Good Things Will Come Tomorrow: The New Negro Movement

Good Things Will Come Tomorrow During the time of the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, people would create works of art to symbolize their faith and pride. The artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance used their pieces of art to convey many different themes. Still, a key recurring theme is that the power of using your past experiences can bring resilience, ardor, and perseverance and guide you to a better tomorrow. Numerous pieces from the Harlem Renaissance make it apparent that looking at your past can help guide you to a better future. Three of the works that exemplify this theme are “Hope” by Georgia Douglas Johnson, the painting "Frompainting From Slavery Through Reconstruction" by Aaron Douglas, and a story

The structure of the poem connects the ideas to move past the painful thoughts and use them to move towards a brighter future and the idea of good things taking time and effort. It paints the picture by using nature to describe how you need to be patient for good things to come your way. A line from the text that exemplifies these ideas is “The oak tarries long in the depth of the seed, but swift is the season of nettle and weed.” This shows how good things like oak tarries take patience and effort, and challenges like nettle and weed can come briskly. This line invites us to also show how we need to look back on our experience, just like how a seed starts deep in the ground. This conveys the theme of how looking back at past experiences can bring good things like resilience, ardor, perseverance, and one day guide you to a better tomorrow, but those good things take time and effort. The painting “Slavery Through Reconstruction” by Aaron Douglas shows the history of black African Americans leading up to one day the American dream. The painting shows a timeline of pre- and post-civil

Through the paths of pain and suffering, they are slowly using the suffering to guide them to the American Dream. This can be shown by looking at how the figures with candles are pointing towards the background, a castle, and other buildings, resembling their desire to have the American Dream. They are following their paths to freedom and a better future. The silhouette with the lights in their hands standing on a box speaking up may resemble African American voices finally being heard. The theme can be seen by viewing the group of figures some are African Americans breaking free from shackles, symbolizing slaves being freed thanks to the Emancipation Proclamation, or the K.K.K. in the middle ground of the painting, which shows the suffering colored people went through in the past, all leading up to the buildings in the background, which resembles the American Dream. These details from the painting demonstrate the theme because they show that using your past painful experiences, like being a slave, and getting help from your community, can help bring a sense of purpose and guiding light to a person's life, when in dark