Harlem Rennissance
Langston Hughes I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I'll be at the table When company comes. Nobody'll dare Say to me, "Eat in the kitchen," Then. Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed-- I, too, am America.
The Harlem Renaissance (1917-1930) Change was the only constant for Americans in the early 20th century. In 30 short years, they faced a world war, an economic boom followed by the Great Depression, shifting attitudes toward women’s place in society, and a mass culture that isolated and alienated the individual. In this swirl of uncertainty, traditional values seemed to slip out of reach or were actively discarded as Americans—writers and nonwriters alike—searched for truths in what felt like a whole new world.
Beginning in 1916 and continuing throughout the 1920s, in what came to be known as the Great Migration, millions of black farmers and sharecroppers moved to the urban North in search of opportunity and freedom from oppression and racial hostility. Thousands of these migrants settled in Harlem, a New York City neighborhood that quickly became the cultural center of African-American life.
Soon, the very air in Harlem seemed charged with creativity as black men and women drew on their own cultural resources—their folk traditions as well as a new urban awareness—to produce unique forms of expression. Harlem attracted worldly and race-conscious African Americans who nurtured each other’s artistic, musical, and literary talents and created a flowering of African- American arts known as the Harlem Renaissance.
The Harlem Renaissance was not just a literary movement, it was a time of extraordinary creativity in all of the arts. There were many other Harlem Renaissance artists, such as musicians, actors, painters, and sculptors.
Literary Movement The event that unofficially kicked off the Harlem Renaissance as a literary movement was a dinner given on March 21, 1924. Some of the nation’s most celebrated writers and thinkers, black and white, gathered at New York City’s Civic Club. The sponsors of the dinner— an older generation of African-American intellectuals that included W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Charles S. Johnson—had begun organizations such as the National Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to promote equality for African Americans.
Literary Movement These organizations published journals in which the writings of a younger generation were first published. Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes were among the young writers who received recognition and sometimes cash awards for their work in these journals, and many were present at this “coming-out party” for the writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
Literary Movement These young writers considered themselves the founders of a new era in literature. They looked inward and expressed what it meant to be black in a white-dominated world. They represented what came to be called “the New Negro,” a sophisticated and well- educated African American with strong racial pride and self-awareness
Zora Neale Hurston (c. 1891-1960) Raised in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida. In 1925, she arrived in New York with “$1.50, no job, no friends, and a lot of hope.” Hurston’s flair, talent, and sheer nerve soon made her one of the leading African- American novelists of the 1930s.
When Hurston was 13 years old, her family life fell apart When Hurston was 13 years old, her family life fell apart. Her mother died, her father remarried, and by the age of 14, Hurston was on her own. Working an endless series of menial jobs, Hurston tried for years to earn enough money to send herself back to school. After 12 years of trials and adventures, she finally completed high school and scraped together a year’s tuition for Howard University, “the Negro Harvard,” where in 1921 she published her first story.
After graduating from Barnard in 1928— the first known African American to do so—Hurston returned to the South to collect African- American folklore. “I had to go back, dress as they did, talk as they did, live their life,” she said, “so I could get into my stories the world I knew as a child.” The lively, hilarious stories she collected soon became material for her own fiction.
Hurston often came under fire by African-American writers who felt she minimized the seriousness of racial prejudice. By the late 1940s, her books had fallen out of favor and out of print. During the last 20 years of her life, Hurston struggled to earn a living, once again working as a maid to pay her bills. In 1960, Hurston died in a welfare home, poor and nearly forgotten, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida. Thanks to the efforts of author Alice Walker, Hurston’s work was rediscovered in the 1970s. Hurston is now acknowledged as an influential figure in the history of African-American literature.
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Setting: rural west Florida, Eatonville, and the bean-fields outside of Palm Beach. The early twentieth century, presumably the 1920s or 1930s Frame: Janie’s recounting of events to her friend Phoeby, takes place in Eatonville on the porch of Janie’s house. Genre: Bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel), American Southern spiritual journey Themes: Language as a mechanism of control; power and conquest as a means to fulfillment; love and relationships versus independence; spiritual fulfillment; materialism
Their Eyes Were Watching God Narrator : The narrator is anonymous, though it is easy to detect a distinctly Southern sensibility in the narrator’s voice. Point of View: Though the novel is narrated in the third person, by a narrator who reveals the characters’ thoughts and motives, most of the story is framed as Janie telling a story to Pheoby. The result is a narrator who is not exactly Janie but who is abstracted from her. Janie’s character resonates in the folksy language and metaphors that the narrator sometimes uses. Also, much of the text relishes in the immediacy of dialogue.