Download HR Powerpoint

The Harlem
Renaissance
Harlem is vicious
Modernism. BangClash.
Vicious the way it's made,
Can you stand such beauty.
So violent and transforming.
- Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
Background Info
An outburst of creative activity from 19201930 amongst African-Americans
Began in New York City, specifically
Greenwich Village and Harlem areas
First called “The New Negro Movement”
African Americans were encouraged to
become “The New Negro”
This term was coined by sociologist and
critic Alain LeRoy Locke in 1925
Contributing Factors
The Great Migration to northern cities
between 1919 and 1926
Trend in American society towards
experimentation during the 1920’s
Rise in radical Black intellectuals such as
Locke, Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois
"(Harlem) is romantic in its own right. And it is hard and strong, its noise, heat,
cold, cries and colours are so. And the nostalgia is violent too; the eternal radio
seeping through everything day and night, indoors and out, becomes somehow
the personification of restlessness, desire, brooding."
--Nancy Cunard, Harlem Review, 1933
What is it?
New ways of thinking led to new ways of
expressing one’s self. Such as:



Art
Music
Literature
The Crisis, a literary magazine started by
W.E.B. DuBois and ran by the NAACP,
was an outlet for many authors and artists
at the time
Louis Armstrong
"Louis Armstrong's station in the history of
jazz is umimpeachable. If it weren't for him,
there wouldn't be any of us." Dizzy Gillespie,
1971
“Trumpet Player” by Langston
Hughes
Ain’t Misbehavin’
Was born in New Orleans, but
influenced many musicians
when he was in Chicago and
New York during the 1920’s
and 1930’s
Considered the King of Jazz
Jelly Roll Morton
Original Jelly
Roll Rag
Jelly Roll Morton was the first
great composer and piano player
of Jazz.
As a teenager Jelly Roll Morton
worked in the whorehouses of
Storyville as a piano player.
He worked as a gambler, pool shark,
pimp, vaudeville comedian and as a
pianist.
He was an important transitional
figure between ragtime and jazz
piano styles.
He fell upon hard times after 1930
and even lost the diamond he had in
his front tooth.
Bessie Smith
Was one of the
most popular
African American
recording stars of
the 1920’s
Was popular with
Black and White
fans
“Empress of Blues”
He Treats Me Like a
Dog
Aaron Douglas
His work best exemplified
the “New Negro”
His work was showcased
as murals on buildings
and as cover art and
illustrations to works in
The Crisis.
"...Our problem is to conceive, develop, establish an art era. Not white art
painting black...let's bare our arms and plunge them deep through laughter,
through pain, through sorrow, through hope, through disappointment, into the
very depths of the souls of our people and drag forth material crude, rough,
neglected. Then let's sing it, dance it, write it, paint it. Let's do the impossible.
Let's create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy.
Spiritually earthy. Dynamic."
Aaron Douglas
Langston Hughes
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15722
His work was very important in shaping the art of
the H.R.
His writing was influenced by the life and art of
African Americans, such as jazz
He wanted to tell the stories of the people in a
way that reflected their culture including both
their suffering and their love of laughter,
language and music
His self proclaimed calling was "to explain and
illuminate the Negro condition in America."
Countee Cullen
was raised and educated in a primarily
white community, and he differed from
other poets of the Harlem Renaissance
like Langston Hughes in that he lacked the
background to comment from personal
experience on the lives of other blacks or
use popular black themes in his writing.
(www.poets.org)