1. The Roaring 20s and African-Americans
By Stephanie Fuhrmannek

2. Harlem Renaissance
In the 1920s, there were 200,000 African-Americans living in Harlem in upper Manhattan.
This became known as the black capital of the United States and many black intellectuals and artists moved here.
Many artists wanted to have a cultural link between African Americans and African traditions.

3. The Jazz Age
Jazz is rooted in the many cultures in New Orleans – African, Creole, French, Native Americans. It spread to other cities because of the Great Migration. It is uniquely American!
Louis Armstrong played the trumpet and sang.
Bessie Smith was one of the greatest jazz singers.
Duke Ellington was a famous band leader.

4. Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes was a poet who wrote about the life experiences of African Americans and showed the amazing strength they had for enduring prejudice and racism. Let’s look at one of his poems!

5. Mother to Son by Langston Hughes
Well, son, I’ll tell you: Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It’s had tacks in it, And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor- Bare. But all the time I’se been a-climbin’ on, And reachin’ landin’s, And turnin’ corners, And sometimes goin’ in the dark Where there ain’t been no light. So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps ‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard. Don’t you fall now- For I’se still goin’, honey, I’se still climbin’, And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

6. Zora Neale Hurston
There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.   (Zora Neale Hurston ( ), African-American novelist, short story writer, folklorist, playwright and anthropologist. Dust Tracks on a Road, ch. 8, J.P. Lippincott (1942).)

7. To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness
To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.   (Zora Neale Hurston ( ), African-American novelist, short story writer, folklorist, playwright and anthropologist. Dust Tracks on a Road, ch. 16, J.P. Lippincott (1942).)

8. The Great Migration
At the end of WWI, 75% of blacks lived on farms and 90% lived in the South. Many sharecropped. All lived under Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan. The South also became gradually more and more economically depressed as boll weevils began to infest cotton crops.
As a result, blacks began to head to the northern United States by the millions. Racism was considered much less brutal there than in the South, but housing was still segregated. In addition, the North granted all adult men with the right to vote; provided better educational advancement for African-Americans and their children; and offered greater job opportunities as a result of World War I and factories. This phenomenon, known as the Great Migration, brought more than seven million African- Americans to the North.

9. Jacob Lawrence: Painter
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