Without women and girls like the ones above, the 20’s would never have roared.
It was Black musicians who put the “Jazz” in “The Jazz Age” so it’s no wonder there were many fabulous flappers of color (even though history doesn’t show us this). The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural explosion of Black Excellencefrommusic,literature,art,pop culture,fashion,politics,religion,social views,and so much more. One of the things that epitomizes the 1920’s is The Charleston Dance, made popular by none other than Josephine Baker.
I have spent a long time thinking about my blog. In light of the protests in the US and around the world, I don’t feel comfortable carrying on as usual. I’m trying to do my part by signing petitions, donating money, and working as a technical assistant to workshops on recognizing and unlearning racism. However, I’m still not sure what I should do with my blog. I just stopped posting because I didn’t feel like it was an appropriate time to post my own content but I also feel like I should be using my platform in this time. I’ve decided to continue posting but in a new format. I usually caption my photos with a quote and I have decided to use this space to highlight writers of the Harlem Renaissance. The following excerpt, describing the Harlem Renaissance, is taken from the Poetry Foundation.
“In the 1920’s, creative and intellectual life flourished within African American communities in the North and Midwest regions of the United States, but nowhere more so than in Harlem. The New York City neighborhood, encompassing only three square miles, teemed with black artists, intellectuals, writers, and musicians. Black-owned businesses, from newspapers, publishing houses, and music companies to nightclubs, cabarets, and theaters, helped fuel the neighborhood’s thriving scene. Some of the era’s most important literary and artistic figures migrated to or passed through “the Negro capital of the world,” helping to define a period in which African American artists reclaimed their identity and racial pride in defiance of widespread prejudice and discrimination.
The origins of the Harlem Renaissance lie in the Great Migration of the early 20th century, when hundreds of thousands of black people migrated from the South into dense urban areas that offered relatively more economic opportunities and cultural capital. It was, in the words of editor, journalist, and critic Alain Locke, “a spiritual coming of age” for African American artists and thinkers, who seized upon their “first chances for group expression and self-determination.” Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Georgia Douglas Johnson explored the beauty and pain of black life and sought to define themselves and their community outside of white stereotypes.
Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance reflected a diversity of forms and subjects. Some poets, such as Claude McKay, used culturally European forms—the sonnet was one––melded with a radical message of resistance, as in “If We Must Die.” Others, including James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, brought specifically black cultural creations into their work, infusing their poems with the rhythms of ragtime, jazz, and blues.”
Exterior shot of the Cotton Club in its heyday New Years celebration, 1935. Performance by Cab Calloway and his band
Although the Harlem Renaissance is often thought of as an explosion of African American cultural expression and recognition, most of the white New Yorkers who flocked uptown when the sun went down nonetheless a upheld a standard of racial discrimination. The area’s most famous nightclubs, including the Cotton Club (shown above), were whites-only. Banished from the audience, blacks were allowed on stage, and some of the most famous black entertainers of the era - Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, and more - performed at the Cotton Club between 1923 and 1940.
Archibald John Motley, Jr., Jazz Age modernist whose oil paintings are associated with the Harlem Renaissance, although he’s never actually lived in Harlem.
||| Publisher’s blurb ||| “The Making of the New Negro examines black masculinity in the period of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s in America and was marked by an outpouring of African American art, music, theater and literature.
Drawing on African American texts, archives, unpublished writings, and contemporaneous European discourses, this book highlights both the canonical figures of the New Negro Movement and African American culture such as W. E. B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Alain Locke, and Richard Wright, and other writers such as Wallace Thurman, who have not received as much scholarly attention despite their significant contributions to the movement.”
|||Contents||| Acknowledgements
Introduction: Chapter One: Prologue: The Question of Manhood in the Booker T. Washington-W. E. B. Du Bois Debate Part 1: Alain Locke and the New Negro Chapter Two: Midwifery and Camaraderie: Alain Locke’s Tropes of Gender and Sexuality Chapter Three: Arts, War, and the Brave New Negro: Gendering the Black Aesthetic Part 2: Wallace Thurman and Niggerati Manor Chapter Four: Gangsters and Bootblacks, Rent Parties and Railroad Flats: Wallace Thurman’s Guide to the Black Bourgeoisie Chapter Five: Discontents of the Black Dandy Chapter Six: Epilogue: Richard Wright’s Interrogations of the New Negro Conclusion: Black Male Authorship, Sexuality, and the Transatlantic Connection
I have been inspired by many photographers, Mapplethrope, Ritts, Sleet, Parks, Arbus, Lange and Van Vechten.
Van Vechten was particularly proud of the range of his photographs of blacks. One of the unique features of the collection is a set of photographs of Negroes (already there are eleven boxes with an average of forty photographs in a box) which I have made myself during the past ten years,” Van Vechten told readers of the Crisis in 1942, “perhaps the largest group of photographs of notable Negro personalities ever made by one man.” ~ Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White.
“It was the way of Emma Lou always to create her worlds within her own mind without taking consideration the fact that other people and other elements, not contained within herself, would also have to aid in their molding. She had lived to herself for so long, had been shut out from the stream of things in which she was interested for such a long time during the formative years of her life, that she considered her own imaginative powers omniscient. Thus she constructed a future world of love on one isolated experience, never thinking for the moment that the other party concerned might not be of the same mind.”
Wide open in the shape of an enormous fan splashed with violent colors, Marseille lay bare to the glory of the meridian sun, like a fever consuming the senses, alluring and repelling, full of the unending pageantry of ships and of men.
Magnificent Mediterranean harbor. Port of seaman’s dreams and their nightmares. Port of the bums’ delight, the enchanted breakwater. Port of innumerable ships, blowing out, booming in, riding the docks, blessing the town with sweaty activity and giving sustenance to worker and boss, peddler and prostitute, pimp and panhandler. Port of the fascinating, forbidding and tumultuous Quayside against which the thick scum of life foams and bubbles and breaks in a syrup of passion and desire.
A noted figure of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay had an itinerant career—travelling widely in Europe and North Africa, and eventually forsaking the Marxism of his early years for Catholicism. This vibrant satire, begun in 1929, later abandoned, and now published for the first time, follows a West African stowaway on a boat from Marseille to New York. Discovered by the crew and shut in a freezing room, he loses both legs to frostbite, but, in a twist based on real cases, wins a large settlement from the shipping company and is able to return to Marseille a rich man. Encompassing a huge diversity of perspectives—including memorable evocations of Marseille’s black Marxist scene and of its queer subculture—the novel remains radical in its clear-eyed assessment of racism and unsentimental depiction of disability.
Gladys Bentley (1907-1960), a US openly lesbian, cross-dressing performer, blues singer, pianist, and entertainer during the Harlem Renaissance (1920s-30s) ♀️️
