Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a culmination of African American cultural expression and is usually associated with the “jazz age” of the 1920s. In comparison to preceding decades, the period was characterized by an increased intensity and concentration on two levels. Demographically, Harlem had benefitted from a large number of immigrants as a result of national and international immigration, turning it into an area in which black people constituted the majority. Culturally, New York City was at its height as the publishing and entertainment center of the United States, thereby increasing the chances of finding outlets and publics for African American writers and artists.

The renaissance was the result of a complex interplay of social, economic, and intellectual forces in the preceding decades. Although migration by African Americans from the South to the North had been taking place as early as the Civil War, this stream turned into the “Great Migration” in the 1910s. Encouraged by black newspapers such as the New York Age and the Chicago Defender and by the increased demand for labor as a result of World War I, nearly half a million African Americans left rural areas of the South for the cities in the North. The black population of New York alone increased from about 100,000 in 1910 to about 210,000 in 1920. Following a collapse in real-estate speculation, Harlem landlords decided to rent apartments to blacks, which resulted in many newcomers moving straight into Harlem. Finally, at the turn of the century, African Americans who were committed to a modernist view and integrationist perspective in relation to American culture proved highly influential to most intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.

These intellectual influences go a long way toward explaining some of the tensions active during the era of the renaissance. Writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and the older W. E. B. Du Bois were the most visible and eloquent spokesmen of the Harlem Renaissance, and as a result, many debates in the 1920s were structured by a belief in art as indicator of a flourishing civilization as well as a possible mediator between black and white Americans. In general, it was argued that African Americans could achieve full freedom only if they succeeded in developing an autonomous aesthetic that was not merely a copy of European forms. Although the popular cultural nationalism of the time clearly resonated in these statements, none of these authors was willing to contemplate the more radical view of full political independence. In contrast to Irish and Czech nationalists, for example, the aim of these spokesmen of the Harlem Renaissance was not territorial separation but instead integration into mainstream U.S. culture based on a liberal view of differential equality and full participation. George Hutchinson has shown that this position was to an important extent the result of a nationalization of social relations and institutions during the 20 or 30 years before the 1920s. The sophisticated, urban, and American image of the “new Negro” would have been vastly different without this increasing embedding of social and cultural relations in national structures of communication and transportation. This also [Page 325]explains why Marcus Garvey is often excluded from descriptions of the Harlem Renaissance, by both his contemporaries and later critics. Although Garvey lived in New York, was editor of the Negro World, and organized parades of his Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem, his separatist emphasis on Africa as the true home of African Americans distanced him from intellectuals like Locke, Johnson, and Du Bois, who were above all interested in being and becoming Americans.

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