Selected Langston Hughes poems

In the first few decades of this century, 'the Great Migration' brought African Americans to the cities of the North. An explosion of art, creativity and culture emerged from this era that was rightly called a black 'Renaissance.’ This renaissance was centered in New York's Harlem.

BEGINNINGS

Many factors contributed to the emergence of African-American art during the period following WWI. Social, economic, political, and demographic changes contributed to the rise Harlem, and other African-American urban centers.

During this time, W.E.B. DuBois and other leaders cultivated black art and black activism side by side. DuBois was the first African American to receive a Ph.D from Harvard. His ground-breaking book "The Souls of Black Folk," was a prophetic look at the turn of the century.

FEATURED WRITING

DuBois was also part of the Niagara movement that created the NAACP, the first national Civil Rights organization. One of the NAACP’s efforts was publishing periodicals like "The Crisis" and the children’s magazine, "The Brownie Book." These magazines provided a venue for emerging African-American writers. These young artists, in turn, painted literary pictures of a maturing Black America.

One of these writers was Jamaican émigré poet Claud McKay. In the midst of lynching and race riots that scarred America following World War I, MacKay’s poem "If we must Die" was a poignant and powerful wakeup call.

Claud McKay dramatic reading

The writer who would come to symbolize the Renaissance was Langston Hughes. Hughes writing spanned literary genres and included plays, poems, essays and autobiographies. He would become Harlem’s Poet laureate and impact and influence that is still felt today. While Hughes was one of the writers to influence the Harlem renaissance, he himself was inspired by Harlem. His poem, the Weary Blues, symbolizes the spirit and soul of Harlem.

Langston Hughes dramatic reading

One of the most intriguing figures of the Harlem Renaissance is Zora Neale Hurston. Raised in rural Florida, she was attending college in New York when she got involved in this new literary movement. Lillian Bridwell-Bowls (U of MN) asserts the Hurston is, "a phenomenal anthropologist, and author of what I think may be the great American novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God."

In her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston describes her attitude and approach while writing the 1937 novel.

In 1960, Hurston died in Florida, alone and in poverty. For decades, her work was overlooked. But contemporary Black intellectuals and authors have helped the world rediscover Hurston's work and put it in its rightful place of prominence in American literature.

In 1935, riots in Harlem symbolized the end of the Renaissance. But the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance lives on in the literature.