Content Background
The Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement
The term, “Harlem Renaissance” often brings to mind images of the Jazz age - clubs, blues, jazz, literature, music, and art - with an African-American hue. While these may be appropriate signifiers, the Harlem Renaissance, was much more. It was not just an artistic resurgence, but also a cultural, social, and political movement all in one. As Langston Hughes, one of the era’s most well know and prolific writers refers to it as “the period when the Negro was in vogue”.2
Like other social movements, the Harlem Renaissance often defies definition. There is much debate over if the movement existed, what the dates were, and what the movement should be called. While modern scholars use the term “Harlem Renaissance”, some writers and intellectuals at the time referred to the movement as the “Negro renaissance”, while others preferred the term “New Negro Movement” thus widening its location, scope, and political implications.3
Similarly, scholars debate the time period for what we will refer to as the Harlem Renaissance. Because “periodization is always artificial and approximate”, this is not surprising.4s From a strictly literary aspect, scholars mark the time period between 1916, with the production of Alice Grimke’s play Rachel and ending with the publication of Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, while the Norton Anthology of African American Literature presents a timeline of 1919-1940.5 From a wider social perspective, some mark the beginning in 1919 with the 369th “Harlem Hellfighters” Regiment’s march up Fifth Avenue which is the same year Claude McKay’s anti-lynching sonnet, “If We Must Die” was first published. A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance provides an even broader timeframe that began in the early twentieth century and faded prior to the Second World War.6 Looked at together, these discussions roughly agree that the Harlem Renaissance preceded Jazz Age Harlem and lasted well into the 1930’s with the decade of the 1920’s as its pinnacle. For our discussion, we will use Hutchinson’s dates of 1918-1937, while recognizing that “the Harlem Renaissance, or New Negro Movement, was characterized by remarkable diversity that cannot be limited to a linear narrative of boom and bust… (with an) unprecedented flowering of black cultural production in visual art, literature, dance, and music.”7
Precipitating Factors
Now that we have established a name (The Harlem Renaissance) and time period (1918-1937), let us look first at the precipitating factors and then at the characteristics of the movement as we continue to define the undefinable. The Harlem Renaissance can be viewed as either a segment or an evolution of the larger “New Negro Movement” in African-American discourse. This New Negro can be traced to an 1895 editorial in the Cleveland Gazette which speaks to “a class of colored people who have arisen since the war with education, refinement, money, assertiveness, and racial consciousness”.8 Booker T. Washington and others sought to create a public image of the New Negro specifically through the anthology, A New Negro for a New Century: An Accurate and Up-to-Date Record of the Upward Struggles of the Negro Race which was a compilation of excerpted black histories, slave narratives, journalism, biographical sketches, and exaltations of black soldiers that provided testimony to Black progress and perfectibility. The New Negro of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century sought to forget the past of slavery and created him / herself through description and the creation of literature as necessary in the search for respectability. Immediately after World War I, a new iteration of the New Negro appeared with more militant political connotations as seen in essays in publications such as the Messenger, the Crusader, the Kansas City Call, and the Chicago Whip in response the post war race riots. In 1925, Alain Locke edited a special edition of the magazine Survey Graphic, which was devoted exclusively to life in Harlem, which he later expanded into the anthology The New Negro. In these works, Locke sought to define the New Negro as a poet using the sublimity of the arts to speak to America and define who and what the Negro was or could be.
This New Negro arrived in Harlem and other large northern and Midwest cities as part of the Great Migration. Beginning around 1916, the Great Migration saw about six million Black Southerners relocate to urban centers. Limited economic opportunities in the South and ongoing racial oppression and violence through Jim Crow laws and lynching were some of the motivating “push” factors for the move. Simultaneous “pull” factors included reports of good wages and living conditions spread by word of mouth and through African-American publications, like the Chicago Defender, with ads for employment and housing as well as personal testimonies of success in the North. Though these urban centers such as Detroit, Chicago, and New York, were not utopias due to segregation and race riots, they represented better civil, social, and economic opportunities for many.9 In addition to Southern migration, there was an influx of immigrants from the African diaspora, specifically the Caribbean, as Blacks across the globe sought better lives. This physical convergence of Black people helped facilitate Pan-African sensibilities that were evident in art of the time. Harlem served as a symbolic capital for the movement as it was a facilitator for artistic expression and had a popular nightlife. As a major communication capital of the world, New York provided aspiring African-American artists prominence and more opportunities for publication. By the early 1920’s, Harlem, formerly a white residential area, had become virtually a Black city within Manhattan. While people who identified with the renaissance lived in other boroughs, they often met in Harlem or attended special events at the 135th Street branch of the NYC Public Library. Likewise, Black intellectuals from other metropolitan areas such as Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, who had their own artistic circles, also met in Harlem, with some settling there. Because of the diverse and decentered nature of New York City Black social life, this was a particularly productive place for artistic and cultural experimentation.
Alongside the artistic and cultural growth were increased political and social awareness and engagement, thus making the Harlem Renaissance unusual among artistic and literary movements due to its close relationship to civil rights and reform organizations. The Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Opportunity, published by the National Urban League; The Messenger, a socialist journal eventually connected with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; and Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, were crucial to the movement’s growth.10
This merging of Black people from diverse cultural and geographic backgrounds also brought myriad political and social ideologies. Though all sought better civic and economic opportunities for African-Americans, the beliefs about how to achieve those goals varied greatly and resulted in different schools of thought and debates by prominent leaders of the time. These leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Alain Locke, and Marcus Garvey drew supporters from Harlem’s artistic community and impacted their creative and civic work.
Competing Political Ideas
In order to better understand the deliberate artistic decisions and the continued fascination with the Harlem Renaissance and its relations to debates about representation, vernacular theories of Black literature, Black radicalism, Black nationalism, transnationalism, and feminism, it is important to look briefly at the prevailing political / social ideas at the time.11
Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois
The debate between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois in the late 19th century and early 20th century framed the quest for African-American equality and paved the way for the modern Civil Rights movement. Though contemporaries committed to the civil rights cause and skilled scholars, their differences in backgrounds and methods were both galvanizing and polarizing for Black America.
Washington’s early life and education greatly influenced his later thinking. Born a slave in Virginia in 1856, after the Civil War, Washington worked in a salt mine and as a domestic before attending Hampton Institute which was one of many schools founded by the American Missionary Association (AMA) after the Civil War to educate newly freed Black people. After graduation, Washington taught before heading the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama which was a vocational school founded to provide African-Americans moral instruction and practical work skills so they could be successful in their new lives of freedom. Because of this background, Washington was a proponent of economic independence and the ability to prove themselves productive members of society that would lead African-Americans to real equality. Washington’s philosophy of self-help, solidarity, and accommodation formed the crux of his Atlanta Exposition speech in 1895. While the ideas espoused in the speech were eagerly accepted by Black people for their practicality and white people who were willing to defer difficult discussions on African-American equality, critics referred to it disparagingly as the “Atlanta Compromise”. Du Bois was among those critics.
Du Bois was born 12 years after Washington in 1868 to a free Black family in a somewhat integrated community in Massachusetts. He excelled in school, graduating as valedictorian of his high school class. While attending Fisk University in Tennessee, another school founded by the AMA, Du Bois for the first time encountered the open racism and oppression of the South. No doubt this experience impacted his social and political thinking. He returned to the North to continue his education and became the first African-American man to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Equal rights for blacks were on his mind as evidenced through his dissertation on the African Slave Trade and the groundbreaking essay, “The Strivings of Negro People”, in the Atlantic Monthly, which explained how it felt to be the victim of racism.
Partially derived from the Atlantic article, The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays examining the Black experience in America by Du Bois, gave voice to his personal history through his arguments. Not only did the book introduce the idea of “double consciousness”, the internal conflict or inward “twoness” experienced by African-Americans because of their racialized oppression in a white-dominated society, but it also explicitly differentiated Du Bois from the conservative voice of Washington.12 Du Bois argued that Washington’s approach would only serve to prolong white oppression, while political action, agitation and protest were necessary to change the status quo. Du Bois and other Black intellectuals believed that setting a civil rights agenda would hasten the march to inequality and founded the Niagara Group for this purpose. Though this group dissolved, many of its ideals and members, including Du Bois, were incorporated in the NAACP. Du Bois served as editor of the NAACP journal, Crisis, for the next 25 years affording a space for artists and activists of the Harlem Renaissance to share their voices while offering social and political commentary. This ideological rift, which divided African-American leaders into two camps - the conservative supporters of Washington and the radical critics led by Du Bois - would eventually prove to be one of the most important in the history of the struggle for civil rights.13
Alain Locke
Alain LeRoy Locke was a preeminent scholar, educator, theorist, critic, and interpreter of African-American literature and art who referred to himself as “midwife” to aspiring young African-American writers in the 1920’s. Locke is sometimes referred to as the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance” because of his 1925 publication, The New Negro, an anthology of poetry, essays, plays, music, and portraiture. Locke sought to redefine the New Negro through this text with the purpose of documenting “the New Negro culturally and socially - to register the transformations of the inner and outer life of the Negro in America that have so significantly taken place in the last few years.”14 He was also an imaginative and methodical philosopher who developed theories of value, pluralism and cultural relativism that instructed and were strengthened by his work on aesthetics. Locke’s ideas of Black aesthetics were quite different from other Black intellectuals of his day, most notably W. E. B. Du Bois. Locke and Du Bois disagreed about the appropriate social and political function of Black artistic endeavors. While Du Bois thought it was the role and responsibility of Black artists to create “art that works on behalf of racial advancement, deploying ‘Truth’ to promote ‘universal understanding’ and ‘Goodness’ to engender ‘sympathy and human interest” thus aiding the goal of social uplift.15 Locke criticized this as “propaganda” and argued that the primary responsibility and function of the artist is not to produce “decadent or "over-civilized" art but art free to serve its own ends, free to choose either "group expression" or "individualistic expression” thereby communicating something of universal human appeal.16 Though they disagreed, both Locke and Du Bois sought to combat the myth of Black inferiority.
Marcus Garvey
Like both Washington and Locke, Marcus Garvey was often in disagreement with Du Bois. Garvey was a Jamaican born political activist, entrepreneur, journalist, and publisher. He was the founder and first president of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). Ideologically, Garvey was a Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist with his particular brand known as Garveyism. Garveyism, as an outshoot of Black nationalism, through economic, racial, and political policies focused on the unification and empowerment of Blacks under the banner of their collective African descent.17 Garvey must be included in a discussion of the Harlem Renaissance as he was also a significant Black leader in creative, intellectual, and political pursuits in the U.S. as well as on a global scale. The middle-class leadership of the NAACP (James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois), Urban League, and the Messenger (Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph) were often at odds with Garvey’s message of Black nationalism and a free Black Africa. In 1924, Du Bois claimed that "Marcus Garvey is the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world.”18 Despite their differences all of these leaders subscribed to some form of Pan-Africanism and through art, literature, economic empowerment, and political power sought equality for African-Americans.
These charismatic leaders affected the artists of the Harlem Renaissance in a number of ways from incorporating traditional African elements in their visual works of art, to using the written word to speak out against lynching and segregation and affirm positive images of Black America. James Weldon Johnson was not only actively engaged in these political debates as a leader of the NAACP with Du Bois, but also was a prolific man of letters who used his creative writing to speak eloquently to the African-American experience. Similarly, Augusta Savage was socially connected to Marcus Garvey and used both her platform and artistic ability to speak out against racial discrimination and sculpt positive images of African-Americans including Du Bois, Johnson, and Garvey.
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson was the epitome of a renaissance man as he excelled in many different fields. As a songwriter, poet, novelist, journalist, critic, autobiographer, educator, public speaker, lawyer, and social activist he accomplished a great deal personally and professionally.
Johnson was born in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida to a freeborn Virginian father and a Bahamian mother. He was trained in music, literature, and other subjects by his mother, a schoolteacher. Her influence developed interests that Johnson would take with him throughout his complex career. His parents raised him without the sense of limitations placed on African-Americans, especially in South during that time. After graduating from Atlanta University in 1894, Johnson returned to Jacksonville to teach at Stanton grammar school for Black students. When he became principal, Johnson expanded Stanton to include high school. While working as an educator, Johnson studied the law and in 1897 became the first African-American man admitted to the Florida bar and began practicing law. While balancing his law studies and responsibilities as an educator, Johnson founded The Daily American newspaper 1895. Already established as a man of law and letters, Johnson partnered with his brother, John Rosamond Johnson - a composer, to write the song, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, based on James’s 1900 poem of the same name. This song is widely known as the Black National Anthem and inspired other works of the Harlem Renaissance including Augusta Savage’s sculpture for the 1939 World’s Fair.19
In 1901, the Johnson brothers moved to New York City. There, they created approximately 200 songs for Broadway shows. While in New York, Johnson studied at Columbia University and began connecting with other influential African-American community members and leaders. In 1904, Johnson became the chairman of the newly created Colored Republican Club of New York and it became a huge success. Many Harlem Renaissance artists joined and according to The New York Sun, “the Colored Republican Club…has almost a corner on the writers of ragtime…. Among its 800 members are at least 200 trained singers and fifty men capable of caressing the piano. 'I suppose no other organization not purely musical has so many musicians and composers as ours’'".20 That same year, the Johnson brothers wrote “Teddy’s Song” for Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential campaign. They sent the song to Booker T. Washington who then sent it to Roosevelt who wrote back that he considered a “bully good song.” Realizing the song was a hit, the Johnsons renamed the song, “You’re All Right Teddy” and published it along with sheet music and it became the official song of the campaign. This merging of political involvement / activism and art would lead to the next stage of James Weldon Johnson’s career.
As a show of gratitude for his campaign contribution, and as part of his effort to promote African-Americans in government, Roosevelt appointed James Weldon Johnson United States Consul to Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. Johnson served there with such distinction that Taft later appointed him Consul to Nicaragua, a position he held until 1913. During this time, Johnson anonymously published his only novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. This fictional autobiography explored the complexity of racial identity through the life of its biracial narrator. Raised in a life of security and culture secured by monthly checks from his white father, when he accidently learns that he is Black, the narrator experienced the first of many identity shifts that occured throughout his life eventually leading him to “pass” by living his life as a member of white society. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man attracted little attention until Johnson reissued it under his own name in 1927. The public assumed it was a work of nonfiction, so to clarify his upbringing and life, Johnson published his actual autobiography, Along This Way, in 1933.21
After leaving the world of diplomacy, Johnson turned his attention from the international to the national when he joined the NAACP and in 1916 became a field secretary where helped expand membership and open new branches across the South. During this time, he campaigned for a federal anti-lynching bill and spoke at the 1919 National Conference on Lynching. In 1920, he became the first African-American to serve as the Executive Secretary of the NAACP, a position he held for a decade. In this top leadership position, Johnson continued to fight against lynching, segregation, and Black voter disenfranchisement in the South. Despite the demands of NAACP leadership, Johnson continued not only to write, but also support other Black artists as he became known as one of the leading figures in the development of the Harlem Renaissance. While actively working with the NAACP, Johnson published Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917), Self-Determining Haiti (1920), The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), two volumes of The Book of American Negro Spirituals, in collaboration with his brother (1925,1926), and God’s Trombones (1927). During a leave of absence from the NAACP in 1929, with the support of Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, Johnson wrote Black Manhattan. In 1930, Johnson resigned from the NAACP and became the Adam K. Spence Professor of Creative Literature at Fisk University.22
Throughout his wide-ranging career, Johnson developed a unique philosophy on gaining Black equality and combating racism that scholars contrasted with views of other Black intellectuals. While Du Bois championed the power of a liberal arts education and the “Talented Tenth” and Washington argued for industrial training, Johnson believed Black Americans should create magnificent literature and art to prove their equality to whites in terms of intellect, ability, and creativity. This belief no doubt supported and encouraged Black artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
Augusta Savage
More than just a gifted sculptor, Augusta Savage was also an activist, community organizer, teacher, and a leader in breaking down barriers for black artists. Her artwork was acclaimed for its positive images of black people, often seen by some as outsiders. By creating these images, Savage elevated her Black subjects to mainstream American citizens. She was central to the Harlem Renaissance, not just for her activism and talented artwork, but for her ability to connect artists from many generations.
Born Augusta Christine Fells in Green Cove Springs, Florida, on February 29, 1892, she was the seventh of fourteen children of Cornelia and Edward Fells. Savage knew from a very young age that she wanted to become a sculptor, but her father, a Methodist minister, strongly opposed her early interest in art. Fells often scolded and whipped her for creating “graven images”. Savage recalls, “My father licked me four or five times a week… and almost whipped all the art out of me.”23
In 1907, at only 15 years old, Savage married John T. Moore, and the following year her only child, Irene, was born. Moore died several years after the birth of their daughter, and the widowed artist eventually married James Savage, a carpenter whose name she kept after their divorce. Savage’s father moved his family from Green Cove Springs to West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1915 and she moved with them. Lack of family encouragement and support combined with the scarcity of local clay kept Savage from sculpting for almost four years. In 1919, a local potter provided her with clay which she used to sculpt a group of figures that she entered in the West Palm Beach County Fair. Her work was well received and won a special prize, ribbon of honor, and the support of the fair’s superintendent who encouraged her to study art despite the racism she would face. Heartened by her success, Savage moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where she hoped to support herself by sculpting portrait busts of prominent Blacks in the community. When that patronage did not materialize, Savage left her daughter in the care of her parents and moved to New York City.24
In 1920, with little money and a job as apartment caretaker, Savage enrolled in Cooper Union’s School of Art which did not charge tuition. Her teachers knew immediately that Savage was talented, and eventually provided her with a scholarship to cover her living expenses, and she excelled by finishing the 4 -year program in just 3 years. In 1923, Savage applied and was one of about 100 young women selected to attend a special summer program to study art at Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts in France. Unfortunately, her application was later refused, and her acceptance revoked when the jurors learned she was African-American. This incident served as a call to action for Savage and she sent letters to the local media about the program selection committee's discriminatory practices. Her story made headlines in many newspapers and signified Savage’s acceptance of the role as a “race woman” or “intellectual fundamentally engaged in their work with the sociopolitical experience of people of color.”25 Although Savage’s public defense wasn't enough to change the group's verdict, one committee member, Herman MacNeil, denounced the decision and invited Savage to further hone her craft at his Long Island studio. Also, in 1923, Savage married her third and final husband, Robert L. Poston, a newspaper publisher editor who eventually became Secretary General of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA. As a result, Garvey became a family friend and visited the home of Savage and Poston to discuss the state of African-American political affairs. Eventually, Garvey sat for a bust sculpture by Savage and the two further explored the ideas of Garveyism.
During the early 1920’s Savage’s talent was recognized with commissions to create busts of other prominent personalities such as W. E. B. Du Bois as she was one of the first artists who consistently dealt with black physiognomy. Her best-known work of the 1920s was Gamin (French for “street urchin”), an informal bust portrait of her nephew, for which she was awarded a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship to study in Paris in 1929. There she studied briefly with Felix Benneteau at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She had two works accepted for the Salon d’Automne and exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris. In 1931, Savage won a second Rosenwald fellowship, which permitted her to remain in Paris for an additional year. She also received a Carnegie Foundation grant for eight months of travel in France, Belgium, and Germany.26
When Savage returned to Harlem in 1932, the Great Depression made commissions and art sales difficult to obtain, so she established the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts and became an influential art educator in Harlem. In 1934, she became the first African-American member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. In 1937, Savage’s career took a significant turn when she was appointed the first director of the Harlem Community Art Center and was commissioned by the New York World’s Fair of 1939 to create a sculpture symbolizing the musical contributions of African-Americans. Inspired by the lyrics of James Weldon Johnson’s poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, Savage decided to symbolize Negro spirituals and hymns in her sculpture of the same name (also called The Harp). She took a leave of absence from her position at the Harlem Community Art Center and spent almost two years completing the sixteen-foot sculpture which was cast in plaster and finished to resemble black basalt. The sculpture depicted a group of twelve stylized black singers in graduated heights that symbolized the strings of the harp. The sounding board was formed by the hand and arm of God, and a kneeling man holding music represented the foot pedal. No funds were available to cast The Harp, nor were there any facilities to store it. Sadly, after the fair closed Savage’s largest work and last major commissioned piece was demolished in spite of the acclaim it received.27
Savage returned to Harlem only to learn that her position at the Harlem Community Art Center was held by someone else. The Harlem Community Art Center closed when federal funds were cut off, but in 1939 Savage tried to reestablish an art center in Harlem with the opening of the Salon of Contemporary Negro Art. She was founder-director of the small gallery that was the first of its kind in Harlem. Unfortunately, that venture closed shortly after its opening due to lack of funding.
Disheartened and depressed by her job loss and two failed attempts at starting art centers, Savage retreated to the small town of Saugerties, New York, in the Catskill Mountains. During her years in Saugerties, Savage explored her interest in writing children’s stories, murder mysteries, and vignettes, although none were published. She occasionally visited New York, taught children in local summer camps, and produced a few portrait sculptures of tourists.
In addition to collaborating with and sculpting Black leaders of the day such as Du Bois, Johnson, and Garvey, Savage was also a key member of the Harlem art community and a member of the 306 Group. Named for its location, the group was housed at 306 West 141st Street. Savage collaborated a great deal with members of the group and other artists in sharing techniques and ideas with young Black artists, including Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Morgan and Marvin Smith. Her legacy survives in the artists and future artists whose lives she touched. Savage believed that teaching others was far more important than creating art herself and explained her motivation in an interview: “If I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent, I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work. No one could ask for more than that.”28
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