HARLEM RENAISSANCE

February 20, 1998
		An exhibit in San Francisco explores the artistic and cultural legacies of the 1920s and 30s.

Questions asked in this forum: Why did the Harlem Renaissance use exotic, sensual images to celebrate African-American culture? How did the Harlem Renaissance affect the politics leading up to the Civil Rights Movement? With so many economic and cultural hurdles, why was Harlem Renaissance art so optimistic in tone? What was it about Paris that allowed African-American artists to achieve recognition there? Why did the Harlem Renaissance end?	The Online NewsHour asks: Why did the Harlem Renaissance end? Was it cut short by World War II or did it perhaps branch off in different artistic directions? Professor Richard Powell responds: One could argue that the blossoming of black creativity which occurred just after WWI did not actually die but, rather, evolved into another kind of cultural program and race-based art. Although many people use the Great Depression and the political and economic unrest of the mid-1930s as an end marker for the Harlem Renaissance, the 1930s and the U.S. Government's Works Progress Administration cultural program fueled an abundance of African American literary works, performance art, and visual expression well into the early 1940s. What I prefer to think about (in terms of closure for the Harlem Renaissance period and sensibility) is that, by the late 1930s, the earlier artistic emphasis on "the New Negro" -- someone who is urbane, inherently artistic, sometime primitive, or who is an consummate entertainer -- had been supplanted by someone who, while possibly encompassing one or more of the above types, was, first and foremost, a socio-political entity. This shift in themes and subject matter was not abrupt but, rather, gradual, manifesting itself in works of art that increasingly downplayed a one-dimensional "New Negro" type and, instead, accentuated the African American "masses," the Negro "worker," and a dispossessed, potentially explosive "folk." In our exhibition, Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, we chose to end the exhibition with Jacob Lawrence's amazing 41-panel Toussaint L'Ouverture Series (1937-38). With the above ideas in mind, we felt that Lawrence's thematic focus on the Haitian revolution could be interpreted as a metaphor for Harlem (and other Depression era black communities), as it and its inhabitants struggled with new economic and social challenges on the eve of WWII. Professor Jeffrey Stewart responds: The Harlem Renaissance ended for a variety of reasons. First, the broader conditions that brought it into existence ended, basically with the Great Depression. First, the Harlem Renaissance was an adjustment on the part of the Black community to the sudden influx of African American migrants from the South to the North during World War I, or roughly from 1915 to 1918. While the migration continued after 1920, the northern communities such as New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. etc., had developed structures to accommodate these new migrants and the changes in the culture of the Black north that their arrival produced. Second, the European American infatuation with the Negro declined in the 1930s, in large part because the fad had been built on the "devil may care" attitude of the "Roaring Twenties." As the depression collapsed the wild enthusiasm of the 1920s, so too European American patronage of Harlem establishments and artists declined precipitously. Also, the depression exposed the economic fragility of Harlem, given that much of the real estate in Harlem was owned by European Americans; and when the depression hit, African Americans lost their jobs at faster rates than European Americans, caused foreclosures on mortgages, evictions from rental properties, and a depression and alienation from the American Dream that was expressed violently in the first modem race riot, the Harlem Riot of 1935. That riot symbolized that the optimism and hopefulness that had fueled the Harlem Renaissance was dead. I also think that the Harlem Renaissance ended because the central ideas that underlay its artistic production had been exhausted by the mid 1930s. The idea that the American Negro was somehow the harbinger of a rural, southern, ultimately African primitivism had been exhausted as a literary idea by the works that had been produced in the 1920s and early 1930s, works by Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Rudolph Fisher, and Zora Neale Hurston. There were only so many poems and short stories to be written about "what it means to feel like black me" and "what does Africa mean to me?" In the later twenties, moreover the desire to take advantage of the "vogue of the Negro" led some writers to produce works of poor quality that inevitably eroded the staying power of the movement. Even those like Langston Hughes who had contributed mightily to the Harlem Renaissance's celebration of the distinctive culture of the Black of "primitive" masses, found that in the 1930s he needed to move on to embrace what Alain Locke later called "proletarian literature," a poetry and fiction of the Black masses that focussed on their class position rather than their ethnic or racial specialness. In that move, Langston befriended and mentored a whole new generation of leftist writers like Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, and Sterling Brown who found in the blues and the southern experience of Black people a powerful critique of American society that was altogether missing from Harlem Renaissance writing. Others from the period like Zora Neale Hurston took another route out of the Harlem Renaissance and embraced a Black Diaspora consciousness, that saw the logical extension and exploration of Black culture taking them to the Caribbean where many believed Africanisms survived in much more potent forms. Here her work connected with that of a younger generation that included such dancers and choreographers as Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, both of whom, like Hurston, combined an artistic with an anthropological interest in studying Black culture in the Caribbean, and such visual artists as Jacob Lawrence and Lois Mailou Jones, who explored Caribbean historical and artistic themes in their work. In short, the Harlem Renaissance reached a natural end, but was able to feed into and stimulate further developments in the 1930s. Some argue that the Harlem Renaissance emphasis on cultural distinctiveness returned with a vengeance in the 1960s Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, when a new generation of writers, artists, and dramatists emerged in the North to express a Black consciousness in the arts and to rediscover the work of Harlem Renaissance artists all over again. Professor William Drummond responds: Today I interviewed Jacob Lawrence, the country's most celebrated African-American painter and a man who lived through the Harlem Renaissance, for a piece I'm doing for National Public Radio.  Based on his answers and my own research into the issues, I'll try to respond to the queries. This is really the 64 dollar question.  Why did the Harlem Renaissance end?  When did it end?  Did it ever end?  Well, I spent an hour with Jacob Lawrence today.  He signed my autograph.  He lives.  His art lives.  His ideas live.  Some people say the movement ended with the Stock Market crash in 1929.   Well, what are we to make of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Adam Clayton Powell, Ellison, Adam Clayton Powell Jr.?  They were products of the time, just as Lawrence was, and they went on to continue their lives and their work for years afterward.  Epistemologists like to have neat bookends.  The Harlem Renaissance is generally said to have "begun" when the black troops returned from France in 1919.  And It ended in 1929.  You make up your own mind.  I don't think intellectual movements ever end.  They live on in the minds of men and women. Return to this forum's introduction