LITR 5535: American Romanticism
Sample 
Student Research Project, fall 2003

April Patrick
LITR 5535 2003 research project

"(Harlem) is romantic in its own right. And it is hard and strong, its noise, heat, cold, cries and colours are so. And the nostalgia is violent too; the eternal radio seeping through everything day and night, indoors and out, becomes somehow the personification of restlessness, desire, brooding."

-- Nancy Cunard
Harlem Review, 1933          

Research Journal:  EXPLORING THE SETTING OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

            What did Harlem look, sound, smell and feel like at the time?  For several years, I’ve felt stirrings to write a story about African American urban life in the 1920’s-30’s.  To paint a vivid picture when I write my tale, I need a better feel for the neighborhoods, bars, shops, tenement houses and streets of Harlem.  I need to know place names, what it was like to be in those places and what went on there.  So, I researched the PLACE and atmospheres of the Harlem Renaissance.  I knew a bit already about the poetry, stories and music of the Harlem Renaissance, but I discovered new artwork from the time period in my exploring, as well.  Tying this question of place to the issues of American Romanticism, I pursued answers to a parallel question: how or why did so much intense artistic expression spring from a period when significant racial division and inequality still characterized social relations in America? 

            What’s the point of learning historical information when writing fiction or poetry?   According to the Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, a historical novel “makes use of historical personages or events in a fictitious narrative.  True-to-life elements may be added to lend a sense of authenticity…but in serious examples of this genre, historical event, processes, and issues are central to the story line rather than providing peripheral or decorative touches.  Historical novel are often vehicles for their authors’ insights into historical figures and their influences or into the causes and consequences of historical events, changes or movement” (201).  For me, the process is an instinctive pursuit of something that fascinates me and becomes an obsession.  The way to release myself from the obsession is to indulge it fully, researching it intensely and then writing about it creatively. 

            I agree with novelist Sheri Holman on the force of research in storytelling:  “research is all about the possibilities--you get these grandiose ideas of what you’re going to do in your novel to recreate this grand scheme” (Steinberg 72).  I find inspiration in real, raw details of life in the past.  One detail or one image found through research can spawn a whole story.  An example of this is how Holman’s novel,

“The Dress Lodger, had its genesis in a book London Labour and the London Poor that she came across while working as a temp in the marketing department of Penguin.  She was startled by a reference to a type of prostitute called a dress lodger and the woman deployed as her watcher.  The image fascinated her.  ‘A gaudily dressed woman being closely followed. Like your mortality following you through he streets.’ Holman jotted it down in her journal; eight years later, it morphed into her second novel. She set it in Sunderland because that was the city where cholera entered England in the 1830’s. As is her habit, Holman wanted to address a contemporary issue in a historical setting.  During the cholera epidemic, people thought the government had unleashed the disease to rid the society of the poor.  Holman saw a relationship to AIDS, which had similar rumors about its origins and motivation” (Steinberg 73).

            This journal records details that inspired and fascinated me, as well as social ideas I find relevant to today.  I, too, will address contemporary issues in a historical setting, such as delusions of supremacy over other ethnicities, in the story I write eventually.  I tried to divide my findings into three major categories.  The first category details the location of Harlem--when and where it became the “black capital” of America.  The second section records the juicy, visceral, physical details of life in Harlem.  These will help immensely in writing fiction  and poems, in describing and re-creating the setting.  The third section contains thoughts on how the Harlem Renaissance was not a period of “easy, swinging“ living necessarily, nor did it signal the end of racism or segregation.  The last part offers explanations for why the Harlem Renaissance evolved.

            I used The Harlem Renaissance (Greenhaven Press Companion to Literary Movements and Genres), historical books about the time period, such as Osofsky’s Harlem, The Making of Ghetto and other books on the black community of Harlem from the 19^th -20^thcentury.  I enjoyed gazing at Harlem Renaissance artwork, particularly Augusta Savage‘s sculptures and Marvin and Morgan Smith‘s photography in Harlem: a Vision of Marvin and Morgan Smith. 

LOCATION:  Where Is Harlem?  How and when did it become nation’s Black Capital?

            Manhattan is flanked on its west side by the Hudson River, on the northeast side by the Harlem River and the southeast side by the East River.  Harlem lies between 110^th  and 145^th streets.  The streets I saw again and again in my readings were: Lenox Avenue and 135^th Street.  “Roughly drawn, the boundaries of Harlem are: 110^thStreet on the south; on the east, Lenox Avenue to 126^th Street, then Lexington Avenue to the Harlem River” (Huggins 65).

            I was satisfied to learn that there were African American neighborhoods in Harlem which “predated those of its late-nineteenth century residents. The first Negroes to live and work in Harlem were slaves, and references to them are found in seventeenth century documents.  The original wagon road constructed between New Amsterdam and Harlem was built by the ‘Dutch West India Company’s Negroes.’  Slaves worked on farms and estates in Harlem in the seventeenth century and colonial Harlem even had its own ‘Negro Burying Ground.’ …With freedom, Negroes continued to live in the general area” (Osofsky 83).

            Early in the decade of 1900-10, Harlem offered the colored people the first chance in their entire history in New York to live in modern apartment houses.  West 53^rd Street was superior to anything they had ever enjoyed; and they were, for the most part, making private dwellings serve the purpose of apartments, housing several families in each house” (Huggins 66).

            “The development of Black Harlem…had been anticipated by the faithful of Manhattan, the sixty-odd thousand Afro-Americans who lived in midtown’s vastly overcrowded Tenderloin and San Juan Hill districts. ...By the 1890’s, Afro-Americans were pushing above 53^rd Street into the congested area of San Juan Hill, where they fought the Irish for a portion of that pitiable turf.  Midtown was a pressure cooker, as fertility and immigration stained against he invisible walls of the ghetto and the construction of Pennsylvania Station further diminished crucial land space. ...Of Manhattan’s 60,534 Afro-Americans in 1910, only 14,300 had been born in New York” (Lewis 27).

Let’s Move and “Improve Our Lot”

            At the turn of the century, “…many of Brooklyn’s Afro-American bluebloods--clannish, long-established families with substantial incomes from preaching, retailing, and catering--began selling their neat homes and moving to the ‘Negro capital of the world.’  For two varieties of Afro-American enterprises--churches and cabarets--money was especially abundant” (Lewis 27).    

            “Millions of poor black people had silently, both individually and in family groups, left the South in a determined effort to ‘improve their lot‘ in northern cities.  In 1910, eight out of ten black Americans had resided in the eleven former Confederate states, with 90 percent living in rural areas with almost no schools.  Jobs in northern factories, mills and mines during World War I started this migration but it continued between 1920 and 1925 when some 2 million… left the South.  The black population of Chicago rose from 44,102 in 1910 to 233,903 by 1930.  New York, with 91,709 black persons in 1910 had 327,706 by 1930.  Harlemites proudly called it the ‘black capital of the world‘” (Mc Connell 115).

            “300,000, and possibly many more, Afro-American farmers, unskilled laborers, and domestics left the South before 1920.… From late 1915 onward, the South was full of agents recruiting labor for northern industry. Railroad tickets were dispensed gratis or advanced against forthcoming wages ; trains backed into small towns and steamed away with most of the young and the fit; and the Chicago Defender ballyhooed the milk and honey up North” (Lewis 20-21).

            In 1923, “slicing almost the full length of the district, Eighth Avenue cleanly severed black from white.  From Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River few Afro-Americans were to be found.  East of 8^th to the Harlem River, from 130^th to 145^th Streets, lay black Harlem, the largest, most exciting urban community in Afro-America--or anywhere else for that matter” (Lewis 27).

JUICY DETAILS:  Church, Food, Arts & Entertainment

            “Negro Churches played a more important role in the development of Harlem than all other institutions in the Negro community” since it had traditionally been the “most stable and wealthy Negro institution.  As population grew exponentially, the influence and wealth of the church did grew “phenomenally.”  Ministers in all the churches preached in quarters inadequate to seat those who wished to attend, and some were forced to hold five and six services each Sunday.  Membership in older churches doubled and tripled…. Population pressures made the older facilities inadequate--‘standing room is always at a premium’ (Osofsky 114). 

            In the early twentieth century, exclusively white denominations left Harlem due largely o the influx of African American families, “selling their properties to African American Baptists, Methodists and others.  At Leonard and Church Streets stood the queen of Negro religious institutions, ‘Mother Zion’ Church (African Methodist Episcopal Zion), founded in 1796.  In 1800 a frame building replaced the stable in which its founders worshipped; in 1820 a stone structure replaced the frame; in 1840 a solid brick building took the place of the stone.  “’Little Zion’ the uptown branch of ‘Mother Zion’ held service in a small wooden building on Harlem’s east side for three-quarters of a century before it constructed a new church on the west side in 1911.  ‘Not in seventy years has there been so much real enthusiasm in the Harlem Zion Church,’ one member remarked (Osofsky 115). 

            Then, “a white Protestant Episcopal church,” believing it immoral to sell to the African Americans, even though their congregation had all but moved out as the Negroes moved in, tried to find a white buyer.  Finally, relieved, they sold to “a white woman-- who immediately resold it to the Mother Zion Church.  Within ten years, Mother Zion outgrew the premises” (Osofsky 117). 

            Practically every major Negro institution moved its downtown headquarters to Harlem by the early 1920’s.  The formerly white-owned properties were bought by new African American realty agencies and put up for sale to African Americans, sometimes exclusively,.  The lovely Stanford-White designed brownstones were sold to well-to-do African Americans and called the “’finest group of Negro residences in the country.‘”  They were known “within the Negro community as Striver’s Row.  The Astor Estate, second in reputation and quality only to Striver’s Row, were also sold to Negroes in the early twenties” (Osofsky 120).   By 1920, two thirds of Manhattan’s African American population lived in Harlem.  When the twenties came to end, African Americans lived as far south as 110^th Street --the northern border of Central Park;  almost all the older white residents had moved away, though a few “marooned  white families stubbornly remained. ’How our old Dutch Burghers would writhe,’ an old resident commented, ’if they could be reincarnated for just long enough to grasp the modern idea of what was once their cherished Nieuw Haarlem!’” (Osofsky 122).  

            On West 133^rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues--“a block with so many night clubs it was known as Jungle Alley-- were the Clam house, Tillie‘s Chicken Shack, Pod and Jerry‘s and Mexico‘s.  The Clam House drew more white visitors than its neighbors did.  There, Gladys Bentley accompanying herself on the piano, and sang some of the naughtier lyrics of the decade.  Bentley used to ‘draw the celebrities like flies,’ a Harlem journalist said, adding, ‘Those were the days of double entendre songs with ennui, and if ever there was a gal who could take a popular ditty and put her own naughty version to it, La Bentley could do it.’  …’Gladys Bentley was a woman dressed as a man. You also had a male performer who called himself Gloria Swanson. So Harlem was like Berlin, where they had such things going on in cabarets all the time’”  (Anderson 169).

(Huggins 69).    “Tillie’s Chicken Shack served some of the tastier late-night meals uptown--fried chicken and sweet potato pie were its specialties.  Its regular patrons--whites form Sutton Place and blacks form Seventh Avenue--gathered there around midnight as much to dine as to hear Elmira, the torch singer, in her suggestive rendition of ’Stop it, Joe’” (Anderson 169).

            The food eaten in Harlem had a West Indies, Caribbean or African influence.  Unusual vegetables reigned:  “huge yams, as big as a man‘s head are imported especially for Harlem.  In some months they are sold for more than the choicest cuts of meats, because they are eaten as cures for homesickness.  Delectable collards foliaged with just a tinge of purple or lavender, giving warmth to the cool, pale green,” and something Harlemites called “crystal fines--combinations of small, thin-necked squashes and puffy cucumbers…covered with fibers of soft, whitish filaments.  Inside are huge pits or seeds such as are found in alligator pears.  Duly shorn and cut into strips, these strange-looking vegetables give a body to soups and stews--particularly to gumbo. …The Caucasian is likely to be repelled from taroes, tanyans, and eddoes…with a more of the oily quality than tanyans and a little less starch…they are much employed in soups and stews, to which they impart a flavor considered delicious by children of the tropics.  This region also consumes tons of sweet potatoes both from New jersey and the Carolinas.

            “It is always taken for granted that the American Negroes consider chicken the choicest of meats.  But in Harlem, pork seems to be the leading article of flesh diet.  It appears as ‘mixings’ in the beloved collards and mustard greens, or bacon to give tang to tanyans.  …Chitterlings, kept simmering with a little salt  and many choice spices in the restaurants, emit a savory aroma that lures all those who like them” (Schoener 74).  On signs in restaurant windows, one was likely to see: “Pig snouts and black eye,” advertising  pig snouts ranged in a row on a bed of rice with black eyed peas.   Pig tails and red-pepper sauce with beans and rice are also a favorite.  “Out of huge barrels loom red sugar cane, six or eight feet high, which later, cut in short lengths is eaten as a stick candy by children.  Plantains and bananas in all shades of green and yellow and dark red….pyramids of tanyans an eddoes loom; bushels of collards, and stacks of gigantic yellow, brown and reddish yams tempt….  One would go far before finding anything more colorful and picturesque than this weekly food exposition which Harlem stages” (Schoener 74).    

Most Negroes earned money the hard way.  “There was Pig Foot Mary, huge and deep-voiced, who had drifted to New York from the Mississippi Delta penniless, but within a week had set up business outside a saloon.  After earning five dollars as a domestic, Mary spent three for a dilapidated baby carriage and a large wash-boiler, and invested the balance in pigs’ feet.  Hot pigs feet showed an immediate profit” (Boyd 38). 

            When customers began moving to Harlem, she followed, setting up shop at 135^th Street on Lenox Avenue, and three weeks later married John Dean, owner of an adjoining newsstand.  “From early morning until late at night, swathed in starched checked gingham, she remained at this stand for sixteen years.  Beyond two cotton dresses, her worldly goods were a mounting bank account” (Boyd 36) “because of her high reputation in the business of preparing and selling that particular delicacy, so popular in Harlem“ (Huggins 69). 

 “Though unable to read or write, Pig Foot Mary became one of the community‘s             shrewdest businesswomen.  Her subsequent dealings in real estate brought her bank account up to $375.000.”  Prizefighter, “Lanky ‘Keed’ Chocolate, a former Havana             bootblack, dazzled Harlem with yellow automobiles, purple suits and riotous living.              Theatrical people were big money-makers….And hardly had jazz assailed the ears of New York when Jovial W.C. handy arrived with a satchel of music….His “Yellow Dog Blues and “St. Louis Blues” were sung by wailing blues singers in every dive, joint and basement cabaret--places which did a bouncing business.       

            White folks, especially “Bohemian types,” rushed into Harlem to enjoy the action and be entertained by the artsy African Americans.  “Negroes were barred from the Cotton Club, the widely advertised ‘Aristocrat of Harlem.’  On one occasion W.C. Handy was barred admittance--in spite of the fact that his music was the feature of the show. Negroes resented the restrictions. But the theatrical people wanted to appear there. The  club was famous for its high-yaller chorus and so lucrative as a source of income….  Here Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway made reputations as orchestra leaders” (Boyd 43).  According to Langston Hughes in “When the Negro Was in Vogue“ from The Big Sea, many clubs owners, excited at the flood of white patrons:

             “made the grievous error of barring their own race, after the manner of the famous             Cotton Club. But most of these quickly lost business because they failed to realize             that a large part of the Harlem attraction for downtown New Yorkers lay in simply             watching the colored customers amuse themselves“ (Huggins 371). 

            Many blacks preferred other, less trendy spots for good times without the ogling of whites. Langston Hughes said he much preferred the house rent parties to the clubs. Since only blacks were given invitations, you could count on being able to do the Black Bottom without a white guy right behind you, copying.

            A sense of reverse-exclusivity seems to have developed.   “If you really desire a good time, make friends with some members on the staff of Harlem, and have him take you to Mexico’s or to Pod and Jerry’s or to the Paper Mill.  We warn you that only the elect and pure in heart are admitted to  these places”  (Huggins 46).  With many white folks wanting to blend with them for nightlife, many  African Americans wanted to go to places that were exclusively, purely, privately for African Americans.

            A loosening of constraints and a rebelliousness (like the free, rebellious Romantic spirit) against repressive, guilt-driven Puritan ethic characterized the time.  “By the fall of 1913, America had gone absolutely dance-mad.  The whole nation seemed to be divided into two equal forces, those who were for it and those who were against it. Dancing was the Devil’s work in prewar America. Proper contact with a partner was even regulated by law in most places.  …A growing number of respectable opinions held…that dancing was good for the health, the spirits and preservation of youth.  Puritan America paused, listened, began to dance a bit the one step, maxixe, and Castle walk, but remained…unconvinced and guilt-ridden” (Lewis 32). 

            This shunning sensual, free movement reminds me of Hawthorne’s “May-Pole of Merry Mount,” wherein the happy, pre-Fall, pagan clan dance about the pole in “wild revelry,” but are regarded by the band of Puritans as “devils and ruined souls” (Norton 620).  The band of Puritans are stern, sober, dance-contemptuous.  I also think about the Romantic impulse to rebel, to challenge traditions--the, “We shouldn’t do it, but let’s anyway,” mindset of early-Americans to the present, the conflict of “Go for it!!!” versus adhering to staid “Family Values.”         

            However, unlike in the story, dancing becomes accepted widely:  “By 1914, everybody did it and laughed about old-fashioned ordinances.  People who believed that the new dancing was connected with the slow, dreaded rise of black culture now found themselves on the defensive and when the Ladies Home Journal at last gave the Castles a flattering spread, Irene knew they had won:  ‘The bitter outcry against dancing began to come to an end’” (Lewis 33). 

            Again , there seems to have been a distinction made between the authentic, ethnic experience and fake, commercialized entertainment for white patrons:  “…up in Harlem, the real jazz and low-down blues were being fueled by the southern invasion.  ‘Many of our patrons are originally from the South,’ Lincoln Theater owner, Mrs. Marie Downs explained, ‘and they relish the entertainment these folks bring, New York cultivated tastes being laid aside for a time.’  Manhattan ‘cultivated tastes’ were abandoned at the Crescent, Lafayette, and Lincoln theaters for the likes of Perry Bradford, Johnny Dunn, Fats Waller, and especially Mamie Smith in the 1919 Lincoln Theater smash, ‘Maid of Harlem‘” (Lewis 33).

            To collect enough to pay the rent,  “whist parties” or Saturday night “rent parties” became a commonplace activity for the Harlemites.  They would have live music, a piano, some drums or a guitar or an old coronet, “awful bootleg whiskey and good fried fish or steamed chitterlings sold at very low prices“ (Huggins 373).  This, combined with the 15 to 25 cents cover charge paid by hundreds who crammed into one-room apartments would go towards the first of the month’s rent. Guests came in part to listen to pianists such as Willie (the Lion) Smith, James P. Johnson, Willie Gant, Fats Waller and other vie for the plaudits of the audience. 

  “It was at Leroy’s that I first saw piano battles.  Players like Willie ‘the Lion’… and Fats Waller.  They’d last for three or four hours.  One man would play two or three choruses and the next would slide in.  Jimmy was on top most of the time.  They played shouts, and they also played pop tunes.  You got credit for how many patterns you could create within the tunes you knew and in how many different keys you could play.” Clarke 65 

            Much mingling of talented African Americans, collaborating and sharing of ideas  could occur in such an overcrowded space.  “Young black writers submerged themselves in the primitive black culture that flourished in the ghetto’s speakeasies , gin-houses and jazzrooms. There all of Harlem converged: the prostitute, the washwoman, the petty gangster, the poet, and the intellectual shared the blues and swayed to the beat of the jazz musicians.  …the gatherings hosted by Harlem’s literary and intellectual elite brought black writers into contact with black intellectuals such James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois and white liberals such as Alfred Knopf, Clarence Darrow, and Carl Van Vechten. 

            As Langston Hughes summarized:  ‘At the James Weldon Johnson parties and gumbo suppers, one met solid people like Clarence and Mrs. Darrow.  At the Dr. Alexander’s, you met the upper crust Negro intellectuals like Du Bois.  At Wallace Thurman’s you met the bohemians of both Harlem and the Village.  And in the gin mills and speakeasies and night clubs between 125^th and 145^th, Eighth Avenue and Lenox, you met everyone from Buddy de Silva to Theodore Dreiser, Ann Pennington to the first Mrs. Eugene O‘Neill.  In the days when Harlem was in vogue, Amanda Randolph was at the Alhambra , Jimmy Walker was mayor of New York and Louise and at the old New World.‘  The glamour and excitement that made Harlem a mecca for black writers also attracted the attention of white New Yorkers who began regular pilgrimages to the ghetto in search of its exotic night life.  …In the 1920‘s this interest became an obsession, as Harlem and blacks in general became the latest fad for middle-class America“ (Wintz 94).

            Tying this middle-class fad idea to current issues, as Holman does in her historical fiction, I’m reminded of the intense, widespread popularity hip-hop music and culture have for middle-class Americans today.  The clothing, lingo, dance styles and even hand gestures (supposed gang signs) are imitated by today’s youth who see the African-American style as appealing and emulate the stars who display it most exuberantly.   

The Harsh Side of African-American Life in Harlem

            The negative aspects of the life in Harlem are frequently described in Gothic detail.  Decay and darkness are frequent adjectives and themes.  For example:  “Harlem‘s tropical verdancy hid the spiritual decay and strangulation spreading through the lushness of a sealed suffocating hothouse.  In the glowing years of the late twenties when Harlem nearly forgot there was more to its life than cabarets and concerts, cocktail parties and publishers‘ contracts, McKay’s verse spoke of ‘The ugly corners of the Negro belt/ The miseries and pains of these harsh days’” (Lewis 55).

            African-Americans had to pay exorbitant rents, much higher than wealthier, white New Yorkers ever paid.  “Of the twenty seven ethnic groups in the neighborhood, Negroes paid the highest rent--generally two to five dollars per month more than others.  ‘A colored man in this city…pays higher rental and gets far less for his money than does the white man…. The present housing conditions of the vast majority of colored families in New York can only be characterized as disgraceful”  (Osofsky 13).  A newspaper article, “Powell Says Rent Too High,” from 1935 explains that, “Rents in the Harlem area are about 20 per cent higher than in other communities of similar accommodations.  The overlords of Harlem are the landlords and with very few exceptions they have worked out a standard of operating which is, roughly: The worse the accommodations, the poorer the people, the higher the rents….What then for the families who cannot pay the high rents nor obtain relief? Down into the ground they have gone, into the cellars and basements they have scurried.  Fully ten thousand of the Harlem citizens live in cellars: dark, damp, cold dungeons” (Schoener 137).

            Again, I was reminded of the Gothic:  of darkness, of secrets hidden away in cellars, attics and dungeons, and of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl when she escaped Dr. Flint, but had to hide in the attic for six months (N 963).  Whether completely reliable or somewhat hyperbolic, the accounts establish the psychological state of the African Americans:  solemn, oppressed, sometimes desolate darkness. 

            Furthermore, it was expensive to live Harlem.  Harlem’s Negroes paid higher rents than those paid by any other black section of New York City, and they continued to “rise rapidly after WWI.  In 1914, the average Negro family paid $23.45 per month“ (Osofsky 111).  The tenements were often hideously dilapidated and unkempt.  The high-paying renters had little recourse.  “From a report in the New York Herald-Tribune:  most slum complaints involve ’sordid hygienic conditions.’  The label ’horror house’ has been used on several of the worst slums.  ’Some are unimaginably filthy.  Sewage sometimes collects in the basement up to a level of three feet.  Stairways have gaping holes, plumbing is nonexistent, and rats and vermin run rampant.’  ‘The rats in the house were better fed and better housed than the people.’  ‘No improvement in ten years.’ ‘Rats, rat holes and roaches.’ ‘Very, very cold.  Not fit to live in.  Air shaft smells.’  ‘Ceilings in two rooms have fallen. The apartment is overrun with rats.’  Housing Court levies fines against slumlords found guilty of code violations.  Some of the owners merely pay the fines and continue to rake in the profits from high rents for subpar conditions.  Then there are the ‘absentee‘ landlords no one knows, not even rental agents….The absentee owner is rarely apprehended for legal action and their dwellings continue to decay.  The peril of these buildings is fire.  Fires occur so frequently that only the most spectacular are reported…” (Clarke 201). 

            There were far about 800 African American women to a 1,000 men at the turn of the century, and most men didn’t earn enough to support a family without the help of their wives  Osofsky writes in The Making of  a Ghetto.  He points out that there were “greater economic opportunities for women in Negro women in cities.”  So, Osofsky contends, the greater “financial stability of Negro women created some serious social and psychological difficulties for Negro men.  Forced reliance on female economic power minimized the sense of control and responsibility Negro men had for their families, and, more than for other ethnic groups, led to disrupted or broken homes.  This economic situation deprived Negro males of an essential symbol of full manhood“ (Osofsky 4).  It seems Osofsky may be somewhat sexist in his attitudes about men’s and women’s roles, but I think the fact that more men than women were unemployed and dependent on their spouses is very interesting.  I think the inability to contribute to society in a creative, fulfilling way breeds despair which deteriorates the family and community.

            In the 1890‘s, most African Americans in New York City held low-paying, unskilled jobs.  The middle class was small, consisting mostly of clerks, then followed in descending order by actors and actresses, musicians and music teachers and small businessmen.  “More than 90 percent of the community, males and females, were employed as menials or laborers: servants, porters, waiters, waitresses, teamsters, dressmakers, laundresses, janitors and ‘laborers not specified’”(4-5).  I think this problem can still be seen today, of course, in all ethnic groups struggling to survive in poverty. 

            In the late 19^th century, “the Negro, hedged about by union restrictions and racial antagonism, usually found upward mobility impossible and settled for employment in the fringe jobs that an industrial and commercial society creates--as janitors, elevator operators, general laborers or all kinds, longshoremen, servants.  Negro women almost always worked as domestics” (Osofsky 23).  Though, by the twentieth, more African Americans than ever before are expressing themselves artistically, thrilling and impressing audiences with accomplishments in music, visual art, dance and acting.  

            In 1963, James Baldwin, in an interview on Harlem spoke of how a Renaissance is perhaps incapable of stamping out racism for good, one can transcending hatred and cruelty.  Baldwin said, “The great victims in this country of the institution called segregation…are the white people and the white man’s children.  Lorraine Hansberry said this afternoon when we were talking about the problem of being a Negro male in this society…that she wasn’t too concerned with Negro manhood since they had managed to endure and even to transcend fantastic things, but she was very worried about a civilization which could produce those five policemen standing on the Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham…and I am, too….because at some point they were taught and they believed that they were better than other people because they were white….It leads to moral bankruptcy” (Clarke 125).

            I see these as being eternal issues:  false beliefs in superiority of one set of people over another, how terribly destructive they can be, how devastating their acts of stupid, selfish cruelty, but how there is a hope and care that transcends such darkness.   So, several current situations come to mind as ones I could explore in a historical setting in fiction.  As the United States military wreaks havoc in at least three already-impoverished countries right now, our delusions of superiority as a country seem plain as day.  The other place I see this old issue playing itself out on a current front is in the ever-increasing immigration of Hispanics to Texas and how, like the African Americans who immigrated increasingly to Harlem, older residents move away, bemoaning the loss of the “best of Harlem” or the best of Pasadena in this case. As the Hispanics move into the houses and apartments surrounding the older generations‘ homes, the older folks evacuate, just like in Harlem. 

Why Did The Harlem Renaissance Occur?

            “As a writer in The Freeman, one of the leading intellectual magazines of the day put it: ‘the greatness of our opportunity consists in the very fact that thus far we have set up no definite boundaries of nationality where culture is concerned.’  African Americans recognized this situation as their opportunity to participate in the evolving American culture and way of life” (Mc Connell 115). 

            Professor Richard Powell on the Online NewsHour said, “One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding the art and culture of the Harlem Renaissance is that the African American artist was somehow above and beyond the primitivist mindset: that the exoticizing of Africa, the exploring of sexual themes, and the interrogation of the black demimonde was primarily something that white artists and intellectuals were engaged in. Yet if one studies the historical record and the cultural artifacts from the period, we see many African American artists delving into these problematic themes and subjects. Why? Because (among many other reasons) many of these artists saw this approach as underscoring their modernist credentials. “

            Typical of the Romantic movement which seeks to break out of conventional ways of doing things and go an individualistic route is the  Harlem Renaissance desire to turn conventional middle class concerns upside down. In Europe for a century or more artists had been  “painting carousers in cafes, decadent circus performers, prostitutes and their clients in bordellos, and the indigent. They also turned to non-western cultures -- especially Africa and Oceania -- for inspiration and information. And they earnestly looked at peasants from rural France and from small villages in northern and eastern Europe: all of this in order to invest their art with power and provocation.”

            “Many African American artists (much to the chagrin of the more conservative critics, like W.E.B. Du Bois) did the same thing. Langston Hughes wrote poetry that celebrated the blues singers and jazz dancers. Paul Robeson played the roles of the stevedore and "jackleg" preacher on the Broadway stage and in films. Duke Ellington composed a range of musical compositions, some quite elegant and sophisticated, while others more fitting for the "hoochie choochie" dancers in the nightclubs. And Josephine Baker turned Paris, Berlin, London, and Copenhagen upside down with her suggestive banana dance and sense of abandonment. All of these artists knew what they were doing and were willing to push their work to the primitivist extremes to make radical artistic statements, to critique what was then seen as a stultifying white puritan ethic, and (to quote the African American muralist Aaron Douglas) to ‘create something transcendentally material, mystically objective. Earthy. Spiritually earthy. Dynamic.’”  This sounds entirely reminiscent of the objectives of Romanticism on our syllabus to me.  

            Here is an example of the individualism that sprang from the Harlem Renaissance:  “Harlem Renaissance artists forged ahead with new ways of seeing black culture, proclaiming (as Langston Hughes did in 1926): ‘If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter.... If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.’”  Pleasing the self is what matters now with the artists of the 1920‘s in Harlem.

            “Some African American audiences did react against the cult of the primitive in such art. When ‘The Emperor Jones’ was performed in Harlem, it failed, because the audience of predominantly Black patrons hooted, howled, and laughed at the performances, particularly the scene in which Brutus Jones becomes ‘scared’ in the jungle.  For working class African Americans living in Harlem, the 'jungle’ was the urban world of survival they were daily struggling to survive in, not some romanticized and distant Africa. “  Chalk one up for realism.

Why did the Harlem Renaissance end?

            Professor Richard Powell on the Online NewsHour said:  “One could argue that the blossoming of black creativity which occurred just after WWI did not actually die but, rather, evolved into another kind of cultural program and race-based art. Although many people use the Great Depression and the political and economic unrest of the mid-1930s as an end marker for the Harlem Renaissance, the 1930s and the U.S. Government's Works Progress Administration cultural program fueled an abundance of African American literary works, performance art, and visual expression well into the early 1940s. 

            What I prefer to think about (in terms of closure for the Harlem Renaissance period and sensibility) is that, by the late 1930s, the earlier artistic emphasis on ‘the New Negro’ -- someone who is urbane, inherently artistic, sometime primitive, or who is an consummate entertainer--had been supplanted by someone who, while possibly encompassing one or more of the above types, was, first and foremost, a socio-political entity. This shift in themes and subject matter was not abrupt but, rather, gradual, manifesting itself in works of art that increasingly downplayed a one-dimensional ‘New Negro’ type and, instead, accentuated the African American ‘masses,’ the Negro ‘worker,’ and a dispossessed, potentially explosive ‘folk.’

            Professor Jeffrey Stewart adds:  “The Harlem Renaissance ended for a variety of reasons. First, the broader conditions that brought it into existence ended, basically with the Great Depression. The European American infatuation with the Negro declined in the 1930s, in large part because the fad had been built on the ‘devil may care’ attitude of the ‘Roaring Twenties.’ As the depression collapsed the wild enthusiasm of the 1920s, so too European American patronage of Harlem establishments and artists declined precipitously. Also, the depression exposed the economic fragility of Harlem, given that much of the real estate in Harlem was owned by European Americans; and when the depression hit, African Americans lost their jobs at faster rates than European Americans, caused foreclosures on mortgages, evictions from rental properties, and a depression and alienation from the American Dream that was expressed violently in the first modem race riot, the Harlem Riot of 1935. That riot symbolized that the optimism and hopefulness that had fueled the Harlem Renaissance was dead.”

            “In short, the Harlem Renaissance reached a natural end, but was able to feed into and stimulate further developments in the 1930s. Some argue that the Harlem Renaissance emphasis on cultural distinctiveness returned with a vengeance in the 1960s Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, when a new generation of writers, artists, and dramatists emerged in the North to express a Black consciousness in the arts and to rediscover the work of Harlem Renaissance artists all over again.­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­“ 

            I agree with Professor Stewart that the 1960s Black Arts Movement was a fierce reincarnation of the Harlem Renaissance spirit.  In addition to creating much beautiful artwork, African Americans then, too, enacted many of the objectives of Romanticism:  they were proudly individualistic; they “desired anything but the ‘here and now’ with their visions of a better society and demands for change, improvement, justice, equality; and, of course, leaders such as Dr. King carried on the legacy of non-violent protest from Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience” and others before and after him.    

Why is the art of the Harlem Renaissance so positive?

            I found answers which concern the Romantic theme of Transcendance to this question on the PBS NewsHour website, also.  Professor Richard Powell said: “To paraphrase the renown African American artist Jacob Lawrence, whose first important works were created in Depression era Harlem towards the end of the Harlem Renaissance era: while Jacob Lawrence devotes a significant part of his early work to depictions of street beggars, common folks hanging out in bars, and to the horrific and depressing history of slavery, he also created images of urban vitality and community ingenuity. His frequent response to the above question is that, for a young man growing up in Depression-era Harlem, the good, the positive, and the progressive outweighed all of the negatives that are often heaped onto black lives. I'm also thinking of a famous line from a poem by the modern African American writer Nikki Giovanni, who wrote: ‘and I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me because they never understand Black love is Black wealth and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy.’”

            Professor Jeffrey Stewart adds:  “The art of the Harlem Renaissance was optimistic because many artists and writers of the 1920s enjoyed greater opportunities to publish and disseminate their art than they had ever had before.  African American artists of the 1920s did not have to deny their racial identity by publishing works anonymously or to write poems, short stories, novels, or create works of art that avoided the racial theme, as Henry O.Tanner, William Stanley Braithwaite, and others had done before the 1920s.  For the first time in American culture, African American creative artists could claim that there was something distinctive about the Black experience, while at the same time arguing that it was an integral part of the American experience. That freedom was exhilarating for many.

            “It should also be remembered that the ‘vogue of the Negro’ in the 1920s poured money into the entertainment economy of Harlem, and many working class folk did find jobs in speakeasies, nightclubs, restaurants, hotels, revues, etc., that would disappear in the 1930s after the ‘fad’ was over. So, the Harlem Renaissance did inject economic vitality, if only of a superficial variety, into Harlem“ (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/february98/harlem5.html).

            African Americans seemingly reached heights of transcendence during the Harlem Renaissance, by overcoming painful conditions with sublime art.  “Mr. Lawrence had a very interesting answer to the question about the ‘optimism’ of the movement in light of the poverty and political repressing that blacks faced during the 1920s and 30s. He compared the art and literature of the Harlem Renaissance to the themes in the movies at the time.  He said people were seeking fantasies to raise them out of their immediate despair.”

            “The humor of Langston Hughes and the comedy on stage at the Apollo Theater were vehicles for bringing artists and audiences out of despair. They were all seeking a better, brighter way. Countee Cullen's refrain, ‘What is Africa to me?’ was one effort to look for renewal in the discovery of an original culture. Marcus Garvey similarly led Negroes toward a political fantasy in his urging them to return to Africa.  These were efforts to re-construct reality separate from the grimness of the day-to-day.”  (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/february98/harlem5.html).  In other words, they were efforts to transcend the gloomy reality.  

            In conclusion, the transcendence of the Harlem Renaissance characterizes it as  Romantic.  That Americans characterized African Americans with such traits as emotionality (rather than intellectuality) and sensuality (rather than rationality) seems to be a bit Romantically idealistic.  That the African American might be seen as a less-inhibited, freely sensual, childlike primitive imbues the period with Romantic hues, at least insofar as inaccurate perceptions go.  Whereas, the gritty details--sewage three feet high in basements, talented artists being hooked on heroin and booze, having to pay much higher rents than whites or other ethnic groups across the city and throw parties to scare up enough cash to pay the rent, and getting their heads bashed in the 1935 race riots with no recourse to justice--seem like a slap in the face of Romanticism. 

            I would like to read more on the subject--honestly, I’d like to re-read, in a less hurried fashion, the sources used here.  Mostly, I look forward to using my new knowledge in fiction or poetry.  Fortified with colorful street names, food names, cabaret names, and juicy details of living conditions, the mass of faithful church-goers, and the lively, musical, dancing nightlife, I can begin my story with a much clearer picture.  

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Works Cited

Anderson, Jervis.  This Was Harlem.  New York:  Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981.

Boyd, Herb, ed.  The Harlem Reader: A Celebration of New York’s Most Famous             Neighborhood From the Renaissance Years to the 21^st Century.  New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003.

Clarke, John Henrik, ed.  “Conversation with James Baldwin.“  Harlem: A Community in             Transition.  New York: Citadel Press, 1964. 

Huggins, Nathan Irvin, ed.  Voices of the Harlem Renaissance.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1995.

Lewis, David Levering.  When Harlem Was In Vogue.  New York: Knopf, 1979.

McConnell, William S. ed.  Greenhaven Press Companion to Literary Movements and Genres.  San Diego:  Greenhaven Press, 2003

Online PBS NewsHour.  (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/february98/harlem5.html).  Website visited: November 17^th, 2003. 

Osofsky, Gilbert.  Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890-1930.  New York:   Harper & Row, 1963.

 Schoener, Allon, ed.  Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America 1900-1968. New York: Random House, 1968.

Smith, Morgan.  Harlem: The Vision of Morgan and Marvin Smith.  Lexington: University             Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Steinberg, Sybil.  “Sheri Holman:  Guarding Perfection, Flaws and All.“  Publishers Weekly 28 July 2003:  72-73. 

Wintz, Cary.  Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance.  Houston:  Rice University Press, 1988.