Lift every voice and sing powerpoint

An Explosion of African American Art, Literature and Music

THE harlem renaissance

Part 1) Omar Alsalamah

Part 2) Abdulrahman Alkhalifah

Part 3) Fahad Alassem

Part 4) Abdullah Almansour

Part 5) Ahmed Alghamdi

Group

The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem, New York, spanning the 1920s. During the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke. The Movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by the African-American Great Migration, of which Harlem was the largest. The Harlem Renaissance was considered to be a rebirth of African-American arts.

During the 1920s in America, something revolutionary happened in the world of art and literature. African Americans became energized and new artists and musicians joined together in Harlem, New York.

The great talents and minds of many African Americans began to produce fantastic works.

Some of the most important were Alaine Leroy Locke, W.E.B. Dubois, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Huston and Langston Hughes.

Part 1 - Introduction

The Harlem Renaissance developed shortly after World War I in the early 1920s, and lasted until the world was hit by the Great Depression in the 1930s. The people of the Renaissance created works that described what it meant to be black or brown in a white racist society. One of the ideas that came forward at the time was that of “twoness, a divided awareness of one’s identity” (Reuben 1).

Part 1, background

W.E.B. Dubois, in The Souls of Black Folks he wrote, “One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings: two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder" (in Reuben 2).

Part 1, Twoness

Paul Reuben describes the Harlem Renaissance was more than just a literary movement: “it included racial consciousness, the Pan African movement led by Marcus Garvey, racial integration, the explosion of music particularly jazz, spirituals and blues, painting, dramatic revues, and others” (p. 3).

Part 1, new work

African Americans were searching for identity. It started a literary movement “whose aim was, in the words of the Kenyan philosopher D. A. Masolo, to rehabilitate the image of the black man wherever he was through the expression of black personality" (“Harlem” 1).

Part 1, identity

African Americans rejected that white European peoples were superior in intellect and other qualities. Instead,

“The Harlem Renaissance was a universalist movement whose form was poetry and whose content was pluralism. This value of pluralism was built around an ontology that accepted diversity or otherness without hierarchal judgments of human worth on the basis of racial and cultural characteristics" (“Harlem” 2).

Identity

W. E. B. Du Bois one of the most influential African Americans and was America's leading public intellectual of his time. After two years at the University of Berlin, DuBois received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895.

His dissertation, "The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870" was published in 1896 in the Harvard Historical Studies series

He also wrote The Philadelphia Negro (1899), which provided the model for a series of monographs he wrote while at Atlanta University, whose faculty he joined in 1897.

In 1903 Du Bois published his first collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk.

Part 2 – philosophers of the renaissance

Du Bois helped found the most important civil rights organization of 20th Century-- the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Alain Leroy Locke

Alain Leroy Locke is heralded as the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance” for his publication in 1925 of The New Negro—an anthology of poetry, essays, plays, music and portraiture by white and black artists. Locke is best known as a theorist, critic, and interpreter of African-American literature and art. He was also a creative and systematic philosopher who developed theories of value, pluralism and cultural relativism that informed and were reinforced by his work on aesthetics. Locke saw black aesthetics quite differently than some of the leading Negro intellectuals of his day.

went to Harvard College in 1904, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and named a Rhodes Scholar in 1907.

Locke studied at Hertford College, Oxford University, from 1907 to 1910, and at the University of Berlin from 1910-1911.

He received the Ph.D. degree from Harvard in 1918 in philosophy. He was central to the Harlem Renaissance.

Alain Leroy Locke.

Wrote the "Moral Imperatives for World Order.”

He wrote, “The moral imperatives of a new world order are an internationally limited idea of national sovereignty, a non-monopolistic and culturally tolerant concept of race and religious loyalties freed of sectarian bigotry” (“Harlem” 3).

Locke cont.

James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 – June 26, 1938) was an American author, educator, lawyer, diplomat, songwriter, and civil rights activist. Johnson is best remembered for his leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he started working in 1917. In 1920 he was the first African American to be chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novels, and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of black culture.

James Weldon Johnson

Born in 1871.

Became the national organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1920.

He edited The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt Brace, 1922),

His book of poetry God’s Trombones (Viking Press, 1927) was influenced by the rural South, from a trip he took to Georgia while a freshman in college. It was this trip that started his interest in the African American folk tradition.

James Weldon Johnson

In 1900, he wrote the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday

Johnson

Part 3 - poets

The renaissance began around 1919 and lasted until approximately 1940. Paul Dunbar, who died in 1904, was a black poet who most Harlem Renaissance poets claim as their inspiration. There are many outstanding poets from that era, including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson and Countee Cullen.

“The Weary Blues”-- published in 1926 when he was just 24 years old.

HE THEN finished his college education and published his first novel in 1930, for which he won the Harmon gold medal for literature. He became one of the most known writers of his time, and one of the most important poets representing the Harlem Renaissance.

JAMES LANGSTON HUGHES

Countee Cullen was born in 1905, and in 1918 he went to live in the home of Pastor Frederick Cullen, who was the pastor of the largest Church in Harlem

In 1925, Cullen graduated from New York University, and then wen to Harvard's to get his Masters. He published his first volume of poetry, Color

He believed “that art transcended race and that it could be used as a vehicle to minimize the distance between black and white peoples”

Countee cullen

Zora Neale Hurston

Was born in 1891, in Eatonville Florida

Was a novelist and folklorist, is born in Eatonville, Fla.

When she died in 1960, she had published more books than any other black woman in America, “bur she was unable to capture a mainstream audience in her lifetime, and she died poor and alone in a welfare hotel. Today, she is seen as one of the most important black writers in American history.” (History.com)

Hurston

Hurston's first three novels were published in the 1930s: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written during her fieldwork in Haiti and considered her masterwork; and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939).

In 1937, Hurston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct ethnographic research in Jamaica and Haiti. Tell My Horse (1938) documents her fieldwork studying spiritual and cultural rituals in Jamaica and vodoun in Haiti.

Hurston

Part4, artists

During the early 20th century, African-American artists also moved to Harlem in New York City and brought new ideas that shifted the culture forever. Talent began to overflow within this newfound culture of the black community in Harlem, as prominent figures Jacob Lawrence and Aaron Douglas art to its limit as a form of expression and representation. These are some of the famous African Americans artists who shaped the influential movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Jacob Lawrence was born in 1907

Jacob Lawrence was an American painter, and the most widely acclaimed African-American artist of the 20th century. He is best known for his Migration Series.

He said, ““This is my genre...the happiness, tragedies, and the sorrows of mankind as realized in the teeming black ghetto.”

Jacob Lawrence

Born in 1899

Aaron Douglas was an African-American painter and graphic artist who played a leading role in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

His first major commission, to illustrate Alain LeRoy Locke's book, The New Negro, prompted requests for graphics from other Harlem Renaissance writers. By 1939, Douglas started teaching at Fisk University, where he remained for the next 27 years.

Aaron Douglas

PART 5, MUSIC

One of the most significant intellectual and artistic trends of twentieth century American history, the Harlem Renaissance also impacted music in a manner that forever altered the American cultural landscape. The Harlem Renaissance was a movement in the 1920s through which African-American writers, artists, musicians, and thinkers sought to embrace black heritage and culture in American life. This shift towards a more politically assertive and self-confident conception of identity and racial pride led to the establishment of the concept of the "New Negro,".

DUKE ELLINGTON was born in 1899.

He was an American composer, pianist, and jazz bandleader of a from 1923 until his death, over fifty years.

He became famous through his orchestra's appearances at the Cotton Club in Harlem. In the 1930s, his orchestra toured in Europe. He was a critical person in the history of jazz, “Ellington embraced the phrase "beyond category" as a liberating principle, and referred to his music as part of the more general category of American Music, rather than to a musical genre such as jazz”

DUKE ELLINGTON

an important figure during World War II while also a famous entertainers.

She became a symbol of the Jazz Age and the 1920s with her banana skirt. “She was a phenomenal woman whose story deserves to be told.”

Josephine baker

Countee Cullen wrote:

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

To this day, Armstrong is regarded as the father of jazz. His sophistication and inventiveness as a trumpet player changed the course of improvisation, as he inspired musicians to improvise using their own unique styles. His influence was pivotal in the development of jazz in the first half of the century, and guided the creative output of such figures as Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dizzy Gillespie. The joy he brought to the bandstand as a trumpeter, singer, and bandleader has yet to be matched” (Teichroew, p. 1)

Louis Armstrong

Aaron Douglas. https:// www.biography.com/people/aaron-douglas-39794

Duke Elllington. http://www.dukeellington.com/

Duke Ellington. www. Biography.com/people/ellington39795

Josephine Baker. https://www.pinterest.com/legacycom/josephine-baker-celebrated-entertainer-and-wwii-fi /

Teichroew, Jacob. (2009). http://jazz.about.com/od/artistprofiles/p/ArmstrongProfil.htm

Zora Neale Hurston. https :// www.biography.com/people/zora-neale-hurston-9347659

references

“Countee Cullen.” (n.d.). The Poetry Foundation. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/countee-cullen

Franklin, John H. & Moss, Alfred. From Slavery to Freedom. Borzoi: 2000.

“Groundbreaking Book: The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes (1926).” (2009). Poets.Org.

Hughes, Langston. "A Dream Deferred." In Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. Robert DiYanni. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. p. #994

James, Marsha. “The Harlem Renaissance Remembered.” Voanews. 2 Feb. 2005, http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2005-02/2005-02-02-voa68.cfm?CFID=289524392&CFTOKEN=85774381&jsessionid=883071bb84f887a6570b3a0321c1f4577d47

“Langston Hughes.” (2009). Poets.Org, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5657

Langston Hughes. (2009). http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/dreams-2/

Shulman, Robert. (2000). “On White Shadows.” Modern American Poetry. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hughes/shadows.htm

References

“Harlem in the Jazz Age.” (Feb. 8, 1987). The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/08/magazine/harlem-in-the-jazz-age.html?src=pm

Hughes, Langston. "A Dream Deferred." In Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. Robert DiYanni. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. p. #994

Hynes, Gerald. (2004). A Biographical Sketch of W.E.B. Dubois. http://www.duboislc.org/man.html

“Langston Hughes.” (2009). Poets.Org, http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5657

Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 9: Harlem Renaissance - An Introduction." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. URL: http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap9/9intro.html

“Rhapsody in Black.” International Visual Arts. 1997. http://www.iniva.org/harlem/hren.html

Shulman, Robert. (2000). “On White Shadows.” Modern American Poetry. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hughes/shadows.htm

“The Harlem Renaissance.” John Caroll University. 2010. http://www.jcu.edu/harlem/Philosophy/page_1_1.htm

References