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7 The Harlem Renaissance T he end of World War I saw a burst of creativity in the arts and sciences all over the Western world, and the United States participated fully in that surge of individual achievement. Poets Ezra Pound and Vachel Lindsay; novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis; playwrights Eugene O’Neill and Maxwell Anderson—to name only some of the most famous—were responsible for an unprecedented flowering of American letters. Advances in the treatment of such ailments as yellow fever and improvements in methods of surgery brought Nobel Prizes to American medical pioneers, and the invention of the submachine gun (the Tommy gun) by John Thompson, a retired U.S. army officer, proved American technical know-how. While truly adventurous painting and sculpture were still a largely European, or more specifically Parisian, undertaking, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin were creating a genre most congenial to the American psyche, the musical comedy. At the same time “serious” composers like Gershwin, Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, and the others we have already discussed were making American concert music a distinctive and respected art form. All of the above-named artists were part of the mainstream white culture , but during the decades of their great successes a parallel artistic awakening with similar brilliant achievements was occurring in Harlem, a section of northern New York City with a name reminiscent of the city’s former Dutch owners. These enormously productive years—from 1920 until a few years after the 1929 stock market crash—became known as the Harlem Renaissance. Many factors combined to create the Harlem Renaissance. First was the Great Migration, a voluntary relocation of hundreds of thousands of Southern, rural blacks to such Northern and Western cities as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and above all New York. This mass exodus was prompted in part by hideous, and in some Southern states legally permissible , lynchings and other forms of brutality. Even where such violence was not condoned, widespread Jim Crow laws and customs confined most Music Musique 72 Southern blacks to second-class citizenship. In addition, better job opportunities began to lure African Americans northward and westward. One can trace the beginnings of the Great Migration to the Reconstruction Era, which followed the Civil War. Starting as a slow trickle and gradually gathering momentum, the migration was vastly accelerated by the armaments buildup leading up to and during the United States’ participation in World War I, which brought a sudden increase in the number of factory jobs up North just when there were fewer white men to fill them. This situation forced integration in many previously segregated Northern plants. For this reason, the years 1915 to 1920 saw the greatest swell in the migratory movement. New York City was the natural destination for many in the Great Migration . There had always been, from its founding, a black presence in the city, and by 1910 there were 95,000 African Americans in the five boroughs .1 The majority of these men and women were, of course, just plain folk, but a considerable number who had been attracted by the black theater and the incipient recording and publishing industries were professional performers and writers. This vibrant nucleus naturally attracted others similarly inclined, and New York became a magnet for the African American elite. As Manhattan became more and more densely populated, the borough’s population spread northward. For a while the area around West 53rd Street was the hub of African American activity, but constantly rising real estate values forced the less affluent communities to relocate, and there was really only one direction in which to go. By 1923 the African American population of Harlem numbered somewhere between 180,000 (the figure arrived at by the federal census) and 300,000 (Information Bureau of the United Hospital Fund).2 Whatever the correct figure, clearly Harlem had become the black capital of America. The achievements of Harlem Renaissance writers, painters, and musicians are the most visible manifestations of that fertile period, but there were also serious political and philosophical underpinnings that deserve attention. The principal question debated by such thinkers as James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, and Alain Locke was how militant or conciliatory the African American community should be regarding civil rights. Could the community at large, if it spoke in a unified voice, wield enough political power to make a difference in legal and de facto segregation ? A concomitant...

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