New Negro Movement: made popular by Alain Locke, this movement was
The Harlem Renaissance: a cultural movement by the African American community in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s
Duality: in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, this is the idea of a person being at once American and black. It was the concept of being both African American and American, while seeing the two identities as ultimately separate
The Great Migration: the movement of over 6 million African Americans out of the South into the more urban North that happened between 1916 and 1970
The Jazz Age: a movement in the 1920s of a more youthful and carefree culture, especially in music and art
Pan-Africanism: the advocacy of the political union of all the indigenous inhabitants of Africa
This video from PBS in collaboration with the Columbus Museum of Art gives a perfect snapshot of what the reason for the Harlem Renaissance was. It tells the story of the beginnings of the movement and the reason this explosion of creativity and knowledge was so important to the African American community in the United States.
The Harlem Renaissance was a period in American history from the 1920s and 1930s. During this time, many African-Americans migrated from the South to Northern cities, seeking economic and creative opportunities. Within their communities creative expression became an outlet for writers, musicians, artists, and photographers, with a particular concentration in Harlem, New York. This guide provides access to selected Library of Congress digital and print resources as well as links to external websites on the Harlem Renaissance:
Leader of the first movement of the black working class, Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey galvanized African Americans with his inspiring speeches and his newspaper, Negro World. When Garvey spoke at the Bethel A.M.E. church in Harlem, 2,000 people raised the roof with shouts of approval. In 1914, Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Its goal: to promote self-reliance among African Americans and solidarity among blacks worldwide. Five years later, Garvey set up UNIA headquarters at Liberty Hall in Harlem. The message and the movement spread like wildfire: By the early 1920s, the UNIA had opened 700 branches across the country.
Garvey's "back to Africa" movement aimed to instill a sense of black pride—and to empower those of African descent to defy European domination and oppression.
As contributions to his cause poured in from around the country, Garvey founded several black-owned enterprises. Foremost among them was the Black Star Line, a steamship company designed to foster trade and transport among blacks living in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa.
In August 1920, hundreds of delegates from all over the globe packed Liberty Hall for UNIA's first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World. On August 3, some 25,000 people marched from Harlem to Madison Square Garden for a rally led by Garvey.
Garvey was frustrated not only with white hegemony but with the racism he encountered among fellow African Americans. He challenged the aristocratic ideals of so-called Talented Tenth leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois—who, in Garvey's eyes, rejected their African heritage and discriminated against dark-skinned blacks. Du Bois, for his part, considered Garvey both a traitor and a dictator; the two leaders traded frequent rhetorical barbs and blows in public.
Like Du Bois, the U.S. government eyed Garvey's growing popularity with suspicion. In 1923, when the Justice Department convicted Garvey of mail fraud, it did so with the help of his detractors. After being imprisoned in 1925, Garvey was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge and deported to Jamaica in 1927.
http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/interactives/harlem/faces/marcus_garvey.html
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Most of the well-known figures of the Harlem Renaissance were men: W.E.B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes are names known to most serious students of American history and literature today. And, because many opportunities that had opened up for black men had also opened up for women of all colors, African American women too began to "dream in color"—to demand that their view of the human condition be part of the collective dream.
Jessie Fauset not only edited the literary section of "The Crisis," but she also hosted evening gatherings for prominent black intellectuals in Harlem: artists, thinkers, writers. Ethel Ray Nance and her roommate Regina Anderson also hosted gatherings in their home in New York City. Dorothy Peterson, a teacher, used her father's Brooklyn home for literary salons. In Washington, D.C., Georgia Douglas Johnson's "freewheeling jumbles" were Saturday night "happenings" for black writers and artists in that city.
Regina Anderson also arranged for events at the Harlem public library where she served as an assistant librarian. She read new books by exciting black authors and wrote up and distributed digests to spread interest in the works.
To read the full article, click HERE.
Drop Me Off in Harlem This website serves as a collective to give users a chance to walk through key figures and ideas of the Harlem Renaissance while using interactive maps and being able to search through images of the movement as well. Created by historians in the field, this resource make available a general outline of important terms, ideas, and individuals of the Harlem Renaissance.
100 Jazz Profiles A collection of 100 of the Jazz musicians that came to popularity because of the Harlem Renaissance. Explore the links to different ages of Jazz and hear some of the music of each musician to hear the diversity of voices coming out of artists at this time.
Uncovering America: Art and the Harlem Renaissance The National Gallery of Art presents a history and definition of the art movement during the Harlem Renaissance. This website offers a look at the artists that are typically overshadowed by the poets and playwrights of the Harlem renaissance and specifically offers a look at the work and lives of painters and photographers in the 1920s.
Harlem 1900-1940 The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has created this website as a walk through of the key features of the Harlem Renaissance. From the early beginnings of the movement to the reasons that the movement came to and end, this publication offers an inside look at what it meant to live through the Harlem Renaissance.