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Langston hughes and harlem renaissance essay
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Occurring in the 1920’s and into the 1930’s, the Harlem Renaissance was an important movement for African-Americans all across America. This movement allowed the black culture to be heard and accepted by white citizens. The movement was expressed through art, music, and literature. These things were also the most known, and remembered things of the renaissance. Also this movement, because of some very strong, moving and inspiring people changed political views for African-Americans. Compared to before, The Harlem Renaissance had major effects on America during and after its time. After the end of the civil war African Americans had more opportunity and freedom since the men were soldiers of the civil war. Most African Americans had the plan to leave the south and move to up north because of the racism still lingering in the south, for example the Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court case. This case was about a light-skin colored man sitting in the “white” car of a train. Although he was light-skin he was still considered black and got arrested for sitting in that section of the train. This was an opportunity to express racial equality, but the end result was devastating. The Supreme Court declared that segregation of race was to be still constitutionally acceptable. Also economic status in the south was getting lower and there was not as much labor due to destroyed crops. Before African Americans moved to this area, Harlem was “designed specifically for white workers who wanted to commute into the city” (BIO Classroom). Due to the rapid growth of white people moving there and the developers not having enough transportation to support those people to go back and forth between downtown to work and home most of the residents left. Th... ... middle of paper ... ...ty who got to see black culture and all its creativity. Works Cited "BIO Classroom." BIO. A&E Television Networks, 1996. Web. 19 Apr. 2014. Dickstein, Morris. "Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance." Morris Dickstein RSS. Times Literay Supplement, n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2014. "The Harlem Renaissance - Boundless." Boundless. Ed. CC-BY-SA 3.0. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2014. "Harlem Renaissance". Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 20 Apr. 2014 "The Harlem Renaissance - Open Textbook." Boundless. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2014. "Intimate Circles | Mason." Intimate Circles | Mason. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2014. "Langston Hughes." Langston Hughes. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2014. . "Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)." PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.
The Harlem Renaissance is the name given to a period at the end of World War I through the mid-30s, in which a group of talented African-Americans managed to produce outstanding work through a cultural, social, and artistic explosion. Also known as the New Negro Movement. It is one of the greatest periods of cultural and intellectual development of a population historically repressed. The Harlem Renaissance was the rebirth of art in the African-American community mostly centering in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s. Jazz, literature, and painting emphasized significantly between the artistic creations of the main components of this impressive movement. It was in this time of great
The Harlem Renaissance is a term used to describe the expansion and development of African American culture and history, particularly in Harlem. It is believed to have started around 1919, after World War I, and ended around the time of the great depression. During this time period African Americans writers, artists, musicians, and poets all gathered in Harlem and created a center for African American culture.
In the introduction to The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, David Levering Lewis states the Harlem Renaissance was not a cohesive movement, but a constructed and forced phenomenon that was “institutionally encouraged and directed by leaders of the national civil rights establishment for the paramount purpose of improving race relations.” (Lewis, xiii) However, after researching many influential artists, politicians, and orators of the time, I must disagree. While, yes, the movement of an entire cultural and racial awakening can only be seen as a phenomenon and the movement itself was by no means cohesive, these powerful men and women needed no institutionalized encouragement. Each of their works were their own with diverse ideas and methods, yet somehow, came together to form an interconnected goal within the movement.
Hill, Laban Carrick. Harlem Stomp!: A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Little, Brown, 2003. Print.
In Harlem Renaissance by Nathan Irvin Huggins, the author doesn’t answer just one general question, but instead questions the culture and identity crisis that enveloped this movement. He successfully brings
The Harlem Renaissance, originally known as “the New Negro Movement”, was a cultural, social, and artistic movement during the 1920’s that took place in Harlem. This movement occurred after the World War I and drew in many African Americans who wanted to escape from the South to the North where they could freely express their artistic abilities. This movement was known as The Great Migration. During the 1920’s, many black writers, singers, musicians, artists, and poets gained success including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Du Bois. These creative black artists made an influence to society in the 1920’s and an impact on the Harlem Renaissance.
The Harlem Renaissance is one of the most historic and significant movements in American history; it has become a phenomenon marking something more than the fact that the African Americans wrote poems and stories, painted and sculpted, and infused new life into the American theater (Huggins 3). The Renaissance sustained to create an identity of African Americans it is best remembered as the beginning of African-American creativity that came from their talented minds. Although it was a literary movement, it also embraced art, dance, and music. The creative minds that sprung from the Harlem Renaissance used artistic expressions to make an impact on society in the 1920s and still today. African American writers had been published since the 19th century, but what made Harlem Renaissance different and memorable was the spread of topics that the writers wrote about. Although the artists created lasting and important works of literature, art, and music, it became just as important in a way which gave African Americans a legitimate culture and a pride in embracing that culture.
The Harlem Renaissance was a time of racism, injustice, and importance. Somewhere in between the 1920s and 1930s an African American movement occurred in Harlem, New York City. The Harlem Renaissance exalted the unique culture of African-Americans and redefined African-American expression. It was the result of Blacks migrating in the North, mostly Chicago and New York. There were many significant figures, both male and female, that had taken part in the Harlem Renaissance. Ida B. Wells and Langston Hughes exemplify the like and work of this movement.
It all started after World War I and during the Great Depression in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, where a lot of people lived. The first building given to black tenants was on West 134th Street. The area was called “The Capital of Black America” and “The Black Mecca” of the world (Harlem Renaissance). From 1900 to 1920, the black population of New York City increased by ninety-one thousand. Harlem is also where freed African Americans searched for a new place to explore their new identities as free men and women.
3. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 51: Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Gale Group, 1987. pp. 133-145.
... The Harlem Renaissance was a time of growth and development for African-Americans. They wrote novels, performed in clubs, and created the genre of Jazz. However, the Renaissance was imprisoned by its flaws. Rather than celebrating the unique culture of African-American’s, it oftentimes caters to what the White Americans would want to see and hear.
During the 20th century a unique awakening of mind and spirit, of race consciousness, and
The Harlem Renaissance Poets consist of: James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean (Eugene) Toomer, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, and Gwendolyn Brooks. These eight poets contributed to modern day poetry in three ways. One: they all wrote marvelous poems that inspired our poets of modern times. Two: they contributed to literature to let us know what went on in there times, and how much we now have changed. And last but not least they all have written poems that people can sit down and relate to and what people are writing about and take time out to let the people of their families know that they were living in those times. And these people should receive such recognition because of the effort, and the time that was put fourth to doing this great work for the people of their generation and ours.
The Influence of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois on the Writings from the Harlem Renaissance
Hughes, Langston. "Harlem." [1951] Literature. 5th ed. Eds. James H. Pickering and Jeffery D. Hoeper. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, 1027-28.