream was not constructed for them. Marcus Garvey gave Harlemites a vision of a new dream, a new promise, and new land. Poems such as Africa for the Africans capture the richness and potency of the dream Garvey presented to Afro-Americans:
Hurrah! Hurrah! Great Africa wakes;
She is calling her sons, and none forsakes,
But to colors of the nation runs,
Even though assailed by enemy guns.
Cry it loud, and shout it Ion' hurrah!
Time has changed, so hail! New Africa!
We are now awakened, rights to see:
We shall fight for dearest liberty.
Mighty kingdoms have been truly reared
On the bones of Blackmen, facts declared;
History tells this awful, pungent truth,
Africa awakes to her rights forsooth.
Africa for the Africans depicts a feminine nurturing image of Africa which bred a new appreciation of Africa in the West. In 1941, Melville Herskovits published The Myth of the Negro Past, a text that became a classic in discussions of African Americans and their relationships to Africa. The text helped dispel the prevailing belief that Blacks had lost all their culture in the dreaded Middle Passage. Sentiments/arguments like these were present before Herskovits's publication, but this was the first time it was articulated and seen as a reference point.
In the time before the Harlem Renaissance, being a professional artist was not a choice for Black Americans. Jim Crow laws in the South separated Blacks from the mainstream of American life. The Ku Klux Klan and other violently oppressive white groups extended the separation. The traditions of a segregated and largely rural agrarian culture that had experienced slavery had a distinctive and rich grass-roots oral tradition, music, and religion. Attitudes toward Southern Black rural culture, which many believed was too closely associated with the 'low culture' of slavery, were complex. Although Black people could not deny slavery’s influence on their culture many of them thought it was a past worth no recognition.
In the past, African Americans were reduced to animals to make and keep them submissive. As the institution of slavery unraveled African Americans began to imagine themselves outside of what they were but what they could become. The New Negro Movement re-energized the African American dream by spurring people to redefine themselves as individuals and as a collective. The New Negro was educated, cultured, and far from docile or “respectable” The New Negro’s spirit was dignified and introspective, and fought not only for their visibility, but also for those who followed.
The image of a brilliant Black person spoke to many African Americans. Langston Hughes, wrote The Negro Speaks of Rivers while on a train ride to Mexico, although the speaker shares many of Langston Hughes's beliefs, he is a universal figure rather than an autobiographical depiction of Hughes himself. The speaker serves as a voice for all African Americans, as he traces their lineage to the origins of civilization:
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.
In this poem, the speaker links himself to his ancestors, firmly placing them in important historical, religious, and cultural scenes all over the world. Langston Hughes begins by claiming a connection to the world's ancient rivers that predated human beings, and that has made his soul grow 'deep like the rivers.' This insightful description indicates the speaker's immense intellect and allows him to make a definitive connection between people of his race and the rest of human civilization. In the early 20th Century, white Americans often viewed their darker-skinned counterparts as less than human, and here, Hughes offers concrete proof of historical equality.
When examining the Harlem Renaissance, the lens is often fixed upon the highly educated, middle-class intellectuals and artists such as Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, and W.E.B Du Bois. Unsurprisingly, there is indeed an intersection between the Black intellectuals and the working class who fought “daily racism” in both Harlem and across the city. New Negro activists such as Hubert Harrison and Frank Crosswaith challenged local structures of economic and racial inequality. Insurgent stay-at-home mothers took negligent landlords to court, complaining about the lack of hot water and heat in their buildings. Black men and women propelled dishes bricks and makeshift weapons from their apartment rooftops and windows, retaliating against belligerent policemen. Harlemites mobilized around local issues such as high rents jobs leisure and police brutality from the turn of the twentieth century to the Great Depression in order to make their communities self-sufficient. By the end of the 1920s, Harlem had experienced a labor strike, a tenant campaign for affordable rents, and its very first race riot. These public presentations of protest and anguish represented the dress rehearsal for a mass demonstration in the 1930s and 1940s.
African Americans were mobilized by the disparity between the democratic principles their country called upon them to defend at war, and the racist reality of Black life in America. How could they prove America had acquired a debt profound in depth?
As Harlem transformed into a hub for African Americans in the early 1900s, African American writers began to thrive in the new, intellectually-charged atmosphere. While some poets continued to write primarily in traditional English literary forms, others explored vernacular speech and lyrical forms while creating works that identified with the masses. Work that was “accessible” was categorized under the “Black aesthetic.” The Black aesthetic was a concept that work by African Americans must be appropriate to African American culture and people and that its excellence depends on Black people’s concepts of beauty. Some even went as far as to say that artists must seek objects, themes, and styles within the culture of Black people and that they must use these materials for the benefit of Black Americans. Alternatively, Countee Cullen expressed the desire to be known as a “poet” rather than a “Negro poet.” He wanted critics and readers to appreciate and evaluate his work without regard to his race. This philosophy subjected Cullen to a fair amount of criticism from fellow artists including his friend Langston Hughes, who took Cullen to task (without naming him) in his influential essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Although Cullen was mysteriously controversial he retained a sizeable following and remains noted as one of the lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Writers were ultimately free to adopt any doctrine of choice, Cullen exemplifies a movement within a larger movement.
Claude McKay’s “If we must die” served as a robust manifesto:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Claude McKay is letting those fighting know that their “deaths,” which can be interpreted figuratively or literally, will be honorable. He urges Black people to not be afraid but strong and dignified. McKay’s piece didn’t condemn violence but rather threatened deadly retaliation for racial prejudice and abuse.
African Americans were even beginning to turn away from America’s most quintessential system: capitalism. The African Blood Brotherhood was an Afro Marxist organization operated in Harlem during the Renaissance. The ABB was the first independent communist/socialist organization comprised of people from African heritage. This group was sparked by a group of young African American and West Indian radicals who were committed to the struggle for Black liberation. Men such as Hubert H. Harrison, an influential member of the Socialist Party's local branch 5 of Harlem and organizer of the Colored Socialist Club and 21st AD Socialist Club, and A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, two of the most important African American socialists during this period and publishers of The Messenger, were both participants in Harlem radical politics and responsible for attracting militant, vocal young people of African descent to socialism. This underground anti-capitalist mecca attracted a lot of eyes, but fewer institutions seemed more opposed by African American literature than the FBI. The official goal behind the FBI’s close reading of Black writers was to anticipate political unrest.
As Harlemites appreciated If We Must Die, the poem often cited as the inaugural poem of the Renaissance, agents assigned with screening text like McKay’s were cautionary of “a notorious negro revolutionary”- “all across the world and into Moscow” who composed a “collection of radical poems.” McKay’s long string of literary “firsts” made him the first African American author to be tracked in an FBI file of his own. Ranging from 1921 to 1940, this file is particularly concerned to document McKay’s 1922-23 expedition to the Soviet Union, the home of the Marxist revolution he later called “the greatest event in the history of humanity.” Attention like this proved the legitimacy of the Harlem Renaissance and what it could mean for America’s landscape.
The Harlem Renaissance essentially stretched its arms out across the world. Négritude, a literary and ideological movement led by French-speaking Black intellectuals from French colonies, was inspired by the Harlem Renaissance. Négritude intellectuals rejected colonialism and argued for the importance of a Pan-African sense of being among the African diaspora. The Harlem Renaissance also set the stage for the civil rights movement. W.E.B DuBois’s philosophy of agitation flowed directly into the movement:
“Such honest critics mistake the function of agitation.
A toothache is an agitation. Is a toothache a good thing?
No. Is it therefore useless?
No. It is supremely useful, for it tells the body of decay, dyspepsia and death.
Without it the body would suffer unknowingly. It would think: All is well, when lo! danger lurks.
The same is true of the Social Body.
Agitation is a necessary evil to tell of the ills of the Suffering.
Without it many nations has been lulled to false security
and preened itself with virtues it did not possess.”
As the radiant days of the Harlem Renaissance concluded, many intellectuals of the period moved to France, seeking refuge against racism and segregation. Among these artists were James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes, who Sengalese writer and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor praised as the spiritual founder of Négritude. In short, the New Negro’s influence was relentless. As Léopold Sédar Senghor urged “Negritude is neither racialism nor self-negation. Yet it is not just affirmation; it is rooting oneself in oneself, and self-confirmation: confirmation of one’s being. It is nothing more or less than what some English-speaking Africans have called the African personality.”
The white literary establishment soon became fascinated with the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and began publishing them in larger numbers. But for the writers themselves, acceptance by the white world was less important. Establishing a “Black aesthetic” was essential; the work of a Black visionary must be appropriate to diasporic culture and people, and its excellence must be defined according to their collective concept of beauty.
The Harlem Renaissance instilled in African Americans across the country a new spirit of self-determination and pride, a new social consciousness, and a new commitment to political activism, all of which would provide a foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Langston Hughes, Harlem’s esteemed poet, even maintained a friendship with MLK Jr. As the leading figure of the civil rights movement, King needed to maintain popular support. There could be no question about where we stood on communism so King needed to be careful about invoking Hughes’ work. Just three weeks after the premiere of “A Raisin in the Sun,” King delivered one of his most intimate sermons, titling it “Shattered Dreams,” which echoed Hughes's imagery. Additionally, during the Montgomery Bus Boycott King pushed activists on by pulling from “Mother to Son”.
“Life for none of us has been a crystal stair,” Cried King at the Holt Street Baptist Church, “but we must keep moving.” (“Well, son, I’ll tell you / Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,” Hughes wrote. “But all the time / I've been a-climbin’ on.”)
While it was primarily a literary movement, the Harlem Renaissance touched all of African American life. From the moment of its inception, its legitimacy was debated. How can upheaval be measured? How can a collective rhythm be documented? By at least one standard its success was clear: the Harlem Renaissance birthed American literary classics, incited a neverending street riot, Black writers were finally taken seriously (by not only white America but most importantly themselves) and it was the very first time African American literature and arts attracted significant recognition from the universe as a whole. The negro finally changed her mind, and the world was watching.
