Encyclopedia Article
"Harlem Renaissance" By: David Levering Lewis
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition. (New York : Oxford University Press, 2005). Volume 3: p150-161. Call Number: Olin Level 3 DT14 .A37435 2005
African American cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s that was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.Variously known as the New Negro movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance emerged toward the end of World War I in 1918, blossomed in the mid- to late 1920s, and then faded in the mid-1930s. The Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that main stream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously and that African American literature and arts attracted significant attention from the nation at large. Although it was primarily a literary movement, it was closely related to developments in African American music, theater, art, and politics
Langston Hughes Couple in Raccoon Coats" (1932) James VanDerZee Augusta Savage (Sculptor)
"The New Negro: An Interpretation of Negro Life was based on “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” a special March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, the prominent illustrated journal of social analysis and a companion to the journal Survey, which Locke, as guest editor, had previously compiled. For the anthology, which was published in New York by the brothers Albert and Charles Boni, Locke significantly expanded and further edited the Survey Graphic material. He went beyond Harlem, adding material with a national and international perspective. In particular, Locke emphasized a Pan-African dimension, linking black Americans to other blacks worldwide by including such contributions as his essay “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” and W. E. B. Du Bois's “The Negro Mind Reaches Out.” Locke showed black America as a whole—and the entire Pan-African world—to be involved in the new cultural movement..."
