Free Paper on Harlem Renaissance: African-American Cultural Revival Amidst Oppression

The Harlem Renaissance was a period of cultural celebrations. For centuries, African Americans had gone through a lot of slavery, and they were very determined to struggle for its abolition. Towards the end of the bondage, the promise of the land they always thought about had not been fulfilled. Instead, white supremacy, legally, violently, and quickly restored slavery in the South, where about 90% of the black Americans stayed. This forced the African Americans to move in great numbers to the North, which began as a push and pull (ushistory.org).

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The laws of Jim Crow and Disenfranchisement made many black Americans hope to live in the North (ushistory.org). Hate crimes and groups started to alarm the African Americans who were living in the Deep South. The owning of land promise had not been fulfilled, and the blacks were toiling as sharecroppers and were trapped endlessly in a debt cycle. In the 1890s, there was a blight weevil boll that destroyed the cotton in the whole region, which increased the blacks' despair. All these happenings served to drive African Americans to strive for better lives. The pull was forged by the booming economy in the north. There were numerous industrial jobs, and owners of the factory sourced for cheap labor within and from far away.

Regrettably, African Americans were not welcomed by the northerners with enthusiasm. The northern states legal systems did not interfere with the rights of African Americans but the populace prejudice was hostile. There were complaints by white laborers that African Americans would flood their employment market and lower wages. A large number of new migrants settled in urban slums. One of them being Harlem. The traditions of African Americans were glorified by musicians, actors, writers, and artists.

African Americans were urged by Claude McKay to firmly stand up for their rights in the verses that he wrote, which were very powerful. Short stories, poems, and plays were written by Jean Toomer's son to capture the spirits of his time (Wall Cheryl 479). The most significant aspect of the Harlem Renaissance that shaped the whole world and America was jazz music. Jazz syncopated rhythms and instrumental solos that were improvised made it to flout conventions of music. City dwellers flocked the concerts in thousands night after every night to see jazz performers.

With the coming end of the Civil War in the year 1865, hundreds of thousands of Black Americans were let free from the misery of being slaves in the South, and they started to have dreams. Their dreams were full of hope of participating in America's society, including empowerment in the fields of politics, and equal opportunities in the economy.

Unfortunately for the black Americans, in the late 1870s, their dreams were the same as dead as white supremacy was fast in restoring to the South reconstruction. The lawmakers who were white on the local and state levels made strict laws of racial segregation, called the Jim Crow laws. The laws made the Black Americans the second-class citizens in the country. A minimal number of Black Americans were in the position to hold a piece of land and become landowners, as most of them were used as sharecroppers (ushistory.org). The system was constructed to keep the Black Americans poor and without power. There were hate groups that had developed, such as the KKK (Ku Klux Klan), who conducted campaigns and perpetrated lynching of intimidation and terror to keep Black Americans from exercising their essential rights and even voting.

The rapid growth of the economies across the Midwest and the North created jobs for every race, and most African Americans now started realizing their hopes for better living standards compared to how they lived and an environment that was tolerant of any racial that laid beyond the South. Just before the 20th century, the Great Migration was ongoing as hundreds of thousands of Black Americans were now relocating to towns such as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia (Wall Cheryl 479).

Most African Americans learned they had mutual past experiences and their undefined current situations. Instead of pitying themselves, they took pride in their culture. The Black Americans' cultural rebirth happened during the Renaissance in Harlem. The Manhattan Harlem section, which is only three miles squared, is made about a hundred and seventy-five thousand Black Americans giving a neighborhood concentrated by Black Americans around the globe. Harlem now became the destination for Black Americans’ of all backgrounds. From the educated middle class to the unskilled laborers who shared the same experiences in their times of slavery, racial oppression, emancipation, and the positivity to get a new identification as people who are free by forging (Wall Cheryl 479).

The Great Migration heading Harlem brought the brightest talents and minds of the day, astonishing the Black American scholars and artists. Between the mid-1930s and the stopping of World War one, the Black Americans produced the most remembered and important eras in the field of expressing culture in the history of the nation. The disclosing of culture also took place in Los Angeles, Cleveland, and many other cities that were shaped by the Great Migration. During this period the Africans now transformed themselves from social distress to racial pride.

Renaissance Harlem comprised sculpture and painting, swing and jazz, prose and poetry, dance, and opera. The thing that united these diverse forms of art was the Black American realistic way of presenting the meaning of being black in the nation of America or the expression of their dark-skinned selves.

The Renaissance period was mostly contributed by intellectuals, electrifying performers, poets and writers, visual artists, and legendary musicians. The Intellectuals were Cyril Briggs, W.E.B Dubois, Walter Francis White, and Marcus Garvey. Electrifying performers such as Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker were also involved. Poets and writers were Effie Lee Newsome, Zora Hurston, and Countee Cullen. Visual artists such as Augusta Savage and Aaron Douglas also took part in the Harlem Renaissance. There were also legendary musicians such as Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Eubie Blake, Ivie Anderson, Fats Waller, and countless others (Loveland 9).

In the Great Movement, the Harlem Renaissance was the epicenter of the culture of America. The neighborhood was bustling with Black American-owned and publishing newspapers and housing, playhouses, music firms, cabarets, and clubs running at night. Music, fashion, and literature made a defined and cool culture for the blacks and whites around the globe and in America itself (Loveland 9).

In 1893, William Frank Fonvielle, a Black American student at the North Carolina College of Livingstone in Salisbury, took a road trip on summer passing through the South. Frank was the editor of the newspaper in the college, and he had promised his classmates that he would report back to school when there was racial oppression and progression. He had deep beliefs that African Americans were on the verge of becoming educated, exercising voting activities, and being self-sufficient economically.

In the Deep South, a new constitution was drafted in the city of Mississippi in the year 1890. The Constitution was drafted to disfranchise the voters who were not whites. It meant that a voter should be in a position to read and understand any given constitutional section and provide a reasonable interpretation. If one was able to read, understand, and interpret reasonably, he or she was eligible for the voting exercise. The previous year before Frank went for a trip, the year 1892, was the most violent year to him. Approximately 230 people were lynched, 161 of them being African Americans, and the remaining 69 were whites. In the past decade, about 1000 people were lynched, and most of the victims were black men and some women. The Deep Southern people, in particular, were the ones killing the black Americans who were campaigning against their rights (ushistory.org).

As the years of the 1920s drew nearer, the Renaissance of Harlem came to an end too. Renaissance of Harlem heyday was short and broad, the reason was that the Stock Market crashed in the year 1929, and this resulted in the Great Depression, which hurt many Black Americans who owned publications and businesses. It made financial support less from the arts available from foundations, professional organizations, and patrons. However, the impact of the Renaissance of Harlem in America is very indelible. The move brought about noticing the good works of Black American art, which influenced and motivated the coming generations of Black American intellectuals and artists. This was the self-picture of the Black Americans' identity, culture, and culture that came from Harlem and was spread to the art at large, giving a challenge to the people who were racial and disparaging types of the Jim Crow law in the South (Loveland, 9). By doing this, it radically redefined how people from other races viewed Black Americans and brought an understanding of the experience that Black Americans went through.

Moreover, the Harlem Renaissance made Black Americans throughout the nation have a new desire for pride and self-positivity, social awareness, and a new obligation to activism in politics. All these gave leeway to the invention Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1950s. This validated the beliefs of the inventors and leaders such as Langston Hughes and Alaine Locke that art can act as a motor vehicle to make improvements in African Americans' lives (ushistory.org).

Langston Hughes was the writer of the Harlem Renaissance and was the most prolific writer. He cast off the influences of the poets and wrote with the rhythm of jazz and the blues. The ongoing difficulties facing black Americans in the urban North and the deep South were very severe. They surrounded the new American city, where great minds resided to bring in proximity (Loveland,9).

Works Cited

Loveland, Maren E. "The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways in the Urban Landscapes of Harlem Renaissance Poetry." Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism 11. (2018): 9.

ushistory.org. The Harlem Renaissance. Philadelphia: The Independence Hall Association, 2020. https://www.ushistory.org/us/46e.asp

Wall, Cheryl A. The Harlem Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction. Vol. 479. Oxford University Press, 2016. https://books.google.co.ke/books/about/The_Harlem_Renaissance.html?id=a-AdDAAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y