The Harlem Renaissance

Podcast Transcript

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a neighborhood in New York City became the center of an extraordinary cultural explosion.

Writers, musicians, artists, and thinkers gathered to create works that reshaped American culture and redefined how Black Americans were expressed and understood.

Their influence reached far beyond Harlem, transforming literature, music, and politics across the United States and the world

Learn more about the Harlem Renaissance and how a single cultural movement helped change the course of American history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The origins of the Harlem Renaissance can be found in the impact of the First World War.

The outbreak of WWI sharply reduced European migration to northern cities, leading to a labor shortage as factories ramped up wartime production.

In the South, black Americans were subjected to Jim Crow laws, which kept them poor and made their lives intolerable.

The pull of Northern jobs and the push of Southern discrimination led to one of the largest internal migrations in American history. Between 1910 and 1970, more than 6 million people left the South as part of the Great Migration, reducing the population share of Black Americans in the South from 77% in 1910 to 53% at the beginning of WWII.

The pull of the North was strong; stories of $5-a-day wages at Henry Ford’s plant in Detroit drew people to Northern urban centers like Chicago, St. Louis, and Harlem. One migrant recalled, “You could not rest in your bed at night for thoughts of Chicago…”

This prospect of opportunity in the North sparked widespread optimism among the Black community, an optimism that soon found its first hero. In 1908, boxer Jack Johnson defeated Tommy Burns in Australia to become the first Black heavyweight champion of the world.

Johnson broke many sterotypes of the period. He was flamboyant, confident, and larger-than-life. Johnson’s victory and the failure of the subsequent “Great White Hope” period, when White fighters repeatedly challenged him in an effort to restore a White champion, inspired Black Americans to re-examine their role in America.

Johnson’s independent spirit was an archetype for what was called the New Negro movement. Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar, coined the term “New Negro Movement”, challenging the myth that Black Americans should remain submissive and not cultivate their talents.

This perspective represented a decisive break in philosophy from that of Booker T. Washington’s pragmatic principles of accommodation and fitting into industrial life in America.

Locke encouraged Black America to redefine itself as proud, confident, and urban as he championed racial pride. He believed Black America could rise from the ashes of slavery and show its true gifts by establishing a creative and artistic identity.

Locke outlined the goals of the New Negro movement when he said: “Negro life is seizing its first chances for group expression and self-determination.”

…and it was that Harlem stood at the movement’s epicenter, hosting many different voices with different opinions on where Black Americans should be heading.

Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey emerged as a key voice for Black America. After arriving in New York in 1916, Garvey concluded that Blacks, regardless of the accumulation of wealth and talent, could not receive the justice and equality they deserved.

Garvey’s organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, mobilized millions behind a vision of Pan-Africanism aimed at reclaiming Africa from imperial rule and pursuing modernization.

Garvey became the face of Black Nationalism in the United States. His flamboyant military clothes and large parades attracted millions, but he had many detractors within the Black community.

One of his most prominent intellectual opponents was William Edward Burghardt DuBois, better known as WEB DuBois.

Du Bois, who held two master’s degrees and a PhD, was the founder and editor of The Crisis, the newsletter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP.

He called Garvey “the most dangerous enemy of the negro race, either a lunatic or a traitor.”

He also believed that in every community, there is, what he called, a talented tenth. He argued it should be the mission of every community to develop that tenth. For DuBois, it was the responsibility of the 10% to guide the 90% toward the light of equality and political integration.

Set within an environment of lynchings in the South and race riots in Chicago, the Harlem Renaissance had a purpose. It hoped to turn social disillusionment into pride.

Harlem had become the largest Black community in the country. In the 1920s, it welcomed 120,000 new Black arrivals, bringing its population to roughly 200,000.

Harlem had everything required to become the epicenter of a cultural renaissance. Harlem had Black newspapers, Black theatrical companies, and a cadre of authors and poets promoting the New Negro Movement. As a result, Harlem served as inspiration for the many intellectuals who called it home in the 1920s.

Harlem embodied Du Bois’ theory. It became a stage where Black intellectuals and artists showed they were not only equal but exceptional in their own right.

One of its most famous voices, Langston Hughes, wrote: “Harlem! I dropped my bags, took a deep breath, and felt happy again.”

Langston Hughes, who was known as Harlem’s poet laureate, described Black life in America, saying in 1927 that his poetry was about “workers, roustabouts, singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York.”

Moreover, Hughes pioneered a new style of rhythmic poetry called Jazz poetry. Using a specific meter and melodic structure that employed jive language, the language spoken on the streets, Hughes carved out a niche for himself as a bard of the challenges of Black urban life.

Hughes preferred to write about the experiences of everyday Black people in urban life, but sometimes he allowed himself to envision the future and civil rights. His poem “Harlem” casts civil rights as a dream deferred, questioning the fate of unrealized dreams.

Harlem, written in 1951 after the high point of the Harlem Renaissance, reads almost like the movement’s closing stanza.

Harlem’s literary scene extended far beyond Hughes. The authors who frequented the renowned Dark Tower, a salon in A’Lelia Walker’s mansion, were among the giants of 20th-century literature.

A trip to the Dark Tower offered an opportunity to meet the essayist Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay.

The writers of the time were not just authors. They brought with them an extraordinary diversity of experiences and specialties. They were anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists, and their writing reflected a diverse set of perspectives.

Beyond literature, perhaps the most profound legacy of the Harlem Renaissance is Jazz. The foundation of Jazz in the Harlem Renaissance was improvisation.

Improvisational jazz embodied the self-determination highlighted by the “New Negro Movement” of Locke; it marked a profound break from the highly structured musical genres of the past.

The arrival of so many musicians from the South during the migration created a unique environment in Harlem.

Jazz welcomed the rhythmic integration of West African-influenced music, as well as the abandonment of the predictable reliance on the major scale, by emphasizing the flattened notes of Delta Blues.

The musical message was clear: the jazz of the Harlem Renaissance did not conform to the conventional norms and rules of the past. The blending of these styles influenced a generation of musical giants who all converged on Harlem’s legendary music scene.

The quintessential musician of Harlem was Duke Ellington. Ellington’s band probed the boundaries of the new jazz movement, adding the complexity of European classical music.

Ellington’s residency at the famed Cotton Club, once owned by Jack Johnson, had shows broadcast across the nation via the radio. While radio was not new in the 1920s, it marked the beginning of its commercialization and the birth of radio stations.

Ellington’s broadcasts brought the Harlem sound into households across America, expanding the reach of jazz. Ellington’s ability to blend diverging styles helped American music find its own unique sound.

Ellington’s reach was vast, but his motivations were much closer. When asked why he composed and played, he offered an answer typical of the New Negro mindset embedded firmly in the streets of Harlem: “My men and my race are the inspiration of my work. I try to catch the character and mood, and feeling of my people.”

While Ellington served as the greatest mind of Harlem Jazz, the greatest instrumentalist of the Harlem Renaissance had to be Louis Armstrong. Armstrong arrived in Harlem in 1924 and immediately found a place in the band of legendary bandleader Fletcher Henderson.

Armstrong’s virtuosity on the trumpet was immediately clear to Henderson. To accommodate Armstrong’s talent, Henderson’s band transitioned away from group improvisation toward individual solo performances, allowing Armstrong and others to take a turn with their own soaring solos.

This newfound style fit in perfectly with the New Negro movement’s goal of highlighting Black genius. The charismatic, charming, and captivating Armstrong was the perfect representation of the new ethos. His genius was a musical representation of the values of the Harlem Renaissance.

While Louis Armstrong was the great instrumentalist of the age, he could not overshadow the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith. Smith perfected her craft in Southern tent shows; as a result, she developed a booming, powerful voice that had to be heard to be believed.

Smith had a unique ability to sing with extraordinary power and subtle grace; she thrived in blues and jazz, using vibrato to span the entire musical scale.

Unlike almost any other vocalist, Smith’s power allowed her to sing in crowded speakeasys and over a band without amplification. One of the highlights of the music from this period is the song “St. Louis Blues,” which features Bessie Smith, delivering a signature vocal performance while trading solos with Louis Armstrong.

By the end of the period, Bessie Smith was the highest-paid black performer in the world, making an incredible $2,000 per week, which was an astonishing sum for the 1920s.

In addition to literature, poetry, and music, the Harlem Renaissance also featured pioneers in the visual arts.

Aaron Douglas is often described as the father of African Modernism, a style characterized by shadowy silhouettes. Douglas provided the cover art and illustrations for Alain Locke’s The New Negro, James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones, and regularly appeared in magazines and murals in Harlem’s neighborhoods.

The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance transcends the 1920s, as it also served as a blueprint for the Civil Rights Movement, which came decades later.

The achievements of the Harlem Renaissance provided endless evidence that Black America was worthy of pride, individuality, and self-determination.

Famed Harlem Renaissance writer and NAACP director James Weldon Johnson laid the foundation for the civil rights era with the soaring anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

The Harlem Renaissance was more than just a moment of artistic creativity. It was a declaration that African American culture was central to the American experience.

Through poetry, music, literature, and art, a generation of creators reshaped how black Americans expressed themselves, leaving an influence that still echoes in American culture today.

Even after the movement faded during the Great Depression, its legacy endured, inspiring future generations of artists, writers, and musicians who continued to build on the foundation first laid in Harlem.