Gains And Pitfalls Of The Harlem Renaissance

As white soldiers and soldiers of color returned home from the devastation of World War I, many African Americans thought that fighting for their country and the democracy it championed would finally win them total equality at home. However, they found themselves marching home to fight a “sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land” (Du Bois “Returning Soldiers”). They fought against atrocities abroad only to return to an even more horrifying day to day reality. Their children could not attend schools with white children, most were stripped of their right to vote, and racial violence by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were everyday occurrences. “In an era marked by race riots, a resurgence of the Ku Klux

The “Silent March” was held in Harlem, along with many other impactful events, but the most lasting impact of the Harlem Renaissance was not the “breaking down the rigid barriers of Jim Crow that separated the races” but “was to reinforce race pride among blacks” during the time and for future generations (Wormser). In in 1939, in an article written for Opportunity magazine, Alain Locke debated about the gains and pitfalls of the Harlem Renaissance, namely the “New Negro” movement. He said that the advantages included “a wider range of Negro self-expression in more of the arts, an increasing maturity and objectivity of the approach on the part of the Negro artist and his subject matter, a greater diversity of styles and artistic creeds, a healthier and firmer trend toward self-criticism, and perhaps most important of all, a deepening channel toward the mainstream of American literature and art as white and Negro artists share in ever-increasing collaboration the growing interest in Negro life and subject-matter” (Locke, "The Negro: "New" or Newer"?"). On the other hand, Locke said that because the “New Negro” was so vaguely defined by his “general traits and attributes”, it left the movement exposed to “cheap race demagogues” and “petty exhibitionists who were only posing as

The last stepping stone of democracy was discovered, and African Americans realized their worth. The archaic notions of “what was right” and “what was expected” were blurred, bent, and shattered. Young minds became sculpted to see the world in a different light, a world where discrimination, racism, and inequality of any form were no longer acceptable or normal. This new world had opportunity, victory, pride, and strength. Although it would take until the 1960s to achieve this far off dream of the Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, the cornerstone was set here, upon the work of talented individuals that did not subscribe to some chimerical idea of what the world should see, but realized a bold truth that would be accepted by even the most stubborn of minds in the generations to come. Their efforts would not be in vain, a world of freedom, democracy, and equality would surely come for the men and women that had fought for it since the beginning, all the way back to the roots of the “New Negro” in Harlem, New