Harlem Renaissance
The question of “Negro art”
The international appeal of jazz and its connection to common black life, accompanied by the sheer virtuosity of its musicians, encouraged black intellectuals in other fields to turn increasingly to specifically “Negro” aesthetic forms as a basis for innovation and self-expression. The tendency appeared in concert music, choral programs, and Broadway musicals as well as literature. Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's musical revue Shuffle Along opened on Broadway in 1921 and established a model that would shape black musicals for 60 years. Florence Mills, a spritely dancer and phenomenal singer, achieved enormous fame across racial lines in the United States and Europe before suddenly succumbing to appendicitis in 1927. Josephine Baker, who began as a chorus girl in a popular revue, became an international star when La Revue nègre opened in 1925 in Paris, where she ultimately settled as a celebrity and played a variety of “exotic” roles exploiting the glamour of the “primitive.” Popular revues and vaudeville acts drew all-black audiences throughout the United States in cities on the Theatre Owners Booking Association circuit. In the 1920s black-produced shows came to Broadway again and again, and many white-produced shows featured black casts. The success of such shows helped fuel the optimism of the Harlem Renaissance. Amid worsening socioeconomic conditions in Harlem itself and political setbacks in what was a very conservative and racist era—it was during the 1920s that the Ku Klux Klan reached its peak in membership and political influence in the South and the Midwest—some black leaders hoped that achievement in the arts would help revolutionize race relations while enhancing blacks' understanding of themselves as a people.
Important new publishing houses opened their doors to black authors. These publishers—particularly Alfred A. Knopf, Harcourt Brace, and Boni & Liveright—were breaking away from an earlier emphasis on British literary tradition. They were publishing translated Modernist works from a variety of nationalities previously unread in the United States except by immigrants in their native languages. Interested too in the notions of American cultural pluralism—in some cases influenced by left-wing thought, in others involved in the drive for black civil rights—and aware of the vogue of primitivism, they saw a market for black-authored books on “Negro” topics. Their interest was accelerated by the efforts of African American magazine editors who organized literary prize contests and other events showcasing black literary talent. The most often cited event of this sort was a banquet at the liberal Civic Club in downtown New York organized by Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity, in 1924. The event had the effect of announcing what had come to resemble a “movement”—a cohort of talented African American writers ready to be noticed. In 1925 appeared the ultimate result: The New Negro: An Interpretation, edited by Alain Locke, which sold well and garnered positive critical attention in addition to inspiring black readers and would-be authors.
Locke attempted to direct the “movement” he announced in The New Negro, stressing a turn away from social protest or propaganda toward self-expression built on what he termed “folk values”—a movement, in other words, akin to the Irish literary renaissance that had slightly preceded it. Yet the writers of the Harlem Renaissance were not unified in artistic aims or methods. Disagreement helps account for the renaissance's importance. Locke believed that black authors and artists should develop distinct aesthetic tendencies inspired by African American folk sources and African traditions. The satirist George Schuyler lampooned the very idea of “Negro art” in America as “hokum” artificially stimulated by white decadents.
