Langston Hughes and The Harlem Renaissance Because in

Langston Hughes and The Harlem Renaissance Because, in part, of the terrorism of the Klan in the South, by the turn of the 20 th century, African-Americans were migrating north. They headed for cities where growing industries needed workers: Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, New York. A formerly upper class (white) neighborhood in New York City became a middle class African-American neighborhood: Harlem. Negro intellectuals like W. E. B. Du. Bois lived there; the N. A. A. C. P. was located there—and soon, in the 1920’s, Harlem would become known as a mecca for black artists, musicians, writers, and poets. Langston Hughes was one of those poets, and Harlem fit him perfectly. He loved jazz, he loved the dialogue and dialect of the Harlem streets, he loved writing about the experiences of people living in Harlem. Beginning in the 1920’s, and stretching over the next three decades, Hughes would live and write in Harlem, publishing 12 volumes of poetry; he also published a novel and, in the late 1930’s created a character, Jesse B. Semple, whose urban folk wisdom commented on racism in America. “Like Whitman, Hughes enhances our love of humanity, our vision of the just society with a spiritual transcendence and ever-widening horizons of joy and hope” Source: http: //www. fatherryan. org/harlemrenaissance/) Source: www. tqnyc. org

Young Langston Hughes in Cleveland, circa 19191920. Source: www. wikipedia. com Langston Hughes was born in Missouri, lived much of his childhood in Kansas, but after his parents divorced, his mother moved to Cleveland married again. In Cleveland, Hughes started reading poets and writing poetry. Just after high school, as Hughes traveled to Mexico to spent some time with his father, he wrote one of his most famous poems: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers: ” I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. . Langston Hughes, ca. 1922; photograph by Nickolas Muray; from the George Eastman House photography collection. Source: www. eastman. org/ Note: You can hear Hughes give some background to the poem, and read it at the following link: http: //www. poets. org/viewmedia. php/prm. MID/15722

The Harlem Renaissance: Literature Countee Cullen; source: www. si. umich. edu Langston Hughes moved to Harlem and soon found himself in a literary circle of "New Negro" writers: Countee Cullen, Arna Bontemps, Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude Mc. Kay, and others. Among all these artists, Hughes became a lead of the movement with his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain. ” However, it was Harlem itself which delighted Hughes: “The black revue Shuffle Along was on Broadway, and Harlem was the center of a thriving theater and the new music--jazz. Hughes steeped himself in the language, music, and feeling of the common people of Harlem. Proud of his folk heritage, Hughes made the spirituals, blues, and jazz the bases of his poetic expression. Hughes wrote, he contended, ‘to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America. ’ As his friends said of him, ‘No one enjoyed being a Negro as much as Langston Hughes. ’" (Source: www. fatherryan. org/harlemrenaissance/) Arna Bontemps; source: www. pbs. org Claude Mc. Kay; source: www. nndb. com Zora Neale Hurston; source: www. loc. gov

“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” In June, 1926, Langston Hughes published probably his most important essay in The Nation magazine. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” discussed the desire among African. American artists and poets not to be “too black. ” Poets such as Countee Cullen, in fact, prided themselves on “sounding white. ” Just as many African-Americans often went through great pain to straighten their hair, many African-American artists thought they should try to suppress elements of their culture in order to be accepted as artists. Hughes would have none of it. He understood, as Whitman and Sandburg, that pluralism was what America was all about. As he looked around Harlem, he saw an African-American culture emerging—one which was black, rather than trying to be white. He wanted to encourage “Negro” characteristics in art, music and literature. As Hughes put it in his essay, “ the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America-this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible” (Source: www. hartford-hwp. com/archives/45 a/360. html) Source: cenhum. artsci. wustl. edu

The Harlem Renaissance: Music Source: www. depan orama. net/ Above: The Cotton Club; Source: http: //nfo. net/usa/cottoncb. jpg; Below: Young Edward Everett (“Duke”) Ellington; source: encarta. msn. com At the center of the Harlem Renaissance was music—African-American music that completely changed the cultural landscape of America: Jazz. By the 1920’s, New Orleans “dixieland” music had grown and evolved. It had also found a new medium: radio. And it found a new audience: white people. The Cotton Club—often featuring Duke Ellington— was a symbol both of Jazz’s central place in the Harlem Renaissance, and of the limitations of racial progress. Only whites could be patrons of The Cotton Club.

“Dancin’ at The Savoy” All photos on this page are from: blogcritics. org “The Savoy Ballroom defined the essence of dance in Harlem. It was a place where race was irrelevant, ‘. . . whether you were black, green, yellow, or what. If you walked in the Savoy, the only thing we wanted to know is can you dance? ’ It was a place of elegant beauty, with a burnished maple dance floor, colored spotlights, and crystal cut chandeliers. It was a place where round tables were packed with people, root-de-toot root beer, and ginger ale sold for a nickel. The crescendo of the best big-band jazz in the world drove dancers to their feet as the sounds of Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Fess Williams, King Oliver, and Chick Webb filled the air. ” (source: artsedge. kennedy-center. org) Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald.

The Lindy Hop “The Lindy Hop, an authentic Afro. Euro-American Swing dance that drew on African and European dance traditions, emerged as one of many popular dances during this time. . As the Lindy Hop grew in popularity, it evolved into many forms, such as West Coast Swing, Rock'n'Roll, Boogie Woogie, the Jitterbug, Jive, Bop, Shag, Balboa, and the Imperial. Lindy Hop dancers created new steps as the music inspired them, much as jazz musicians improvise. ” (source: both text and above image are from artsedge. kennedy-center. org) Savoy dancers: Source, above: http: //www. wehaitians. com/ ; right: www. uky. edu

The Harlem Renaissance: Art “We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. " So concludes the poet Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, ” the essay published in 1926 that became known as the manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes here becomes a mouthpiece for the younger generation of African American writers and artists, including his close friend and collaborator Aaron Douglas. “Sahdjio, ” 1925; , by Aaron Douglas; ink and graphite. (Source: www. ralphmag. org) Aaron Douglas was one of the darlings of the Renaissance in the eyes of both its older and younger participants, and he was the only black visual artist featured in the “bible” of the movement, The New Negro. He created, in Hughes’ words, “strange black fantasies [which] cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty” (Hughes, "Racial Mountain"). Clearly, Douglas was “negotiating” the racial mountain—alluding to it, critiquing its presence, and working to surmount it—during the Harlem Renaissance. The question is, what happened to this project in the face of the Depression? As Arnold Rampersad writes in the introduction to The New Negro, the book, originally published in 1926, did not “prepare its readers for the Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression, which effectively destroyed the Harlem Renaissance” (xix). (Source: xroads. virginia. edu/)

Aaron Douglass Source: www. montmartrevirt. paris 4. sorbonne. fr “Born in Kansas, Aaron Douglas received a B. A. in art from the University of Nebraska. He taught in Kansas City schools for a few years and then began to study with Winold Reiss, an illustrator from Germany who encouraged him to look to African art for inspiration in his work. Douglas' use of African design and subject matter in his work brought him to the attention of William Edward Burghardt Du. Bois and Alain Locke who were pressing for young African-American artists to express their African heritage and African-American folk culture in their art. This was during the "Harlem Renaissance" or New Negro Movement, and Aaron Douglas became a leading visual artist during this time. ” (Source: www. si. umich. edu) “Forest Fear” (Flight”) Source: www. iniva. org

“Despite the even greater obstacles for blacks, especially black artists in the 30 s, the racial mountain persisted as a symbolic and literal focal point for Douglas to communicate around. ” He used it as a symbol in his murals of the 1930 s. ”Douglas produced seven murals in seven years from 1930 to 37, generally thought of as his best work. ” “the Depression era saw an sharp increase in racism across the country, especially in the South where lynchings rose again (Gates, 166). This change created an added urgency for the race consciousness first explored by Douglas and other artists and writers in the 20 s. ” (“The Depression Era Murals of Aaron Douglas, ” xroads. virginia. edu) “Aspiration, ” 1936, oil on canvas. Source: www. uwrf. edu

Aaron Douglas, Slavery Through Reconstruction, Aspects of Negro Life Series, 1934; oil on canvas, 84" x 96". One of four in a series executed under the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), a government funded art project that ran from Dec. 1933 - June 1934, just prior to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) (1935 -39) Despite the even greater obstacles for blacks, especially black artists in the 30 s, the racial mountain persisted as a symbolic and literal focal point for Douglas to communicate around. He in fact used it more prevalently as a symbol in his murals of the 1930 s, despite the death knoll that Black Tuesday is for many historians of the Renaissance. Far from petering out after the Depression started, Douglas produced seven murals in seven years from 1930 to 37, generally thought of as his best work. (Source: xroads. virginia. edu)

Hughes: Poet, and More Carl Sandburg, “prairie populist poet, ” source: www. notablebiographies. com Langston Hughes’ poetic influences were, like Hughes himself, a mixture. His first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ shows a direct line of influence back to Walt Whitman. Hughes also admired the work of African-American poets Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and his Harlem Renaissance (and socialist) colleague, Claude Mc. Kay. But it was Carl Sandburg “who Hughes later called ‘my guiding star, ’ ’was decisive in leading him toward free verse and a radically democratic modernist aesthetic” (Rampersad, www. english. uiuc. edu/maps/poets/g_l/hughes/life. htm). Paul Lawrence Dunbar; source: newsservice. stanford. edu But Hughes was more than a poet. He wrote plays, fiction, autobiographies, and during the 1940’s created a fictional character, Jesse B. Semple. Jesse spoke his mind about racial and others matters in The Chicago Defender. The character was so popular, Hughes published 5 collections of the columns. Poet Marianne Moore and Langston Hughes. Source: www. writing. upenn. edu “As a radical democrat, (Hughes) believed that art should be accessible to as many people as possible” (Rampersad, Ibid. ).

“Landlord, landlord!” It’s really a very simple poem—deceptively so. The poem has four speakers; each one makes a comment on what was, in the late 1930’s, a common occurrence in Harlem: a tenant-landlord dispute. Hughes’ genius is in the poem’s simplicity: he simply lets each voice speak: the tenant, the landlord, the police (through their actions), the press. However, he skews the poem a bit: we understand like the tenant; we see how the landlord over-reacts (however, given that whites often accused blacks of being “communists”, it’s not a big surprise), how the police lock up the tenant, and how the press puts a “spin” on the events to make the tenant at the end of the poem a “Negro”—not the warm voice we read at the beginning of the poem. Harlem tenement, with view of midtown Manhattan in the background. Source: www. cyburbia. org

In the early 1950’s, Republican Senator Joseph Mc. Carthy launched a crusade to find communists in the government. The House Un -American Activities Committee (HUAC) was formed to conduct this investigation. Mc. Carthy’s crusade spread outside the government, as Mc. Carthy looked for communists in Hollywood and elsewhere in the United States—even the U. S. Army. One of Mc. Carthy’s victims was Langston Hughes, who had written a poem in the early 1940’s called “Goodbye Christ. ” The poem was not about Christ, but about religious evangelists and businessmen. However, Mc. Carthy and other conservatives didn’t like it. As Hughes said in his testimony, ““Since it is an ironic poem (and irony is apparently a quality not readily understood in poetry by unliterary minds) it has been widely misinterpreted as an anti-religious poem. This I did not mean it to be, but rather a poem against racketeering, profiteering, racial segregation, and showmanship in religion which, at the time, I felt was undermining the foundations of the great and decent ideals for which Christ himself stood. ” (Source: www. bannedmagazine. com/Langston. Hughes. Goodby e. Christ. 0001. htm) Hughes & HUAC Go ahead on now, You're getting in the way of things, Lord. And please take Saint Ghandi with you when you go, And Saint Pope Pius, And Saint Aimee Mc. Pherson, And big black Saint Becton Of the Consecrated Dime. And step on the gas, Christ! Move! (“from “Goodbye, Christ”)

“What happens to a dream deferred? ” “… in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) he broke new ground with verse accented by the discordant nature of the new bebop jazz that reflected a growing desperation in the black urban communities of the North” (Rampersad). Source: www. english. uiuc. edu Source: images. encarta. msn. com Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, debuted on Broadway in 1959. Above: Ruby Dee and Sidney Poitier in the 1961 film version of Raisin; source: www. britannica. com “Although he was hailed in 1966 as a historic artistic figure at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, he also found himself increasingly rejected by young black militants at home as the civil rights movement lurched toward Black Power. ” (Rampersad: www. english. uiuc. edu/maps/poets/g_l/hughes/li fe. htm