Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was primarily a literary and intellectual movement, the precise chronological limits of which are somewhat difficult to define. Generally the consensus among scholars has been that the Harlem Renaissance was an event of the 1920s, bounded on one side by the war and the race riots of 1919 and on the other side by the 1929 stock market crash. Some, however, have greatly extended or sharply limited the movement's lifespan. Abraham Chapman, for example, saw elements of the Renaissance in Claude McKay's poetry of 1917 and even in W. E. B. Du Bois's poem "Song of Smoke," which appeared in 1899.

The Harlem Renaissance was basically a psychology - a state of mind or an attitude - shared by a number of black writers and intellectuals who centered their activities around Harlem in the late 1920s and early 1930s. These men and women shared little but a consciousness that they were participants in a new awakening of black culture in the United States . Those directly involved in the movement were all black, although Carl Van Vechten to a major degree and other white writers, patrons, and publishers to a lesser degree participated in and influenced the movement. There was no common bond of political or racial ideology, personal experience, background, or literary philosophy that united the various elements in the Renaissance. What they held in common was a sense of community, a feeling that they were all part of the same endeavor.

Given this interpretation, it is difficult to see the Renaissance beginning before the early twenties, when Jean Toomer published Cane and black writers and scholars began to realize that something new was happening in black literature. The movement extended well into the 1930s and included the later works of Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes. As long as they and other writers consciously identified with the Renaissance, the movement continued. It did not, however, encompass the younger writers like James Baldwin and Richard Wright who emerged in the late thirties and the forties. This group of writers never really identified with or felt themselves to be part of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance may best be conceptualized as a group of young writers orbiting somewhat erratically around several older black intellectuals who were established in the NAACP, in the Urban League, or with black journals and universities. These older men and women, while sometimes participating directly in the creative aspects of the Renaissance, served chiefly as critics, advisers, and liaisons between the younger black writers and the white literary establishment. This group, consisting of people such as James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and W.E.B. Du Bois, generally helped lesser-known black writers make contacts with white publishers and potential patrons. As such, they exerted considerable influence and a certain amount of control over aspiring black writers.The black writers of the Harlem Renaissance were in the vanguard of the attempt to come to terms with black urbanization.

As a final word of introduction to the Harlem Renaissance, it is necessary to say something about the relationship between black literary creativity of the twenties and the similarly intense creativity among white writers of the same period. Like their black counterparts, the white writers of the 1920s engaged in experimentation in form, revolted against what they considered the restrictions imposed by an obsolete morality, and sought to identify truth and meaning in a world of violence, oppression, and absurdity. However, except for a brief examination of those few whites who focused on race in the 1920s and a more detailed discussion of the relationship between black literature and the publishers and promoters of the white literary establishment, this book will not attempt to weave the work of the Harlem Renaissance into the larger pattern of post-World War I American literature.