The literary and artistic influencers of the Harlem Renaissance were facing a similar theme to one that was central to the greater modernist art movement. Many of the modernists explored life through the lens of greater global reach, and the frequent melding of cultures the world round. The Great Migration that resulted in the Harlem Renaissance similarly brought black people from different parts of United States, and even different countries, into urban communities where it was primarily the color of their skin that united them. Poets were central to helping form a new identity for different cultures merging within new social, geographical, and political contexts.
The Great Migration was a movement of southern black people not simply northward, but more generally out of the deep south. William Cook describes the motivations for leaving the south as push and pull forces that led to the millions of people who migrated during the first half of the 20th Century. Push forces included lack of freedom to own land and move freely, growing Klu-Klux-Klan numbers, and a multitude of dangers to there health and well being associated with the racial tensions they faced in everyday life. The end of World War I stimulated many of the pull forces that instigated people leaving their lives behind for the hope of the north. In the mist of the post-war economy boom, the urban areas, most of which are in northern states, were hiring factory workers in droves. Those workers were not only increasingly protected by unions, but they could also find affordable housing. Williams goes on to argue that the Great Migration was the greatest muse for artists of the Harlem Renaissance, which created a kind of feedback loop for further flight to the north. While Harlem, as the Mecca for African American culture, and its satellites in cities like Chicago and Detroit, expressed themselves and a new found identity for Black Americans, more people were drawn into the movement, the more people were drawn in, the more vibrant and “vogue” as Emily Bernard would put it, the Renaissance became.
The Harlem Renaissance was vogue because it attracted an audience beyond the black population, which was a great part of their political motivation, around which literary publications were created to express the New Negro. Crisis, Opportunity, and, The New Negro: An Interpretation, published African American works where artists were safe to express their sometimes divisive and dichotomous images of their cultures past and present. Further, because the Renaissance was lauded as one rich in song and dance, their nightlife was among the liveliest in any urban area, where mixed couples were free to interact, and where black entertainment was always the feature. The Harlem Renaissance went out of style by necessity with the Great Depression. The nightlife that had once drawn outsiders into the African American culture, vanished overnight. However, because the movement was largely literary future generations were left with something lasting to hold onto in regard to where their new identities came from. There was, in a sense, a cultural map left behind that said: this is our soul.
What is of further interest on this topic is in how the literature of the Harlem Renaissance was rediscovered during the Civil Rights movement, and even outside of black culture like Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” was by Winston Churchill during World War II. How has the rediscovery of identity seen in the Harlem Renaissance movement informed the identity of the greater American public?
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