Are You Aware? The Harlem Renaissance
This is part I in our Awareness Wednesday series for Black History Month 2021. Read the other posts in the series here.
The Harlem Renaissance was a product of the Great Migration. Millions of rural Blacks left the South, which had failed them, for better opportunities in western, midwestern, and northern cities. These largely factory driven cities needed industrial workers, especially during World War I. Cities like Detroit, Chicago, Tulsa, and New York were the beneficiaries of the great pool of talent and labor that arrived.
Once they had arrived, they built up vibrant neighborhoods full of art, music, and industry. Restaurants, barbershops, grocery stores, and pool halls were opened to cater to the needs of the many domestic and manual laborers. These, in turn, afforded additional opportunities for a Black professional class to thrive. Doctors, lawyers, insurance agents, and undertakers were able to provide services to the people who could not get these services from whites.
In Tulsa, the entrepreneurial spirit was in full force in the Greenwood neighborhood. In Detroit, over time, the people gave us Motown. In Chicago, the Southside Writers Group gave us notable writers such as Richard Wright.
And in New York, there was Harlem.
Of all of the places and times in the world that seem to me to be magical, Harlem in the first half of the 1900s is it. There were poets like Countee Cullen, whose pain-filled words still speak to me.
Incident
By Countee Cullen
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
Langston Hughes was also a product of this place and time. He wrote the following:
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston also developed her talents in Harlem. In 1931 she interviewed Cudjo Lewis, the last living person to have arrived as cargo in the U.S. on a slave ship. The resulting book, “Barracoon,” was just published in 2018.
These writers and others, like James Weldon Johnson and Claude McKay, documented the Black experience in differing ways and continue to enrich us all in the process.
The music scene that developed in Harlem was marked by names we know and some we have begun to forget. The musicians performed through their afflictions and their joys. When Louis Armstrong came to Harlem to seek his fortune, he met up with Fats Waller. Louis’ vocal style and cornet playing beside Fats Waller’s stride piano were a turning point in the development of jazz.
Much of the musical entertainment of Harlem, although performed by Black artists, was staged in segregated clubs like the Cotton Club. Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, Count Basie, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Dorothy Dandridge were on stage in front of all-white audiences in Harlem.
Billie Holiday was probably the most notable of all the singers to emerge during the Harlem Renaissance. Her songwriting and performance of “God Bless the Child” is among her best-known works aside from “Strange Fruit.” “Strange Fruit” is the song that killed Billie Holiday. The backlash she faced — largely because of this song and from the government’s Bureau of Narcotics commissioner Harry Anslinger— would directly lead to her death.
To look back at Harlem during this time, look to the photographs of James Van Der Zee — the most prominent of all Black photographers in Harlem. Van Der Zee chronicled the life of Harlem in its finest moments. He wanted to counteract the negative images of Black America that were widely published at the time. He photographed celebrities such as Florence Mills, Hazel Scott, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Gordon Parks was also a Harlem photographer. He was the first Black photographer to shoot for Vogue magazine. He was a photographer for the Farm Security Bureau and in 1942 produced his iconic photograph American Gothic. I could not help thinking of this photo as I saw the recent photos of the workers cleaning up after the Capitol riots of January 6. Parks also moved into the movie business later, directing and writing films such as “Shaft” and “Leadbelly.”
But Harlem as a cultural capital didn’t last forever. Its demise was nearly complete by the 1960s. Although nearly all the people in the area were Black, the housing stock was not owned by them. Because of the increase in the Black population in New York City, and a reluctance for landlords in other parts of the city to rent to black people, rent in Harlem skyrocketed. In fact, for more than 50 years (well into the ’60s), rents were about 33 percent higher in Harlem than in other neighborhoods in New York City. During this time it was uncommon for property owners who did not live in the neighborhood to make capital improvements to the buildings.
The city built public housing projects in large swaths of the neighborhood, creating a population density (with a peak of more than 200,000 people per square mile) that schools and other services could not adequately serve. Those who could moved away. This left behind the poorest of Black residents, while vacancies were filled in by recent migrants.
During this Black History Month, we look forward to bringing you stories of strong Black communities from around the country, and we’ll explore what has happened to them. Many of these stories feature parallels to today, where economic, social, or some other overt opposition creates barriers to strong Black communities.
As they say, you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.
Charlotte Mountain is the anti-racism committee lead for Mormon Women for Ethical Government.
