The Harlem Renaissance A Slide Show By Your (Nearly) Technologically Savvy Professor, Chris De Santis
Images of Harlem... “A City Within A City”
The Black Yankees
Flapper Girls
A Parade in Harlem
Protest March
Shoe Shine Man
Soldiers on Parade
A Harlem Wedding Party
A Wealthy Harlemite
Madame C.J. Walker
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey
UNIA Parade
Music and Dance in Harlem The Cotton Club
Bessie Smith
Bessie Sings The Backwater Blues
Billie Holliday
Cab Calloway
Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington Orchestra
A Young Duke
One more of Duke
Ethel Waters
Backstage
Fletcher Henderson
Florence Mills
The FROGS!
The Fabulous Josephine Baker
Josephine with Minstrels
Louis Armstrong!
Louis one more time... Singing “What Did I Do to be So Black and Blue?”
Minstrel Show
Mr. Bojangles
James Reese Europe
Bill “Bojangles” Robinson
Paul Robeson
Sissel and Blake
Harlem Renaissance Art
Augusta Savage
Miguel Covarrubias
Book Cover
Cover of The Crisis
Book Cover
Jacob Reis
The Big Bend Tunnel from the John Henry Series The Museum of African American Art Los Angeles.
Blue Nile Hatch Billops Collection, Inc., New York
The Janitor who Paints The National Museum of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington, D.C.
Jeunesse Watercolor on paper, 14 x 17" Collection Dr. Meredith F. Sirmans, New York
William H. Johnson entered the Harlem Renaissance during its making. He came to New York in 1918 from Florence, South Carolina, to embark on his career. He became a student at the National Academy of Design. He was educated there for five years, during which he learned from greats such as George Luks and Charles Hawthorne. He then traveled to places in North Africa and Europe to paint and find residence. It was by the suggestion of Hawthorne that he traveled to Paris in 1826, where he settled, painted, and studied the works of modern European masters.
Girl in a Red Dress, ca. 1936
Self-Portrait, 1929
Swing Low Sweet Chariot National Museum of American Art
Chain Gang National Museum of American Art Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Lois Mailou Jones was a pioneering artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in New England, her life was still clouded by the prejudices of an everyday African American life. She began her career after attending the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. Afterwards, she went through the racial barriers to exhibit her works to the world. She persevered through many roadblocks and prejudices, without ever losing her passion to express herself through art.
Fishing Smacks Menemsha, Massachusettes, 1932
Negro Youth, 1929
Authors of the Harlem Renaissance Claude McKay
Claude McKay
If We Must Die If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! --Claude McKay
Countee Cullen
An older Countee
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson
Jean Toomer
Sterling Brown Reads... “Ma Rainey”
Jessie Fauset
Langston Hughes!!!
The Negro Speaks of Rivers (to W. E. B. B. DuBois) 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. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. --Langston Hughes
Nella Larsen
Nella Larsen
Nella One more time
W. E. B. Du Bois
Du Bois
Zora Neale Hurston!!! “You May Go But This Will Bring You Back”
The END