The African American Renaissance
The greatest challenge to conventional notions about race came from black Americans. The influx of southern black migrants to the North spurred by World War I and continuing into the 1920s created a black cultural renaissance, with New York City’s Harlem and the South Side of Chicago leading the way. Black intellectuals joined their white counterparts in criticizing conventional social and cultural norms. Gathered in Harlem—with a population of more than 120,000 African Americans in 1920 and growing every day—a group of black writers paid homage to the New Negro, the second generation born after emancipation. These New Negro intellectuals refused to accept white supremacy. In militant voices, they expressed pride in their race, sought to perpetuate black racial identity, and demanded full citizenship and participation in American society. Intending to enrich the culture of the United States, black writers and poets drew on themes from African American life and history for inspiration in their literary works.
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See Document 21.2 for an example of Harlem Renaissance poetry.
These men and women made up the “Talented Tenth,” the leaders of the black race whom W. E. B. Du Bois had spoken of in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). James Weldon Johnson, a writer and the chief executive of the NAACP, commented: “The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.” The poets, novelists, and artists of the Harlem Renaissance captured the imagination of blacks and whites alike. Many of these artists increasingly rejected white standards of taste as well as staid middle-class, black values. Writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston in particular drew inspiration from the vernacular of African American folk life. In 1926 Hughes defiantly asserted: “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.”
Black music became a vibrant part of mainstream American popular culture in the 1920s. Traveling musicians such as Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, Louis Armstrong, Edward “Duke” Ellington, and singer Bessie Smith developed and popularized two of America’s most original forms of music—jazz and the blues. Emerging from brothels and bars in the South, these unique compositions grew out of the everyday experiences of black life and expressed the thumping rhythms of work, pleasure, and pain. Such music did not remain confined to dance halls and clubs in black communities; it soon spread to white musicians and audiences for whom the hot beat of jazz rhythms meant emotional freedom and the expression of sexuality. (See e-Document Project 21: The New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance.)