The Harlem Renaissance :: American History

Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural movement of the 1920s and aboriginal 1930s that was concentrate on in the Harlem neighborhood of revolutionary York City. Also known as the New Negro movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, the movement emerged toward the end of man War I in 1918, blossomed in the mid- to late 1920s, and then watery in the mid-1930s. The Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics took African American lit seriously and that African American literature and arts attracted real attention from the nation at large. Primarily music, theater, art, and politics.The Harlem Renaissance emerged amid social and ingenious upheaval in the African American community in the early 20th century. Several factors laid the groundwork for the movement. A desolate inwardness class had developed by the turn of the century, fostered by increased grooming and employment opportunities following the America n Civil War (1861-1865). During the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of lightlessness Americans moved from an economically depressed rural South to industrial cities of the magnetic north to take advantage of the employment opportunities created by piece War I. As more and more educated and socially conscious sicks settled in New Yorks neighborhood of Harlem, it developed into the political and cultural center of wispy America. Equally important, during the 1910s a new political agenda advocating racial par arose in the African American community, particularly in its growing warmheartedness class. Championing the agenda were black historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and the National Association for the Advancement of swart People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909 to advance the rights of blacks. This agenda was also reflected in the efforts of Jamaican-born black nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose Back to Africa movement inspired racial pride among blacks in the United States.African American literature and arts had begun a pie-eyed development just before the turn of the century. In the performing arts, black musical theater featured such accomplished artists as songbird Bob Cole and composer J. Rosamond Johnson, brother of writer James Weldon Johnson. Jazz and discolor music moved with black populations from the South and Midwest into the bars and cabarets of Harlem. In literature, the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt in the late 1890s were among the earlier works of African Americans to receive national recognition. By the end of World War I the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and the poetry of Claude McKay anticipated the literature that would follow in the 1920s by describing the reality of black conduct in America and the struggle for racial identity.