what contributed to the beginnings of the new negro movement

The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden historic period in African American civilisation, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art.

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Great Migration

The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem was meant to be an upper-class white neighborhood in the 1880s, but rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and desperate landlords seeking to fill them.

In the early 1900s, a few eye-course Black families from some other neighborhood known as Black Bohemia moved to Harlem, and other Black families followed. Some white residents initially fought to proceed African Americans out of the area, merely failing that many whites somewhen fled.

Outside factors led to a population smash: From 1910 to 1920, African American populations migrated in large numbers from the South to the Northward, with prominent figures similar W.E.B. Du Bois leading what became known as the Nifty Migration.

In 1915 and 1916, natural disasters in the s put Blackness workers and sharecroppers out of piece of work. Additionally, during and after Globe State of war I, immigration to the United States fell, and northern recruiters headed due south to entice Black workers to their companies.

Past 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the Due south had moved north, and Harlem was ane of the almost pop destinations for these families.

Langston Hughes

This considerable population shift resulted in a Blackness Pride movement with leaders like Du Bois working to ensure that Black Americans got the credit they deserved for cultural areas of life. Two of the earliest breakthroughs were in verse, with Claude McKay's drove Harlem Shadows in 1922 and Jean Toomer's Cane in 1923. Civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson'southward The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man in 1912, followed by God'south Trombones in 1927, left their mark on the world of fiction.

Novelist and du Bois protege Jessie Redmon Fauset'due south 1924 novel In that location Is Confusion explored the thought of Black Americans finding a cultural identity in a white-dominated Manhattan. Fauset was literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis and adult a magazine for Black children with Du Bois.

Sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, who was integral in shaping the Harlem literary scene, used the debut party for There Is Confusion to organize resources to create Opportunity, the National Urban League magazine he founded and edited, a success that bolstered writers like Langston Hughes.

Hughes was at that party along with other promising Black writers and editors, as well every bit powerful white New York publishing figures. Soon many writers found their piece of work appearing in mainstream magazines like Harper's.

Zora Neale Hurston

Anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston courted controversy through her involvement with a publication called Fire!!

Helmed by white author and Harlem writers' patron Carl Van Vechten and filled with works from prolific Black writers including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Aaron Douglas, the magazine exoticized the lives of Harlem residents. Van Vechten'southward previous fiction stirred upwardly interest among whites to visit Harlem and take advantage of the culture and nightlife there.

Though Van Vechten's work was condemned by older luminaries similar DuBois, it was embraced by Hurston, Hughes and others.

Countee Cullen

Poesy, too, flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. Countee Cullen was 15 when he moved into the Harlem home of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the pastor of Harlem's largest congregation, in 1918.

The neighborhood and its civilization informed his poetry, and as a college student at New York Academy, he obtained prizes in a number of poetry contests earlier going onto Harvard's masters plan and publishing his first book of poetry: Color. He followed it up with Copper Sun and The Carol of the Dark-brown Girl, and went on to write plays likewise as children's books.

Cullen received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry in and married Nina Yolande, the girl of W.E.B. DuBois. Their wedding was a major social issue in Harlem. Cullen'due south reviews for Opportunity magazine, which ran under the cavalcade "Dark Tower," focused on works from the African-American literati and covered some of the biggest names of the age.

Louis Armstrong

The music that percolated in and and so boomed out of Harlem in the 1920s was jazz, frequently played at speakeasies offering illegal liquor. Jazz became a not bad draw for non only Harlem residents, but outside white audiences also.

Some of the most celebrated names in American music regularly performed in Harlem—Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, oftentimes accompanied by elaborate floor shows. Tap dancers like John Bubbles and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson were as well popular.

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Cotton wool Club

With the groundbreaking new music came a vibrant nightlife. The Savoy opened in 1927, an integrated ballroom with two bandstands that featured continuous jazz and dancing well past midnight, sometimes in the form of battling bands helmed by Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford and Male monarch Oliver.

While it was fashionable to frequent Harlem nightlife, entrepreneurs realized that some white people wanted to feel black civilization without having to socialize with African Americans and created clubs to cater to them.

The most successful of these was the Cotton Club, which featured frequent performances past Ellington and Calloway. Some in the community derided the being of such clubs, while others believed they were a sign that Blackness culture was moving toward greater acceptance.

Paul Robeson

The cultural boom in Harlem gave Black actors opportunities for stage work that had previously been withheld. Traditionally, if Black actors appeared onstage, information technology was in a minstrel show musical and rarely in a serious drama with not-stereotypical roles.

At the center of this phase revolution was the versatile Paul Robeson, an player, vocalizer, writer, activist and more. Robeson first moved to Harlem in 1919 while studying constabulary at Columbia University and continually maintained a social presence in the surface area, where he was considered an inspirational but outgoing figure.

Robeson believed that arts and civilisation were the best paths frontwards for Blackness Americans to overcome racism and make advances in a white-dominated culture.

Josephine Baker

Black musical revues were staples in Harlem, and by the mid-1920s had moved southward to Broadway, expanding into the white world. One of the earliest of these was Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's Shuffle Along, which launched the career of Josephine Baker.

White patron Van Vechten helped bring more serious lack stage work to Broadway, though largely the work of white authors. It wasn't until 1929 that a Blackness-authored play about Black lives, Wallace Thurman and William Rapp's Harlem, played Broadway.

Playwright Willis Richardson offered more serious opportunities for Black actors with a several one-act plays written in the 1920s, as well every bit articles in Opportunity mag outlining his goals. Stock companies like the Krigwa Players and the Harlem Experimental Theater also gave Black actors serious roles.

Aaron Douglas

The visual arts were never welcoming to Black artists, with art schools, galleries and museums shutting them out. Sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, a protégé of Auguste Rodin, explored African American themes in her work and influenced Du Bois to champion Black visual artists.

The most celebrated Harlem Renaissance artist is Aaron Douglas, oftentimes called "the Father of Black American Art," who adapted African techniques to realize paintings and murals, as well every bit book illustration.

Sculptor Augusta Barbarous's 1923 bust of Du Bois garnered considerable attending. She followed that upwards with small, dirt portraits of everyday African Americans, and would later be pivotal to enlisting blackness artists into the Federal Fine art Project, a division of the Work Progress Assistants (WPA).

James VanDerZee's photography captured Harlem daily life, as well as by commissioned portraits in his studio that he worked to make full with optimism and separate philosophically from the horrors of the by.

Marcus Garvey

Blackness nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism move Marcus Garvey was built-in in Jamaica merely moved to Harlem in 1916 and began publishing the influential newspaper Negro Globe in 1918. His shipping company, Black Star Line, established trade betwixt Africans in America, the Caribbean, South and Central America, Canada and Africa.

Garvey is perhaps best known for founding the Universal Negro Comeback Clan, or UNIA, which advocated for "separate but equal" status for persons of African ancestry with the goal of establishing Black states effectually the globe. Garvey was famously at odds with W.East.B. DuBois, who called him "the most unsafe enemy of the Negro race in America." His outspoken views also made him a target of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

Harlem Renaissance Ends

The end of Harlem's creative boom began with the stock market crash of 1929 and The Corking Depression. Information technology wavered until Prohibition concluded in 1933, which meant white patrons no longer sought out the illegal alcohol in uptown clubs.

By 1935, many pivotal Harlem residents had moved on to seek work. They were replaced by the continuous period of refugees from the South, many requiring public assistance.

The Harlem Race Riot of 1935 broke out post-obit the arrest of a immature shoplifter, resulting in three expressionless, hundreds injured and millions of dollars in belongings damage. The riot was a death knell for the Harlem Renaissance.

Bear upon of the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a golden age for African American artists, writers and musicians. It gave these artists pride in and control over how the Black experience was represented in American culture and ready the stage for the civil rights movement.

Sources

Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance. Laban Carrick Hill.
The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930. Steven Watson.
The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary For The Era. Bruce Kellner, Editor.

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Source: https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/harlem-renaissance

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