Is Harlem in need of another Renaissance? Looking at a cultural boom through an interdisciplinary lens
The 1920s witnessed an intellectual and creative revival in America, as African-Americans began to reconceptualise their heritage and install in themselves a sense of cultural pride. Literature, music, poetry and theatre became the building blocks of a new black consciousness, and this new awakening through the arts enabled black America to redefine itself. It was a time of unparalleled cultural collaboration that tied in closely with the civil rights movement and political action.
From 1910 to 1920, an exodus of some 6 million African-Americans from the Jim-Crow South to the North led to the development of Black neighbourhoods in cities such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Detroit. The Northern Manhattan neighbourhood of Harlem was intended as a neighbourhood for the upper-class white population in the 1880s, but rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and ‘desperate landlords’ seeking to fill them (click to read an article on early Harlem by the Encyclopedia Britannica). A few middle-class black families moved to Harlem at the turn of the century, and while white residents fought to keep them out of the area, they ultimately failed and moved elsewhere. Eventually the neighbourhood became a key centre for marginalised African-Americans who had moved from the South, in what would later become known as ‘The Great Migration’.
Three women in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, c.1925. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
It was around this time, sixty years after the emancipation proclamation, writer and philosopher Alain Locke declared black Americans “spiritually emancipated.” Historian Cheryl A. Wall describes this sense of emancipation as a release from the caricatures used to represent African-Americans:
‘They had shaken off the stereotypes that the epithets defined. These stereotypes had never defined black people; legacies of slavery, they signified more myth than man, more formula than human being. They were the caricatures that circulated throughout popular culture in the advertisements, minstrel shows, movies, and literature. They were figments of white Americans’ imaginations’.[1]
The Harlem Renaissance is considered a ‘Golden Age’ in African-American culture. As suggested by Wall, it can be characterised by its cultivation of an African-American identity, as separate from a purely American identity, as well as emphasis on racial pride and intellect, and its integration of different art forms. Prominent figure and author W.E.B Du Bois explored the idea of a double consciousness, and the strife of his fellow men in trying to reconcile or ‘merge’ the two sides of their identity, the African and the American. The below passage from his famous work ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ (1903) poetically captures this sentiment, and the idea of reconciling the double consciousness is certainly a key underlying ideology of the Harlem renaissance, and ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ had a profound effect on the generation at the core of the movement.
‘The history of the American-Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of his other selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of White Americanisms, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows’[2]
Music was of a course a key pillar of the Harlem renaissance. A huge variety of talented musicians flourished during this time, including Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ivie Anderson, Art Tatum, Josephine Baker, Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton, among many others. Click here to see Art Tatum, a key musician of the Harlem Renaissance, performing ‘Yesterdays’.
Looking at the Harlem Renaissance from the perspective of a Liberal Arts student reminds me why interdisciplinarity in the humanities is so important. The artistic contributions for the Harlem renaissance were inspired by one another in a sort of chain reaction - poetry inspired art, which in-turn inspired music, which in-turn inspired literature, and so on, all coalescing as a creative discourse that had a real purpose. There could have been no substitute for these artistic innovations in renewing a sense of pride for a racial group deprived of their heritage by the dominant culture. In this sense, art occupies a unique space, it interacts with and responds to reality, but is able to elevate, and give a new sense of possibility.
NAACP’s ’The Crisis’ magazine was crucial to the Harlem renaissance. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Learning about the history of the Harlem Renaissance raised a question to me, how did the neighbourhood continue to develop and where is it at now? Most historians argue the Renaissance collapsed under the stock market crash of 1929, as black-owned businesses and venues were given minimal patronage, and people had little disposable income to use for cultural ventures.
The gentrification of Harlem in the 21st century has made it increasingly difficult for African-Americans to preserve the neighbourhood as a black cultural centre. In 2016, Michael Adams, a Harlem resident of over 30 years, relays this process and the effect it’s had on the black community in a New York Times article entitled ‘The End of Black Harlem’. New housing projects are underway, unaffordable to black residents with an average income of 31,00 a year. Historical cultural centres including ‘The Renaissance’, ‘The Lenox Lounge’, and ‘The Child’s Memorial Temple Church of God in Christ’, the venue of Malcolm X’s funeral, have all been dismantled. Adams laments the disappointment of young black children, who discover that the neighbourhood is being ‘improved’ for people other than themselves:
‘It was painful to realize how even a kid could see in every new building, every historic renovation, every boutique clothing shop — indeed in every tree and every flower in every park improvement — not a life-enhancing benefit, but a harbinger of his own displacement.’[3]
Black people created Harlem, they brought life to a neighbourhood marred by limited opportunity and shared their creativity with fellow Americans. The art that blossomed during the Harlem renaissance made an indelible print on art globally and has given hope to millions. The future of the neighbourhood is uncertain, but as new high-rise flats continue to pop up on Harlem’s streets, we see that although the nature of African Americans’ struggle against systemic racism may have changed since the Great Migration, it certainly hasn’t ended.
By Mia Jenkins
[1] Cheryl A. Wall, A Very Short Introduction to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2016), p.22. [2] W.E. Du Bois, ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ (1903). [3] Michel Adams, 'The End of Black Harlem',TheNew YorkTimes, 27 May 2016.