The Harlem Renaissance: An Analysis

“The Harlem Renaissance was viewed primarily as a literary movement centered in Harlem and growing out of the black migration and the emergence of Harlem as the premier black metropolis in the United States.” (Wintz 2015) It was a time for culture and celebration. “Originally called the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance was a literary and intellectual flowering that fostered a new black cultural identity in the 1920s and ‘30s.” (Rowen) Alain Locke, who was a critic and teacher, summed up the essence of the Harlem Renaissance in 1926 declaring through art, “Negro life is seizing its first chances for group expression and self-determination.” Locke also called it “The Spiritual Coming of Age.” At this time, Harlem was the cultural

The Civic Club Dinner of March 21, 1924 signaled the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance; This occasion did not happen in Harlem, but rather was held very nearly one hundred pieces south in Manhattan at the Civic Club on Twelfth Street off Fifth Avenue. Charles S. Johnson, the youthful supervisor of Opportunity, the National Urban League 's month to month magazine, imagined the occasion to respect essayist Jessie Fauset on the event of the distribution of her novel, There Is Confusion. Johnson arranged a little supper party with around twenty visitors—a blend of white distributers, editors, and scholarly faultfinders, dark savvy people, and youthful dark essayists. The basic celebratory supper transformed into a transformative occasion with more than one hundred participants. African Americans were spoken to by W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others of the dark scholarly people, alongside Fauset and an agent gathering of artists and creators. The Civic Club supper essentially quickened the abstract period of the Harlem Renaissance. Frederick Allen, editorial manager of Harper 's, drew closer Countee Cullen, securing his ballads for his magazine when the artist completed the process of understanding them. As the supper finished Paul Kellogg, supervisor of Survey Graphic, stuck around conversing with Cullen, Fauset, and a few other youthful scholars,

The term ‘Jazz Age’ was used by many who saw African American music, especially the blues and jazz, as the defining features of the Harlem Renaissance.” (Wintz 2015) No part of the Harlem Renaissance molded America and the whole world as much as jazz. Jazz ridiculed numerous melodic traditions with its syncopated rhythms and ad libbed instrumental performances. When seen as a melodic theater and diversion, The Harlem Renaissance all began three years before when Shuffle Along opened at the 63rd Street Musical Hall. Shuffle Along was a melodic play composed by a couple of veteran Vaudeville acts—entertainers Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, and writers/artists Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. “In the process, it introduced white New Yorkers to to black music, theatre and entertainment and helped generated the white fascination with Harlem and the African American arts that was so much a part of the Harlem Renaissance. Shuffle Along also bought jazz to Broadway.” (Wintz 2015) After the war, black music such as jazz and blues became progressively liked within the black and white