Harlem - Harlem Renaissance

From Philosopedia.org

Harlem

Harlem is a district in the northern part of Manhattan Island, New York City, the center of which is 125th Street that extends from the Hudson River to the East River. In 1658, Peter Stuyvesant founded the area as Nieuw Haarlem, naming it after the city in the Netherlands.

During the American Revolution it was the site on 16 September 1776, of the Battle of Harlem Heights, during which Generals George Washington, Nathanael Greene, and Israel Putnam tried with 2,000 men to hold the high ground against 5,000 men under the British General Alexander Leslie. The British and their hired Hessian soldiers suffered 300 wounded and 90 killed. The Americans suffered 100 wounded and 30 killed. At the site is a cemetery.

In the 18th century, it was a farming area that, in the 19th century, became a fashionable residential district. By World War I, it was mostly a black residential and commercial area. In the 1920s it was the center of the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem Renaissance - New Negro Movement

Coinciding with the creative and commercial growth of jazz, the movement known as the New Negro Movement or the Harlem Renaissance flourished in the Harlem of the 1920s.

Its leading figures included Alain Locke, J. W. Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and Arna Bontemps.

Their various kinds of creativity helped change the character of much black American literature away from dialect works and conventional imitations of white writers and toward sophisticaed explorations of black life and culture that revealed and stimulated new confidence and racial pride.

Notable Harlem Renaissance Figures and their Works, Regardless of Their Race

Leading Intellectuals

William Stanley Braithwaite

Marion Vera Cuthbert

W.E.B. DuBois

Marcus Garvey

Charles Spurgeon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson

Alain Locke

Mary White Ovington

Chandler Owen

A. Philip Randolph

Joel A. Rogers

Arthur Schomburg

Carl Van Vechten

Walter White

Artists

Charles Alston

Romare Bearden

Beauford Delaney

Aaron Douglas

Palmer Hayden

Sargent Johnson

William H. Johnson

Lois Mailou Jones

Jacob Lawrence

Norman Lewis

Archibald Motley

Augusta Savage

Dramatists

Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., author of the play, On the Fields of France

Charles Gilpin, actor

Angelina Weld Grimke, author of the drama, Rachel

Langston Hughes, Mulatto, produced on Broadway.

Hughes also helped to found the Harlem Suitcase Theater

Zora Neale Hurston, author of the play Color Struck

Georgia Douglas Johnson, author of the play, Plumes, A Tragedy

John Matheus, author of the play, Cruiter

Richard Bruce Nugent, author of the play, Sahdji, an African Ballet

Paul Robeson, actor

Eulalie Spence, author of the play, Undertow

Musicians/Composers

Ivie Anderson

Marian Anderson

Lil Armstrong

Louis Armstrong

Josephine Baker

Count Basie

Eubie Blake

Lucille Bogan

Cab Calloway

The Chocolate Dandies

The King Cole Trio

The Dandridge Sisters

Duke Ellington

Ella Fitzgerald

Dizzy Gillespie

Roland Hayes

Fletcher Henderson

Earl "Fatha" Hines

Billie Holiday

Lena Horne

James P. Johnson

Lonnie Johnson

Moms Mabley

Pigmeat Markham

The Will Mastin Trio

Nina Mae McKinney

McKinney's Cotton Pickers

Thelonious Monk

Mantan Moreland

Jelly Roll Morton

The Nicholas Brothers

Ma Rainey

Nora Douglas Holt Ray

Bill Robinson

Cecil Scott

Noble Sissle

Bessie Smith

Mamie Smith

Victoria Spivey

Fats Waller

Ethel Waters

Chick Webb

Bert Williams

Fess Williams

Novelists

Sherwood Anderson — Dark Laughter (1925)

Jessie Redmon Fauset — There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1928), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), Comedy, American Style (1933)

Rudolph Fisher — The Walls of Jericho (1928), The Conjure Man Dies (1932)

Langston Hughes — Not Without Laughter (1930)

Zora Neale Hurston — Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Nella Larsen — Quicksand (1928), Passing (1929)

Claude McKay — Home to Harlem (1927), Banjo (1929), Gingertown (1931), Banana Bottom (1933)

George Schuyler — Black No More (1930), Slaves Today (1931)

Wallace Thurman — The Blacker the Berry (1929), Infants of the Spring (1932), Interne (1932)

Jean Toomer — Cane (1923)

Carl Van Vechten — Nigger Heaven (1926)

Eric Walrond — Tropic Death (1926)

Walter White — The Fire in the Flint (1924), Flight (1926)

Poets

Lewis Alexander, poet

Gwendolyn Bennett, poet

Arna Bontemps, poet

Sterling A. Brown, poet

Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., poet

Mae V. Cowdery, poet

Countee Cullen, poet — The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929)

Waring Cuney, poet

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, poet and fiction writer

Jessie Redmon Fauset, editor, poet, essayist and novelist

Angelina Weld Grimke, poet and dramatist

Langston Hughes, poet, fiction-writer, essayist, dramatist, autobiographer, editor

Helene Johnson, poet

James Weldon Johnson, poet, God's Trombones

Claude McKay, poet and novelist

Effie Lee Newsome, poet

Richard Bruce Nugent, poet

Anne Spencer, poet

Jean Toomer, poet and novelist

(See entry for Schomburg Center's "Harlem, 1900-1940"; a Yale study by Caroline Jackson; examples of artwork of the period; and a collaborative bibliography of the period.)