INTRODUCTION

APPROACH AND RATIONALE

T

he Harlem Renaissance is one of over 60 National Center for History in the

Schools teaching units that are the fruits of collaborations between history
professors and experienced teachers of both United States and World History.
The units represent specific dramatic episodes in history from which you and
your stu-dents can pause to delve into the deeper meanings of these selected
landmark events and explore their wider context in the great historical narrative.
By studying a crucial episode in history, the student becomes aware that
choices had to be made by real human beings, that those decisions were the
result of specific factors, and that they set in motion a series of historical
consequences. We have selected dramatic moments that best bring alive that
decision-making pro-cess. We hope that through this approach, your students
will realize that history in an ongoing, open-ended process, and that the
decisions they make today create the conditions of tomorrows history.
Our teaching units are based on primary sources, government documents, artifacts, magazines, newspapers, films, private correspondence, literature, contemporary photographs, and paintings from the period under study. What we hope
to achieve using primary source documents in these lessons is to remove the
distance that students feel from historical events and to connect them more
intimately with the past. In this way we hope to recreate for your students a
sense of "being there," a sense of seeing history through the eyes of the very
people who were making decisions. This will help your students develop
historical empathy, to realize that history is not an impersonal process divorced
from real people like themselves. At the same time, by analyzing primary
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sources, students will actually practice the historians craft, discovering for
themselves how to analyze evidence, establish a valid interpretation and
construct a coherent narrative in which all the relevant factors play a part.

BACKGROUND
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Until the end of the Civil War, the majority of African Americans had been
enslaved and lived in the South. During the Reconstruction Era, the
emancipated African Americans, freedmen, began to strive for civic
participation, political equality and economic and cultural self-determination.
Soon after the end of the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 gave rise
to speeches by African-American Congressmen addressing this Bill. By 1875
sixteen blacks had been elected and served in Congress and gave numerous
speeches with their newfound civil empowerment. The Ku Klux Klan Act of
1871 was denounced by black Congressmen and resulted in the passage of
the Civil Rights Act of 1875, part of Reconstruction legislation byRepublicans.
By the late 1870s, Democratic whites managed to regain power in the South.
From 1890 to 1908 they proceeded to pass legislation that disenfranchised most
Negros and many poor whites, trapping them without representation. They
established white supremacist regimes of Jim Crow segregation in the South
and one-party block voting behind southern Democrats. The Democratic whites
denied African Americans their exercise of civil and political rights by
terrorizing black communities with lynch mobs and other forms of vigilante
violence as well as by instituting a convict labor system that forced many
thousands of African Americans back into unpaid labor in mines, on plantations,
and on public works projects such as roads and levees. Convict laborers were
typically subject to brutal forms of corporal punishment, overwork, and disease
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from unsanitary conditions. Death rates were extraordinarily high. While a

small number of blacks were able to acquire land shortly after the Civil War,
most were exploited as sharecroppers.] As life in the South became increasingly
difficult, African Americans began to migrate north in great numbers.
Most of the African-American literary movement arose from a generation that
had memories of the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the Civil War.
Sometimes their parents or grandparents had been slaves. Their ancestors had
sometimes benefited by paternal investment in cultural capital, including betterthan-average education. Many in the Harlem Renaissance were part of the early
20th century Great Migration out of the South into the Negro neighborhoods of
the North and Midwest. African Americans sought a better standard of living
and relief from the institutionalized racism in the South. Others were people of
African descent from racially stratified communities in the Caribbean who
came to the United States hoping for a better life. Uniting most of them was
their convergence in Harlem.

DEVELOPMENT
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During the early portion of the 20th century, Harlem was the destination for
migrants from around the country, attracting both people seeking work from the
South, and an educated class who made the area a center of culture, as well as a
growing "Negro" middle class. The district had originally been developed in the
19th century as an exclusive suburb for the white middle and upper middle
classes; its affluent beginnings led to the development of stately houses, grand
avenues, and world-class amenities such as the Polo Grounds and the Harlem
Opera House. During the enormous influx of European immigrants in the late
19th century, the once exclusive district was abandoned by the white middle
class, who moved further north.
Harlem became an African-American neighborhood in the early 1900s. In 1910,
a large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various
African-American realtors and a church group. Many more African Americans
arrived during the First World War. Due to the war, the migration of laborers
from Europe virtually ceased, while the war effort resulted in a massive demand
for unskilled industrial labor. The Great Migration brought hundreds of
thousands of African Americans to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit,
and New York.
Despite the increasing popularity of Negro culture, virulent white racism, often
by more recent ethnic immigrants, continued to affect African-American
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communities, even in the North. After the end of World War I, many AfricanAmerican soldierswho fought in segregated units such as the Harlem
Hellfighterscame home to a nation whose citizens often did not respect their
accomplishments. Race riots and other civil uprisings occurred throughout the
US during the Red Summer of 1919, reflecting economic competition over jobs
and housing in many cities, as well as tensions over social territories.

MAINSTREAM RECOGNITION OF HARLEM CULTURE

6

The first stage of the Harlem Renaissance started in the late 1910s. In 1917, the
premiere of Three Plays for a Negro Theatre took place. These plays, written by
white

playwright Ridgely

Torrence,

featured

African-American

actors

conveying complex human emotions and yearnings. They rejected the

stereotypes

of

the blackface and minstrel

show traditions. James

Weldon

Johnson in 1917 called the premieres of these plays "the most important single
event in the entire history of the Negro in the American Theater". Another
landmark came in 1919, when the poet Claude McKay published his militant
sonnet, "If We Must Die," which introduced a dramatically political dimension
to the themes of African cultural inheritance and modern urban experience
featured in his 1917 poems "Invocation" and "Harlem Dancer" (published under
the pseudonym Eli Edwards, these were his first appearance in print in the
United States after immigrating from Jamaica). Although "If We Must Die"
never alluded to race, African-American readers heard its note of defiance in the
face of racism and the nationwide race riots andlynchings then taking place. By
the end of the First World War, the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and the
poetry of Claude McKay were describing the reality of contemporary AfricanAmerican life in America.
In 1917 Hubert Harrison, "The Father of Harlem Radicalism", founded the
Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper,
respectively, of the "New Negro Movement". Harrison's organization and
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newspaper were political, but also emphasized the arts (his newspaper had
"Poetry for the People" and book review sections). In 1927, in thePittsburgh
Courier, Harrison challenged the notion of the renaissance. He argued that the
"Negro Literary Renaissance" notion overlooked "the stream of literary and
artistic products which had flowed uninterruptedly from Negro writers from
1850 to the present", and said the so-called "renaissance" was largely a white
invention.
The Harlem Renaissance grew out of the changes that had taken place in the
African-American community since the abolition of slavery, as the expansion of
communities in the North. These accelerated as a consequence of World War
I and the great social and cultural changes in early 20th-century United States.
Industrialization was attracting people to cities from rural areas and gave rise to
a new mass culture. Contributing factors leading to the Harlem Renaissance
were the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities, which
concentrated ambitious people in places where they could encourage each other,
and the First World War, which had created new industrial work opportunities
for tens of thousands of people. Factors leading to the decline of this era include
the Great Depression.

RELIGION
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Christianity played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance. Many of the writers
and social critics discussed the role of Christianity in African-American lives.
For example, a famous poem byLangston Hughes, "Madam and the Minister",
reflects the temperature and mood towards religion in the Harlem
Renaissance. The cover story for The Crisis magazines publication in May
1936 explains how important Christianity was regarding the proposed union of
the three largest Methodist churches of 1936. This article shows the
controversial question about the formation of a Union for these churches. The
article "The Catholic Church and the Negro Priest", also published in The
Crisis, January 1920, demonstrates the obstacles African-American priests
faced in the Catholic Church. The article confronts what it saw as policies based
on race that excluded African Americans from higher positions in the church

DISCOURSE
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Various forms of religious worship existed during this time of AfricanAmerican intellectual reawakening. Although there were racist attitudes within
the current Abrahamic religious arenas many African Americans continued to
push towards the practice of a more inclusive doctrine. For example, George
Joseph MacWilliam presents various experiences, during his pursuit towards
priesthood, of rejection on the basis of his color and race yet he shares his
frustration in attempts to incite action on the part of The Crisis magazine
community.
There were other forms of spiritualism practiced among African Americans
during the Harlem Renaissance. Some of these religions and philosophies were
inherited from African ancestry.
For example, the religion of Islam was present in Africa as early as the 8th
century through the Trans-Saharan trade. Islam came to Harlem likely through
the migration of members of the Moorish Science Temple of America, which
was established in 1913 in New Jersey.
Various forms of Judaism were practiced, including Orthodox, Conservative,
and Reform Judaism, but it was Black Hebrew Israelites that founded their
religious belief system during the late 20th century in the Harlem Renaissance.

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CRITICISM
Religious critique during this era was found in literature, art, and poetry. The
Harlem Renaissance encouraged analytic dialogue that included the open
critique and the adjustment of current religious ideas.
One of the major contributors to the discussion of African-American
renaissance culture was Aaron Douglas who, with his artwork, also reflected the
revisions African Americans were making to the Christian dogma. Douglas uses
biblical imagery as inspiration to various pieces of art work but with the
rebellious twist of an African influence.
Countee Cullen's poem "Heritage" expresses the inner struggle of an African
American between his past African heritage and the new Christian culture. A
more severe criticism of the Christian religion can be found in Langston
Hughes' poem "Merry Christmas", where he exposes the irony of religion as a
symbol for good and yet a force for oppression and injustice

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MUSIC
A new way of playing the piano called the Harlem Stride style was created
during the Harlem Renaissance, and helped blur the lines between the poor
Negroes and socially elite Negroes. The traditional jazz band was composed
primarily of brass instruments and was considered a symbol of the south, but
the piano was considered an instrument of the wealthy. With this instrumental
modification to the existing genre, the wealthy blacks now had more access to
jazz music. Its popularity soon spread throughout the country and was
consequently at an all-time high. Innovation and liveliness were important
characteristics of performers in the beginnings of jazz. Jazz musicians at the
time such as Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, andWillie "The
Lion" Smith were very talented and competitive, and were considered to have
laid the foundation for future musicians of their genre. Duke Ellington gained
popularity during the Harlem Renaissance. According to Charles Garrett, "The
resulting portrait of Ellington reveals him to be not only the gifted composer,
bandleader, and musician we have come to know, but also an earthly person
with basic desires, weaknesses, and eccentricities." Ellington did not let his
popularity get to him. He remained calm and focused on his music.

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During this period, the musical style of blacks was becoming more and more
attractive to whites. White novelists, dramatists and composers started to
exploit the musical tendencies and themes of African Americans in their works.
Composers used poems written by African-American poets in their songs, and
would implement the rhythms, harmonies and melodies of African-American
musicsuch as blues, spirituals, and jazzinto their concert pieces. Negroes
began to merge with Whites into the classical world of musical composition.
The first Negro male to gain wide recognition as a concert artist in both his
region and internationally was Roland Hayes. He trained with Arthur Calhoun
in Chattanooga, and at Fisk University in Nashville. Later, he studied with
Arthur

Hubbard

in Boston and

with George

Henschel and Amanda

Ira

Aldridge in London, England. He began singing in public as a student, and

toured with the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1911

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FASHION
During the Harlem Renaissance, Black Americas clothing scene took a
dramatic turn from the prim and proper. Many young women preferred extreme
versions of current white fashions - from short skirts and silk stockings to dropwaisted dresses and cloche hats. The extraordinarily successful black
dancer Josephine Baker, though performing in Paris during the height of the
Renaissance, was a major fashion trendsetter for black and white women alike.
Her gowns from the couturier Jean Patou were much copied, especially her
stage costumes, which Voguemagazine called "startling." Popular by the 1930s
was a trendy, egret-trimmed beret. Men wore loose suits that led to the later
style known as the "Zoot," which consisted of wide-legged, high-waisted, pegtop trousers, and a long coat with padded shoulders and wide lapels. Men also
wore

wide-brimmed

hats,

colored

socks, white

gloves,

and

velvet-

collared Chesterfield coats. During this period, African Americans expressed

respect for their heritage through a fad for leopard-skin coats, indicating the
power of the African animal.

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CHARACTERISTICS AND THEMES

Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride that came to
be represented in the idea of the New Negro, who through intellect and
production

of

literature,

art,

pervading racism and stereotypes to

and

music

could

challenge

the

promote progressive or socialist politics,

and racial and social integration. The creation of art and literature would serve
to "uplift" the race.
There would be no uniting form singularly characterizing the art that emerged
from the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, it encompassed a wide variety of cultural
elements and styles, including aPan-African perspective, "high-culture" and
"low-culture" or "low-life," from the traditional form of music to the blues and
jazz, traditional and new experimental forms in literature such asmodernism and
the new form of jazz poetry. This duality meant that numerous AfricanAmerican artists came into conflict with conservatives in the black
intelligentsia, who took issue with certain depictions of black life.

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Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the
influence of the experience of slavery and emerging African-American folk
traditions on black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas
inherent in performing and writing for elite white audiences, and the question of
how to convey the experience of modern black life in the urban North.
The Harlem Renaissance was one of primarily African-American involvement.
It rested on a support system of black patrons, black-owned businesses and
publications. However, it also depended on the patronage of white Americans,
such as Carl Van Vechten and Charlotte Osgood Mason, who provided various
forms of assistance, opening doors which otherwise might have remained
closed to the publication of work outside the black American community. This
support often took the form of patronage or publication. Carl Van Vechten was
one of the most notorious white Americans involved with the Harlem
Renaissance. He allowed for assistance to the black American community
because he wanted racial sameness.
There were other whites interested in so-called "primitive" cultures, as many
whites viewed black American culture at that time, and wanted to see such
"primitivism" in the work coming out of the Harlem Renaissance. As with most
fads, some people may have been exploited in the rush for publicity.

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Interest in African-American lives also generated experimental but lasting

collaborative work, such as the all-black productions of George Gershwin's
opera Porgy and Bess, and Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in
Three Acts. In both productions the choral conductor Eva Jessye was part of the
creative team. Her choir was featured in Four Saints. The music world also
found white band leaders defying racist attitudes to include the best and the
brightest African-American stars of music and song in their productions.
The African Americans used art to prove their humanity and demand
for equality. The Harlem Renaissance led to more opportunities for blacks to be
published by mainstream houses. Many authors began to publish novels,
magazines and newspapers during this time. The new fiction attracted a great
amount of attention from the nation at large. Among authors who became
nationally known were Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, Zora Neale
Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Omar Al Amiri, Eric D.
Walrond and Langston Hughes.
The Harlem Renaissance helped lay the foundation for the post-World War II
protest movement of the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, many black artists
who rose to creative maturity afterward were inspired by this literary
movement.

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The Renaissance was more than a literary or artistic movement, as it possessed

a certain sociological developmentparticularly through a new racial
consciousnessthrough ethnic pride, as seen in the Back to Africa movement
led by Marcus Garvey. At the same time, a different expression of ethnic pride,
promoted by W. E. B. Du Bois, introduced the notion of the "talented tenth":
those Negroes who were fortunate enough to inherit money or property or
obtain a college degree during the transition from Reconstruction to the Jim
Crow period of the early twentieth century. These "talented tenth" were
considered the finest examples of the worth of black Americans as a response to
the rampant racism of the period. (No particular leadership was assigned to the
talented tenth, but they were to be emulated.) In both literature and popular
discussion, complex ideas such as Du Bois's concept of "twoness" (dualism)
were introduced (see The Souls of Black Folk; 1903). Du Bois explored a
divided awareness of one's identity that was a unique critique of the social
ramifications of racial consciousness. This exploration was later revived during
the Black Pride movement of the early 1970s.

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TEACHER BACKGROUND MATERIALS

I. UNIT OVERVIEW
In the Crisis in 1920, W.E.B Du Bois called for a renaissance of American
Negro literature . . . [for] the strange, heart-rending race tangle is rich beyond
dream and only we can tell the tale and sing the song from the heart. [April,
29899]. By 1925, the New York Herald Tribune proclaimed that a Negro
renaissance was well under-way [May 7]. Now known best as the Harlem
Renaissance, it was an era of vigorous cultural growth that coalesced around a
group of creative young writers, artists, musi-cians, and powerful social
thinkers such as Du Bois and Alain Locke in Manhattans Harlem around 1920.
Critics and historians have struggled to understand the move-ment and its
impact over the years: What were its historical roots? How great is its art? How
widespread and enduring is its legacy? Studying the Harlem Renaissance and its
role in defining African American cultural identity in the rapidly changing
world of the early twentieth century not only helps students grasp that eras
complex-ity, but also helps them develop insights into attitudes that exist in our
19

society today.
Using a variety of documents, plus cooperative and individual instructional
activi-ties that emphasize critical thinking, students will examine the attitudes
and strat-egies of a people battling to take their rightful place in American
society. Art, litera-ture, music, and film are also used to illustrate key points.

II. UNIT CONTEXT

The Harlem Renaissance is part of the post-World War I cultural upheaval that
found all of American society trying to come to terms with the shift from a rural
way of life to an urban and industrialized one. This unit can be taught after
studying World War I, as a case study of the kinds of culture clashes that
dominated the 1920s, or as a transition to the era of the Great Depression and
the New Deal after covering the 20s. In preparation for teaching The Harlem
Renaissance, background on Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois and the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the
agricultural slowdown in the South, Jim Crow laws, the resurgence of the Klu
Klux Klan (KKK), and the 1919 race riots would be worthwhile. See the
Annotated Bibliography for source suggestions.
III. CORRELATION WITH THE NATIONAL STANDARDS FOR UNITED
STATES

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HISTORY
The Harlem Renaissance provides teaching materials that address National
Stan-dards for United States History, Basic Edition (Los Angeles: National
Center for Historyin the Schools, 1996) Era 7 The Emergence of Modern
America (1890 1930). Lessons in the unit specifically address Standard 3C
Examine the con-tributions of artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance
and assess their popu-larity.

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Lessons within this unit likewise address the Historical Thinking Standards by
pro-viding primary source materials which challenge students to analyze causeand-effect relationships, to marshal evidence of antecedent circumstances, to
consider multiple perspectives, and to draw upon visual data, literary, and
musical sources. Students are also expected to draw evidence from historical
maps.
IV. UNIT OBJECTIVES
To identify social, economic, and political events that affected African
Americans in the first decades of the twentieth century
To describe and analyze the artistic and cultural development of African
Ameri-cans during the Harlem Renaissance
To discuss the historical impact of the Harlem Renaissance
V. LESSON PLANS
1. Evolution of Harlem (1 day)
2. Art of the Harlem Renaissance (23 days)
3. Historical Impact of the Harlem Renaissance (12 days)

EVOLUTION OF HARLEM
A. STUDENT OBJECTIVES

To describe the Great Migration of the 1910s and 1920s

To locate Harlem on a map of New York City and trace the migration of
blacks through Manhattan to Harlem
To analyze the unrest felt by a growing number of urban blacks after World
War I and the early years of the Great Migration
To identify several political and economic movements that had an impact on
Af-rican Americans in the 1910s1920s
To identify and categorize events presented in the historical data that
culminate in the Harlem Renaissance
B. LESSON ACTIVITIES
1. Engage students interest in the Harlem Renaissance by reading Document
1 A, the letter to The Crisis from A Southern Colored Woman, describing
her mixed feelings about a 1919 riot motivated by racial problems. To
connect this historical event to students and their own difficult times, before
reading the sig-nature or explaining the circumstances of the letter ask them
who they think the writer could be, what sort of riot she is probably
discussing, and when it might have taken place.

2. Give students a copy of the map Percentage of African Americans in Total

Popu-lation of the United States, 1890 [Document 1B]. Ask them to
determine which part of the country nearly all African Americans lived in at
that time (the South), then to use their own background knowledge to
speculate about whether African Americans would be accustomed to an
urban or a rural environment, what kind of jobs most of them would have,
and what social conditions would be like for them. This is a good place to
discuss Jim Crow laws if students have not already studied them. With this
foundation, students are ready to study the Great Mi-gration that began
around the time of World War I.
3. Let students work in small groups to draw conclusions about the reasons that
several million African Americans migrated to Northern cities by examining
Documents 1C to 1L. In order to interpret documents such as newspaper
articles, photographs and posters students should examine all objects or images included in the document, then ask themselves questions such as: Who
created the document? Who is its intended audience? What is its historical
con-text? What kind of effects would it be likely to have? With the
documents in-cluded here, they should recognize such points as:

 Basic civil rights were denied African Americans in the South and their lives
were often in danger.
Wages in the South were low and working conditions poor.
Education possibilities in the South were limited for African Americans.
Opportunities for African Americans to achieve prominence were greater in
the North (Mr. Abbott, the owner of the Chicago Defender, was an African
American, as was Oscar DePriest whose election to alderman) is announced
in the Defender headline).
Jobs were growing rapidly in Northern factories because of war production.
4. Give students The Trek Northward [Document 1M], a map of Manhattan and
most of New York City, then ask them to determine where and when African
Ameri-cans lived there. They should be able to determine that their introduction
was into lower Manhattan in the mid-nineteenth century, and that there was a
slow migra-tion northward to Greenwich Village, midtown, and the San Juan
Hill area south-west of Central Park by the turn of the century, and finally that
there was a jump over the park to Harlem (first in 1905) in substantial numbers
by 1910. Continue to relate the lesson to todays world by asking students what
they know about Harlem now and why they think African Americans developed
this largely homo-geneous community. Point out the advantages that such a
cultural support system has while people get accustomed to a new way of life,
and that the tight cultural community in Harlem was vital to the growth of the

Harlem Renaissance.
5. Ask a student to read aloud Save, a 1918 editorial in The Crisis [Document
1N]. Explain that The Crisis was published by the NAACP, then discuss such
questions as:
What action does the NAACP advise African Americans to take?
What reason does it give that is directly related to World War One?
What reason is directly related to conditions for African Americans?
How would you expect people to feel if they had sacrificed to fight in World
War One, but were not treated with respect afterward?

INDEX

Sr. No.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

DESCRIPTON

PAGE
No.
INTRODUCTION
1
BACKGROUND
3
DEVELOPMENT
5
MAINSTREAM RECOGNITION OF HARLEM 7
CULTURE
RELIGION
9
DISCOURSE
10
CRITICISM
11
MUSIC
12
FASHION
13
CHARACTERISTICS AND THEMES
15
TEACHER BACKGROUND MATERIALS
19
EVOLUTION OF HARLEM
22