langston hughes harlem renaissance essay

Langston Hughes' Impact on the Harlem Renaissance

Hughes not only made his mark in this artistic movement by breaking boundaries with his poetry, he drew on international experiences, found kindred spirits amongst his fellow artists, took a stand for the possibilities of Black art and influenced how the Harlem Renaissance would be remembered.

Hughes stood up for Black artists

George Schuyler, the editor of a Black paper in Pittsburgh, wrote the article "The Negro-Art Hokum" for an edition of The Nation in June 1926.

The article discounted the existence of "Negro art," arguing that African-American artists shared European influences with their white counterparts, and were, therefore, producing the same kind of work. Spirituals and jazz, with their clear links to Black performers, were dismissed as folk art.

Invited to make a response, Hughes penned "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." In it, he described Black artists rejecting their racial identity as "the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America." But he declared that instead of ignoring their identity, "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual, dark-skinned selves without fear or shame."

This clarion call for the importance of pursuing art from a Black perspective was not only the philosophy behind much of Hughes' work, but it was also reflected throughout the Harlem Renaissance.

Some critics called Hughes' poems "low-rate"

Hughes broke new ground in poetry when he began to write verse that incorporated how Black people talked and the jazz and blues music they played. He led the way in harnessing the blues form in poetry with "The Weary Blues," which was written in 1923 and appeared in his 1926 collection The Weary Blues .

Hughes' next poetry collection — published in February 1927 under the controversial title Fine Clothes to the Jew — featured Black lives outside the educated upper and middle classes, including drunks and prostitutes.

A preponderance of Black critics objected to what they felt were negative characterizations of African Americans — many Black characters created by whites already consisted of caricatures and stereotypes, and these critics wanted to see positive depictions instead. Some were so incensed that they attacked Hughes in print, with one calling him "the poet low-rate of Harlem."

But Hughes believed in the worthiness of all Black people to appear in art, no matter their social status. He argued, "My poems are indelicate. But so is life." And though many of his contemporaries might not have seen the merits, the collection came to be viewed as one of Hughes' best. (The poet did end up agreeing that the title — a reference to selling clothes to Jewish pawnbrokers in hard times — was a bad choice.)

Hughes' travels helped give him different perspectives

Hughes came to Harlem in 1921, but was soon traveling the world as a sailor and taking different jobs across the globe. In fact, he spent more time outside Harlem than in it during the Harlem Renaissance.

His journeys, along with the fact that he'd lived in several different places as a child and had visited his father in Mexico, allowed Hughes to bring varied perspectives and approaches to the work he created.

In 1923, when the ship he was working on visited the west coast of Africa, Hughes, who described himself as having "copper-brown skin and straight black hair," had a member of the Kru tribe tell him he was a White man, not a Black one.

Hughes lived in Paris for part of 1924, where he eked out a living as a doorman and met Black jazz musicians. And in the fall of 1924, Hughes saw many white sailors get hired instead of him when he was desperate for a ship to take him home from Genoa, Italy. This led to his plaintive, powerful poem "I, Too," a meditation on the day that such unequal treatment would end.

Hughes and other young Black artists formed a support group

By 1925 Hughes was back in the United States, where he was greeted with acclaim. He was soon attending Lincoln University in Pennsylvania but returned to Harlem in the summer of 1926.

There, he and other young Harlem Renaissance artists like novelist Wallace Thurman, writer Zora Neale Hurston , artist Gwendolyn Bennett and painter Aaron Douglas formed a support group together.

Hughes was part of the group's decision to collaborate on Fire!! , a magazine intended for young Black artists like themselves. Instead of the limits on content they faced at more staid publications like the NAACP 's Crisis magazine, they aimed to tackle a broader, uncensored range of topics, including sex and race.

Unfortunately, the group only managed to put out a single issue of Fire!! . (And Hughes and Hurston had a falling out after a failed collaboration on a play called Mule Bone .) But by creating the magazine, Hughes and the others had still taken a stand for the kind of ideas they wanted to pursue going forward.

He continued to spread the word of the Harlem Renaissance long after it was over

In addition to what he wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes helped make the movement itself more well known. In 1931, he embarked on a tour to read his poetry across the South. His fee was ostensibly $50, but he would lower the amount, or forego it entirely, at places that couldn't afford it.

His tour and willingness to deliver free programs when necessary helped many get acquainted with the Harlem Renaissance.

And in his autobiography The Big Sea (1940), Hughes provided a firsthand account of the Harlem Renaissance in a section titled "Black Renaissance." His descriptions of the people, art and goings-on would influence how the movement was understood and remembered.

Hughes even played a part in shifting the name for the era from "Negro Renaissance" to "Harlem Renaissance," as his book was one of the first to use the latter term.

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Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (1901–1967) was a poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, columnist, and a significant figure of the Harlem Renaissance. 

Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes was the descendant of enslaved African American women and white slave owners in Kentucky. He attended high school in Cleveland, Ohio, where he wrote his first poetry, short stories, and dramatic plays. After a short time in New York, he spent the early 1920s traveling through West Africa and Europe, living in Paris and England.

Hughes returned to the United States in 1924 and to Harlem after graduating from Lincoln University in 1929. His first poem was published in 1921 in The Crisis and he published his first book of poetry, T he Weary Blues in 1926. Hughes’s influential work focused on a racial consciousness devoid of hate. In 1926, he published what would be considered a manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance in The Nation : “The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. 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 we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.”

Portrait of Langston Hughes , ca. 1960.

Photograph by Louis H. Draper

Hughes penned novels, short stories, plays, operas, essays, works for children, and an autobiography. Hughes’s sexuality is debated by scholars, with some finding homosexual codes and unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover to indicate he was homosexual. His primary biographer, Arnold Rampersad, notes that Hughes exhibited a preference for African American men in his work and his life, but was likely asexual.

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Langston Hughes

By: History.com Editors

Updated: December 15, 2023 | Original: January 24, 2023

Langston Hughes was a defining figure of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance  as an influential poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, essayist, political commentator and social activist. Known as a poet of the people, his work focused on the everyday lives of the Black working class, earning him renown as one of America’s most notable poets.

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it may have been 1901 ), in Joplin, Missouri, to James and Caroline Hughes. When he was a young boy, his parents divorced, and, after his father moved to Mexico, and his mother, whose maiden name was Langston, sought work elsewhere, he was raised by his grandmother, Mary Langston, in Lawrence, Kansas. Mary Langston died when Hughes was around 12 years old, and he relocated to Illinois to live with his mother and stepfather. The family eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume of his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea , which chronicled his life until the age of 28, Hughes said he often used reading to combat loneliness while growing up. “I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, he started writing poetry, focusing on what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American experience. He would later write that he was influenced at a young age by Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico to live with his father for a year. It was during this period that, still a teenager, he wrote “ The Negro Speaks of Rivers ,” a free-verse poem that ran in the NAACP ’s The Crisis magazine and garnered him acclaim. It read, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and spent one year studying at Columbia University in New York City . He didn’t love the experience, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, a period now known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several years, including cook, elevator operator and laundry hand. He was employed as a steward on a ship, traveling to Africa and Europe, and lived in Paris, mingling with the expat artist community there, before returning to America and settling down in Washington, D.C. It was in the nation’s capital that, while working as a busboy, he slipped his poetry to the noted poet Vachel Lindsay, cited as the father of modern singing poetry, who helped connect Hughes to the literary world.

Hughes’ first book of poetry, The Weary Blues was published in 1926, and he received a scholarship to and, in 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University. He soon published Not Without Laughter , his first novel, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” he is credited as the father of jazz poetry, a literary genre influenced by or sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by the music.

“But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile,” he wrote in the 1926 essay, “ The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain .”

Writing for a general audience, his subject matter continued to focus on ordinary Black Americans. Hughes wrote that his 1927 work, “Fine Clothes to the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago—people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July."

He also did not shy from writing about his experiences and observations.

“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain . “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.”

Ever the traveler, Hughes spent time in the South, chronicling racial injustices, and also the Soviet Union in the 1930s, showing an interest in communism . (He was called to testify before Congress during the McCarthy hearings in 1953.)

In 1930, Hughes wrote “Mule Bone” with Zora Neale Hurston , his first play, which would be the first of many. “Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South,” about race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play written by a Black author until Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin in the Sun.” Hansberry based the name of her play on Hughes’ 1951 poem, “ Harlem ” in which he writes, 

"What happens to a dream deferred?

                Does it dry up

                like a raisin in the sun?...”

Hughes wrote the lyrics for “Street Scene,” a 1947 Broadway musical, and set up residence in a Harlem brownstone on East 127th Street. He co-founded the New York Suitcase Theater, as well as theater troupes in Los Angeles and Chicago. He attempted screenwriting in Hollywood, but found racism blocked his efforts.

He worked as a newspaper war correspondent in 1937 for the Baltimore Afro American , writing about Black American soldiers fighting for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War . He also wrote a column from 1942-1962 for the Chicago Defender , a Black newspaper, focusing on Jim Crow laws and segregation , World War II and the treatment of Black people in America. The column often featured the fictitious Jesse B. Semple, known as Simple.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Hughes wrote a “First Book” series of children's books, patriotic stories about Black culture and achievements, including The First Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1955), and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). Among the stories in the 1958 volume is "Thank You, Ma'am," in which a young teenage boy learns a lesson about trust and respect when an older woman he tries to rob ends up taking him home and giving him a meal.

Hughes died in New York from complications during surgery to treat prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, at the age of 65. His ashes are interred in Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His Harlem home was named a New York landmark in 1981, and a National Register of Places a year later. 

"I, too, am America," a quote from his 1926 poem, " I, too, " is engraved on the wall of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

“ Langston Hughes ,” The Library of Congress

“ Langston Hughes: The People's Poet ,” Smithsonian Magazine

“ The Blues and Langston Hughes ,” Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

“ Langston Hughes ,” Poets.org

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Poetry & Poets

Explore the beauty of poetry – discover the poet within

How Did Langston Hughes Impact The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a period between World War I and World War II when black American culture was flourishing, and Langston Hughes played a big part in it. Hughes has long been known as one of the most important figures of the era. A poet, novelist, playwright, and social commentator, he was crucial to the success and vibrancy of the movement.

As a young boy, Hughe’s family moved from his birthplace in Missouri to the African-American neighborhood of Harlem. It was here that he found himself surrounded and welcomed by the lively and diverse culture that was unique to the area.

As a literature enthusiast, Hughes grew up reading the works and essays of the poets who came before him. He was especially drawn to their lyrical and poetic language and wrote works of his own that embraced his love for African-American music and culture. One of his most famous pieces, The Weary Blues, was both highlighted prominently in major theatres in New York such as the Lincoln Theatre, as well as being published in over forty magazines. The Weary Blues, and other works by Hughes, capture the essence of what the Harlem Renaissance was all about which was culture exchange and celebration among African Americans.

Hughes’ work also aid in the establishing of a black aesthetic through his introduction of new poetic rhythms and themes. His emphasis on black expression and the empowerment of African-Americans has been credited as an inspiration and motivation to many artists of the period. His best known work was “I, Too” which reflected the contrast between white people’s privileges and black people’s struggles for equality. This poem has become an anthem for black people’s rights and self-determination.

Sometimes referred to as the “father” of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes continues to remain an essential focal point in African-American history. His imperative works have shaped modern African-American literature, easily distinguishing him from any other author of the 1920s and 30s.

The relevance of Langston Hughes’ work in modern times

Today, when the nation is struggling to outgrow its racist culture and promote social justice, the relevance of Hughes’s work is greater than ever. Projecting the reality of an America behind the veil of white privilege and a resistance to the arbitrary rules of discrimination that were used to oppress African Americans, his work speaks to people’s experience of injustice and oppression.

His poetry had a profound impact on contemporary writers and his themes continue to be explored both in literature and popular culture. His name can be found in hip-hop lyrics, and his work on race, class and gender have been put in context with the current civil rights movement. This includes the Black Lives Matter movement of recent years, which has been inspired by Hughes the same way he was inspired by the Harlem Renaissance.

This brings to the topic of how much of a lasting effect Langston Hughes poetry and writing has had on African-Americans and other cultural minorities, his works are still inspiring and promoting social justice and civil rights in the present times. His most profound writing continues to be an integral part of the literary canon, which endures today.

The importance of Langston Hughes in celebrating African American culture

Langston Hughes’ work conveys the celebration of African American culture, and this is the legacy of Hughes that is most recognized today. Seeing African-American culture as something that is worthy of note and to be respected, Langston Hughes is celebrated for his contribution to the genre, portraying black life in all its beauty, complexity, and profoundness.

From the way he wrote about the blues, to the way he spoke of the vernacular forms of his songs – from, his vast array of works, Langston Hughes unapologetically celebrated African-American culture. This is what he brought to the table during the Harlem Renaissance – freedom. With his words, he provided readers a window into the lives and spirits of African Americans, and this was liberating.

Hughes’ work, regularity depicts themes of resilience, determination, and justice. The way he speaks of the everyday life of African American people by placing importance of their simpler moments is one of the most powerful aspects of his writing. It’s indefeasible how much of an impact his writing has had in terms of creating a platform to explore, understand and celebrate African American culture.

In summary, Langston Hughes played a key role in the Harlem Renaissance, and his works remain relevant today. He was an influential figure in advocating for social justice through poetry, and he helped shape the way African-American culture is celebrated. He wrote about the everyday elements of black life that often went unnoticed, placing importance on them and showcasing them to the world. Through his writing, Hughes was able to empower African Americans and inspire many to take action.

Dannah Hannah is an established poet and author who loves to write about the beauty and power of poetry. She has published several collections of her own works, as well as articles and reviews on poets she admires. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English, with a specialization in poetics, from the University of Toronto. Hannah was also a panelist for the 2017 Futurepoem book Poetry + Social Justice, which aimed to bring attention to activism through poetry. She lives in Toronto, Canada, where she continues to write and explore the depths of poetry and its influence on our lives.

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Harlem Summary & Analysis by Langston Hughes

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

Langston Hughes wrote “Harlem” in 1951 as part of a book-length sequence, Montage of a Dream Deferred . Inspired by blues and jazz music, Montage , which Hughes intended to be read as a single long poem, explores the lives and consciousness of the black community in Harlem, and the continuous experience of racial injustice within this community. “Harlem” considers the harm that is caused when the dream of racial equality is continuously delayed. Ultimately, the poem suggests, society will have to reckon with this dream, as the dreamers claim what is rightfully their own.

• Read the full text of “Harlem”

The Full Text of “Harlem”

“harlem” summary, “harlem” themes.

The Cost of Social Injustice

The Individual and the Community

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “harlem”.

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry ... ...       And then run?

      Does it stink ... ... a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just ... ... does it explode?

“Harlem” Symbols

• Line 1: “dream”

“Harlem” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Line 2: “Does it”
• Line 3: “like”
• Line 4: “Or”
• Line 6: “Does it”
• Line 7: “Or”
• Line 8: “ like”
• Line 10: “like”
• Line 11: “Or does it”
• Lines 9-10: “      Maybe it just sags /       like a heavy load.”
• Line 1: “dream,” “deferred”
• Line 2: “Does,” “dry”
• Line 3: “raisin,” “sun”
• Line 4: “fester,” “sore”
• Line 5: “run”
• Line 6: “it,” “stink,” “like,” “rotten,” “meat”
• Line 7: “Or,” “crust,” “sugar,” “over”
• Line 8: “like,” “syrupy,” “sweet”
• Line 9: “just,” “sags”
• Line 10: “like,” “load”
• Line 11: “Or ,” “does ,” “it ,” “explode”
• Line 2: “Does,” “it,” “dry,” “up”
• Line 3: “like,” “a,” “raisin,” “in,” “the,” “sun”
• Line 6: “Does,” “it,” “stink,” “meat”
• Line 8: “sweet”
• Line 10: “load”
• Line 11: “explode”

End-Stopped Line

• Line 1: “deferred?”
• Line 3: “sun?”
• Line 4: “sore—”
• Line 5: “run?”
• Line 6: “meat?”
• Line 7: “over—”
• Line 8: “sweet?”
• Line 10: “load.”
• Line 11: “explode?”

Parallelism

Rhetorical question.

• Lines 11-11
• Lines 2-3: “up /       like”
• Lines 9-10: “sags /       like ”

“Harlem” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• (Location in poem: )

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Harlem”

Rhyme scheme, “harlem” speaker, “harlem” setting, literary and historical context of “harlem”, more “harlem” resources, external resources.

An Essay From the Poetry Foundation — Read more about "Harlem" in this essay by Scott Challener at the Poetry Foundation.

Letter from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Hughes — Read a letter from Martin Luther King, Kr. to Langston Hughes, which includes a reference to a performance of Lorraine Hansberry's play “A Raisin in the Sun."

"Harlem" Read Aloud by Langston Hughes — Listen to Langston Hughes read "Harlem."

Full Text of "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" — Read Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."

The Harlem Renaissance — Learn more about the Harlem Renaissance from the History Channel.

Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr. — Read about how Langston Hughes influenced Martin Luther King, Jr., including the influence of "Harlem."

LitCharts on Other Poems by Langston Hughes

As I Grew Older

Aunt Sue's Stories

Daybreak in Alabama

Dream Variations

I Look at the World

Let America Be America Again

Mother to Son

Night Funeral in Harlem

The Ballad of the Landlord

Theme for English B

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

The Weary Blues

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The Man Who Led the Harlem Renaissance—and His Hidden Hungers

By Tobi Haslett

Alain Locke led a life of scrupulous refinement and slashing contradiction. Photographs flatter him: there he is, with his bright, taut prettiness, delicately clenching the muscles of his face. Philosophy and history, poetry and art, loneliness and longing—the face holds all of these in a melancholy balance. The eyes glimmer and the lips purse.

It was this face that appeared, one summer morning in 1924, at the Paris flat of a destitute Langston Hughes, who put the scene in his memoir “ The Big Sea .” “ Qui est-il ?” Hughes had asked through the closed door. He was stunned by the reply:

A mild and gentle voice answered: “Alain Locke.” And sure enough, there was Dr. Alain Locke of Washington, a little, brown man with spats and a cultured accent, and a degree from Oxford. The same Dr. Locke who had written me about my poems, and who wanted to come to see me almost two years before on the fleet of dead ships, anchored up the Hudson. He had got my address from the Crisis in New York, to whom I had sent some poems from Paris. Now in Europe on vacation, he had come to call.

During the next two weeks, the middle-aged Locke, then a philosophy professor at Howard University, snatched the young Hughes from dingy Montmartre and took him on an extravagant march through ballet, opera, gardens, and the Louvre. This was the first time they’d met—but, after more than a year of sighing letters, Locke had come to Paris flushed with amorous feeling. The feeling was mismatched. Each man was trapped in the other’s fantasy: Hughes appeared as the scruffy poet who had fled his studies at Columbia for the pleasures of la vie bohème , while Locke was the “little, brown man” with status and degrees.

Days passed in a state of dreamy ambiguity. “Locke’s here,” Hughes wrote to their mutual friend Countee Cullen. “We are having a glorious time. I like him a great deal.” The words are grinning—and sexless. Hughes had found a use for the gallant Locke: an entrée to the bold movement in black American writing then rumbling to life. Cullen was gaining renown; the novelist Jessie Fauset was the literary editor of The Crisis; and Jean Toomer’s “Cane”—a novel in jagged fragments—had trumpeted the arrival of a new black art, one chained to the fate of a roiling, bullied, “emancipated” people. “I think we have enough talent,” W. E. B. Du Bois had announced in 1920, “to start a renaissance.”

Locke drove it forward and is remembered, dimly, as its “dean.” Whoever knows his name today likely links it to “ The New Negro: An Interpretation ,” a 1925 anthology that planted some of the bravest black writers of the nineteen-twenties—Hughes, Cullen, Toomer, Fauset, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston—squarely in the public eye. “The New Negro,” which appeared just a year after Locke’s summer visit with Hughes, launched the Negro Renaissance and marked the birth of a new style: the swank, gritty, fractious style of blackness streaking through the modern world.

Jeffrey C. Stewart’s new biography bears the perhaps inevitable title “ The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke .” But the title makes a point: the New Negro, that lively protagonist stomping onto the proscenium of history, might also be thought of, tenderly, as a figure for Locke himself. Stewart writes,

Locke became a “mid-wife to a generation of young writers,” as he labeled himself, a catalyst for a revolution in thinking called the New Negro. The deeper truth was that he, Alain Locke, was also the New Negro, for he embodied all of its contradictions as well as its promise. Rather than lamenting his situation, his marginality, his quiet suffering, he would take what his society and his culture had given him and make something revolutionary out of it.

Here was a man who enshrined his passions in collections, producing anthologies, exhibitions, and catalogues that refracted, according to Stewart, an abiding “need for love.” But even love could be captured and slotted into a series. Stewart tells us that among Locke’s posthumous effects was a shocking item that was promptly destroyed: a collection of semen samples from his lovers, stored neatly in a box.

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Meticulousness was a virtue among Philadelphia’s black bourgeoisie, the anxious world into which Locke was born. On September 13, 1885, Mary Locke, the wife of Pliny, delivered a feeble, sickly son at their home on South Nineteenth Street. Arthur LeRoy Locke, as the boy was christened, spent his first year seized by the rheumatic fever that he had contracted at birth. The Lockes were Black Victorians, or, as Alain later put it, “fanatically middle class,” and their mores and strivings shaped his self-conception and bestowed upon him an unusual entitlement to a black intellectual life. Pliny was well educated—he was a graduate of Howard Law School—but he suffered, as a black man, from a series of wrongful firings that scrambled the family’s finances.

Roy (as Alain was known in childhood) was Pliny’s project. “I was indulgently but intelligently treated,” Locke later recalled. “No special indulgence as to sentiment; very little kissing, little or no fairy stories, no frightening talk or games.” Instead, Pliny read aloud from Virgil and Homer, but only after Roy had finished his early-morning math exercises. He was being cultivated to be a race leader: a metallic statue of polished masculinity. But he was powerfully drawn to his mother. Pliny opposed this, and worked to shred the bond. Locke later recounted that his father’s death, when he was six, “threw me into the closest companionship with my mother, which remained, except for the separation of three years at college and four years abroad, close until her death at 71, when I was thirty six.” Under the watchful care of the struggling Mary, Roy became a precocious aesthete. And he proceeded, with striking ambition, from Central High School to the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy to Harvard.

Alain, as he was now called, fashioned himself as a yearning man of letters. Enraptured by his white professors, he decorated his modest lodgings in punctilious imitation of their homes. Not quite five feet tall, he had bloomed into a dandy, strutting down the streets of Cambridge in a genteel ensemble—gray suit, gray gloves, elegant overcoat—while displaying a shuddering reluctance to associate with the other black students at Harvard. They weren’t “gentlemen,” and, when a black classmate introduced him to a group of them, he was appalled:

Of course they were colored. He took me right up into the filthy bedroom and there were 5 niggers, all Harvard men. Well, their pluck and their conceit are wonderful. Some are ugly enough to frighten you but I guess they are bright. . . . They are not fit for company even if they are energetic and plodding fellows. I’m not used to that class and I don’t intend to get used to them.

This is from a letter to his mother, and the bile streams so freely that one assumes that Mary indulged the young Locke’s contempt. But his arrogance followed from the strangulating tension between who and what he was: blackness was limiting, oppressive, banal, a boorish hurdle in his brilliant path. “I am not a race problem,” he later wrote to Mary. “I am Alain LeRoy Locke.”

He’d arrived at Harvard when William James and then John Dewey had electrified philosophy in America under the banner of pragmatism, a movement that repudiated idealism and tested concepts against practice. Locke, who also became a devotee of the philosopher and belletristic aesthete George Santayana, went on to become the first black Rhodes Scholar—though as soon as he got to Oxford he was humiliated by white Americans, who shut him out of their gatherings. The scorn was instructive: the foppish Locke joined the Cosmopolitan Club, a debate society composed of colonial élites, who exposed him to the urgencies of anti-imperial struggle and, crucially, to the gratifications of racial and political solidarity. He finished a thesis—ultimately rejected by Oxford—on value theory, while slaking his sexual thirst in pre-Great War Berlin. He returned to Harvard to earn his Ph.D. in philosophy, for which he submitted a more elaborate version of his Oxford thesis, before joining the faculty at Howard. Mary moved down to Washington, where she was cared for by her doting son.

Locke’s other devotions were ill-fated. Much of his erotic life was a series of adroit manipulations and disastrous disappointments; Langston Hughes was just one of the younger men who fell within the blast radius of the older man’s sexual voracity as they chased his prestige. He fancied himself a suitor in the Grecian style, dispensing a sentimental education to his charges, assistants, protégés, and students—but hungering for mutuality and lasting love. Locke had affairs with at least a few of the writers included in “The New Negro.” His desultory sexual romps with Cullen stretched over years—though Cullen himself would flee the gay life by marrying W. E. B. Du Bois’s daughter Yolanda, in a lavish service with sixteen bridesmaids and thirteen hundred guests. Her father described the spectacle in The Crisis as “the symbolic march of young black America,” possessed of a “dark and shimmering beauty” and announcing “a new race; a new thought; a new thing rejoicing in a ceremony as old as the world.” To Locke, it was a farce.

He found his own way to stay afloat in the world of the black élite. Pliny had wanted his son to be a race man, and now Alain was lecturing widely and contributing articles to Du Bois’s Crisis , which was attached to the N.A.A.C.P., and Charles Johnson’s Opportunity , the house organ of the National Urban League. But he stood aloof from the strenuous heroism of Negro uplift, and what he thought of as its flat-footed insistence on “political” art. Locke was a voluptuary: he worried that Du Bois and the younger, further-left members of the movement—notably Hughes and McKay—had debased Negro expression, jamming it into the crate of politics. The titles of Locke’s essays on aesthetics (“Beauty Instead of Ashes,” “Art or Propaganda?,” “Propaganda—or Poetry?”) made deflating little incisions in his contemporaries’ political hopes. Black art, in Locke’s view, was mutable and vast.

Not unlike blackness itself. In 1916, Locke delivered a series of lectures called “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations,” in which he painstakingly disproved the narrowly “biological” understanding of race while insisting on the power of culture to distinguish, but not sunder, black from white. Armed with his pragmatist training, he hacked a path to a new philosophical vista: “cultural pluralism.”

The term had surfaced in private debates with Horace Kallen, a Jewish student who overlapped with Locke at both Harvard and Oxford. Kallen declared that philosophy should, as his mentor William James insisted, concern itself only with differences that “make a difference”—which included, Kallen thought, the intractable facts of his Jewishness and Locke’s blackness. Locke demurred. Race, ethnicity, the very notion of a “people”: these weren’t expressions of some frozen essence but were molded from that suppler stuff, tradition —to be elevated and transmuted by the force and ingenuity of human practice. He could value his people’s origins without bolting them to their past.

His own past had begun to break painfully away. Mary Locke died in 1922, leaving Alain crushed and adrift. But her death also released him, psychically, from the vanished world of the fin-de-siècle black élite, with its asphyxiating diktats. As he moved into modernism, he found that his life was freer and looser; his pomp flared into camp. At Mary’s wake, Locke didn’t present her lying in state; rather, he installed her, alarmingly, on the parlor couch—her corpse propped like a hostess before a room of horrified guests.

“The New Negro,” which appeared three years later, stood as proof, Locke insisted, of a vital new sensibility: here was a briskly modern attitude hoisted up by the race’s youth. The collection, which expanded upon a special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic , revelled in its eclecticism, as literature, music, scholarship, and art all jostled beside stately pronouncements by the race’s patriarchs, Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. The anthology was meant to signal a gutting and remaking of the black collective spirit. Locke would feed and discipline that spirit, playing the critic, publicist, taskmaster, and impresario to the movement’s most luminous figures. He was an exalted member of the squabbling clique that Hurston called “the niggerati”—and which we know, simply, as the Harlem Renaissance.

The term has a crispness that the thing itself did not. It was a movement spiked with rivalries and political hostility—not least because it ran alongside the sociological dramas of Communism, Garveyism, mob violence, and a staggering revolution in the shape and texture of black American life, as millions fled the poverty and the lynchings of the Jim Crow South. The cities of the North awaited them—as did higher wages and white police. With the Great Migration came a loud new world and a baffling new life, a chance to lunge, finally, at the transformative dream of the nation they’d been forced, at gunpoint, to build. Modernity had anointed a new hero, and invented, Locke thought, a New Negro.

But he hoped that this new figure would stride beyond politics. Radicals irked him; he regarded them with a kind of princely ennui. In his mind, the New Negro was more than mere effect: history and demography alone couldn’t possibly account for the wit, chic, or thrilling force of “the younger generation” to whom he dedicated the volume. In the title essay, Locke presented a race whose inner conversion had flown past the lumbering outside world. The Negro leaped not just from country to city but, crucially, “from medieval America to modern.” Previously, “the American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact,” he wrote, but now, “in Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises at least to be—a race capital.”

Black people had snapped their moorings to servitude and arrived at the advanced subjectivity lushly evinced by their art: their poems and paintings, their novels and spirituals. Aaron Douglas had made boldly stylized drawings and designs for the anthology, which rhymed with the photographs of African sculptures that dotted its pages: masks from the Baoulé and the Bushongo; a grand Dahomey bronze. Negroes were a distinct people, with distinct traditions and values held in common. Their modern art would revive their “folk spirit,” displaying a vigorous continuity with their African patrimony and an embrace of American verve. “So far as he is culturally articulate,” Locke wrote in the foreword to his anthology, “we shall let the Negro speak for himself.”

The sentence shines with triumph; it warms and breaks the heart. Behind Locke’s bombast was the inexorable question of suffering: how it forged and brutalized the collective, forcing a desperate solidarity on people not treated as such. The task that confronted any black modernist—after a bloody emancipation, a failed Reconstruction, and the carnage of the First World War—was to decide the place, within this blazing new power, of pain. Locke preached a kind of militant poise. His New Negro would face history without drowning in it; would grasp, but never cling to, the harrowing past. In the anthology, he cheered on “the lapse of sentimental appeal, then the development of a more positive self-respect and self-reliance; the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual recovery from hyper-sensitiveness and ‘touchy’ nerves.” So the book’s roar of modernist exuberance came to seem, in a way, strained.

But also lavish, stylish, jaunty, tart; bristling with whimsy and gleaming with sex. “The New Negro” thrust forth all the ironies of Locke’s ethos: his emphatic propriety and angular vision, his bourgeois composure and libertine tastes. “What jungle tree have you slept under, / Dark brown girl of the swaying hips?” asks a Hughes poem, titled “Nude Young Dancer.” Locke liked it—but was scandalized by jazz. And though he wrote an admiring essay in the anthology on the passion of Negro spirituals, he also chose to include “Spunk,” a short fable by Hurston about cheating and murder.

Locke relished every titillating contradiction but shrank, still, from political extremes. Hoping to avoid the charge of radicalism, he changed the title of McKay’s protest poem from “White House” to “White Houses”—an act of censorship that severed the two men’s alliance. “No wonder Garvey remains strong despite his glaring defects,” the affronted poet wrote to Locke. “When the Negro intellectuals like you take such a weak line!”

And such a blurred line. In a gesture of editorial agnosticism, Locke brought voices to “The New Negro” that challenged his own. Among the more scholarly contributions to the anthology was “Capital of the Black Middle Class,” an ambivalent study of Durham, North Carolina, by E. Franklin Frazier, a young social scientist. More than thirty years later, Frazier savaged the pretensions and the perfidies of Negro professionals in his study “The Black Bourgeoisie.” A work of Marxist sociology and scalding polemic, it took a gratuitous swipe at the New Negro: the black upper class, Frazier said, had “either ignored the Negro Renaissance or, when they exhibited any interest in it, they revealed their ambivalence towards the Negro masses.” Aesthetics had been reduced to an ornament for a feckless élite.

The years after “The New Negro” were marked by an agitated perplexity. Locke yearned for something solid: a home for black art, somewhere to nourish, protect, refine, and control it. He’d been formed and polished by élite institutions, and he longed to see them multiply. But the Great Depression shattered his efforts to extend the New Negro project, pressing him further into the byzantine patronage system of Charlotte Mason, an older white widow gripped by an eccentric fascination with “primitive peoples.” Salvation obsessed her. She believed that black culture could rescue American society by replenishing the spiritual values that had been evaporated by modernity, but that pumped, still, through the Negro’s unspoiled heart.

Mason was rich, and Locke had sought her backing for a proposed Harlem Museum of African Art. Although the project failed (as did his plans for a Harlem Community Arts Center), Mason remained a meddling, confused presence in his life until her death, in 1946. During their association, he passed through a gantlet of prickling degradations. Her vision of Negro culture obviously didn’t align with his; she demanded to be called Godmother; and she was prone to angry suspicion, demanding a fastidious accounting of how her funds were spent. But those funds were indispensable, finally, to the work of Hughes and, especially, Hurston. Locke, as the erstwhile “mid-wife” of black modernism, was dispatched to handle the writers—much to their dismay. He welcomed the authority, swelling into a supercilious manager (and, to Hughes, a bullying admirer) who handed down edicts from Godmother while enforcing a few of his own.

The thirties also brought revelations and violent political emergencies that plunged Locke into a rapprochement with the left. Locke the glossy belletrist gave way to Locke the fellow-traveller, Locke the savvy champion of proletarian realism. There was a fitful attempt to write a biography of Frederick Douglass, and a dutiful visit to the Soviet Union. But he was never a proper Communist. After the Harlem riot of 1935, he wrote an essay titled “Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane” for Survey Graphic , in which he pronounced the failure of the state and its economic system, but congratulated Mayor LaGuardia on his response to the riot, while also cautioning against both “capitalistic exploitation on the one hand and radical exploitation on the other.” Frazier thought this a mealymouthed capitulation; taking Locke on a ride around Washington in his Packard coupe, Frazier screamed denunciations at his trapped, flustered passenger.

Locke was middling as an ideologue, but remained a fiercely committed pragmatist. The rise of Fascism saw his philosophical work make crackling contact with politics. “Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace,” a lecture delivered in the early nineteen-forties, took aim at the nation’s enemies and their “passion for arbitrary unity and conformity.” He sometimes groped clumsily for the radical language of recrimination: inching further from his earlier aestheticism, he praised Richard Wright’s “ Native Son ” as a “Zolaesque J’accuse pointing to the danger symptoms of a self-frustrating democracy.” And he remained riveted by the Negro’s internal flight. One of his most gratifying contributions was his advocacy of the painter Jacob Lawrence, and his sixty-panel tribute to the Great Migration. (Inspecting a layout of Lawrence’s series in the offices of Fortune , Locke exulted that “ The New Masses couldn’t have done this thing better.”) Lawrence had expressed what Locke, with his fidgeting dignity, couldn’t quite: the anger, the desolation, and the bracing thrill of a people crashing into history.

Locke was still driven by a need for order, for meticulous systems: the project that towered over his final years was “The Negro in American Culture,” a book he hoped would be his summum opus. “The New Negro” anthology had been a delectably shambling sample of an era, confected from disparate styles and stuffed with conflicting positions. But “The Negro in American Culture”—he’d signed a contract for it with Random House, in 1945—was to be the lordly consummation of a life spent in the service of black expression. The book is a fixture of his later letters: either as an excuse for his absences (“It’s an awful bother,” he apologized to one friend, “but must turn out up to expectation in the long run”) or as something to flaunt before a sexual prospect. Mason’s death had sapped some of his power, so this new mission refreshed his stature and his righteous purpose.

But he couldn’t finish the thing: his health was failing, he was stretched between too many obligations, and he was consumed, as ever, by the torment of unrequited love. His life was still replete with younger men to whom he was an aide and a guide—but not a sexual equal. “What I am trying to say, Alain,” the young Robert E. Claybrooks wrote, “is that you excite me in every other area but a sexual one. It has nothing to do with the differences in ages. Of that I’m certain. Perhaps physical contact was precipitated too soon—I don’t know. But I do know, and this I have withheld until now, an intense feeling of nausea accompanied me after the initial affair, and I know it would be repeated each time, if such were to happen again.” Solomon Rosenfeld, Collins George, Hercules Armstrong: the names flit through the last chapters of Locke’s life, delivering the little sting of sexual insult. By the end, he called himself “an old girl.”

Yet Stewart’s biography aims to heave Locke out of obscurity and prop him next to the reputations he launched. At more than nine hundred pages, it’s a thudding, shapeless text, despotic in its pedantry and exhausting in its zeal, marked by excruciating attention to the most minuscule irrelevances. This is touching—and strangely fitting. Stewart’s research arrives at a kind of Lockean intensity. But even Stewart’s vigor falters as Locke’s own scholarly energies start to wane. “Locke’s involvement with the race issue,” Stewart finally admits about “The Negro in American Culture,” “had been pragmatic, a means to advance himself—to gain recognition, to be esteemed, and ultimately to be loved by the people.”

Love: the word is applied like glue, keeping this vast book in one preposterous piece. Locke’s most lasting lover was Maurice Russell, who was a teen-ager when he found himself looped into Locke’s affections. “You see youth is my hobby,” Locke wrote him at one point. “But the sad thing is the increasing paucity of serious minded and really refined youth.” Russell was there—along with a few other ex-beaux—in 1954, at Benta’s Funeral Home, on 132nd Street in Harlem, after Locke’s death, from congestive heart failure. W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley; Mrs. Paul Robeson; Arthur Fauset; and Charles Johnson all paid their respects to the small, noble figure lying in the coffin, who perhaps would have smiled at a line in Du Bois’s eulogy: “singular in a stupid land.”

The New Negro was a hero, a fetish, a polemical posture—and a blurry portrait of a flinching soul. But Locke took his place, at last, in the history he wished to redeem. “We’re going to let our children know,” Martin Luther King, Jr., declared in Mississippi in 1968, “that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe.” Locke’s class had cleaved him from the “masses”—and his desires had estranged him from his class. From this doubled alienation sprang a baffled psyche: an aesthete traipsing nimbly through an age of brutal rupture. Wincing from humiliation and romantic rejection, he tried to offer his heart to his race. “With all my sensuality and sentimentality,” he wrote to Hughes after Paris, “I love sublimated things.” ♦

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ARTS & CULTURE

A lost work by langston hughes examines the harsh life on the chain gang.

In 1933, the Harlem Renaissance star wrote a powerful essay about race. It has never been published in English—until now

Steven Hoelscher

It’s not every day that you come across an extraordinary unknown work by one of the nation’s greatest writers. But buried in an unrelated archive I recently discovered a searing essay condemning racism in America by Langston Hughes—the moving account, published in its original form here for the first time, of an escaped prisoner he met while traveling with Zora Neale Hurston.

In the summer of 1927, Hughes lit out for the American South to learn more about the region that loomed large in his literary imagination. After giving a poetry reading at Fisk University in Nashville, Hughes journeyed by train through Louisiana and Mississippi before disembarking in Mobile, Alabama. There, to his surprise, he ran into Hurston, his friend and fellow author. Described by Yuval Taylor in his new book Zora and Langston as “one of the more fortuitous meetings in American literary history,” the encounter brought together two leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. On the spot, the pair decided to drive back to New York City together in Hurston’s small Nash coupe.

The terrain along the back roads of the rural South was new to Hughes, who grew up in the Midwest; by contrast, Hurston’s Southern roots and training as a folklorist made her a knowledgeable guide. In his journal Hughes described the black people they met in their travels: educators, sharecropping families, blues singers and conjurers. Hughes also mentioned the chain gang prisoners forced to build the roads they traveled on.

A Literary Road Trip

Three years later, Hughes gave the poor, young and mostly black men of the chain gangs a voice in his satirical poem “Road Workers”—but we now know that the images of these men in gray-and-black-striped uniforms continued to linger in the mind of the writer. In this newly discovered manuscript, Hughes revisited the route he traveled with Hurston, telling the story of their encounter with one young man picked up for fighting and sentenced to hard labor on the chain gang.

I first stumbled upon this Hughes essay in the papers of John L. Spivak, a white investigative journalist in the 1920s and 1930s, at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Not even Hughes’ authoritative biographer Arnold Rampersad could identify the manuscript. Eventually, I learned that Hughes had written it as an introduction to a novel Spivak published in 1932, Georgia Nigger . The book was a blistering exposé of the atrocious conditions that African-Americans suffered on chain gangs, and Spivak gave it a deliberately provocative title to reflect the brutality he saw. Scholars today consider the forced labor system a form of slavery by another name. On the final page of the manuscript (not reproduced here), Hughes wrote that by “blazing the way to truth,” Spivak had written a volume “of great importance to the Negro peoples.”

Hughes titled these three typewritten pages “Foreword From Life.” And in them he also laid bare his fears of driving through Jim Crow America. “We knew that it was dangerous for Northern Negroes to appear too interested in the affairs of the rural South,” he wrote. (Hurston packed a chrome-plated pistol for protection during their road trip.)

But a question remained: Why wasn’t Hughes’ essay included in any copy of Spivak’s book I had ever seen? Buried in Spivak’s papers, I found the answer. Hughes’ essay was written a year after the book was published, commissioned to serve as the foreword of the 1933 Soviet edition and published only in Russian.

In early 1933, Hughes was living in Moscow, where he was heralded as a “revolutionary writer.” He had originally traveled there a year earlier along with 21 other influential African-Americans to participate in a film about American racism. The film had been a bust (no one could agree on the script), but escaping white supremacy in the United States—at least temporarily—was immensely appealing. The Soviet Union, at that time, promoted an ideal of racial equality that Hughes longed for. He also found that he could earn a living entirely from his writing.

For this Russian audience, Hughes reflected on a topic as relevant today as it was in 1933: the injustice of black incarceration. And he captured the story of a man that—like the stories of so many other young black men—would otherwise be lost. We may even know his name: Hughes’ journal mentions one Ed Pinkney, a young escapee whom Hughes and Hurston met near Savannah. We don’t know what happened to him after their interaction. But by telling his story, Hughes forces us to wonder.

Foreword From Life

By Langston Hughes

I had once a short but memorable experience with a fugitive from a chain gang in this very same Georgia of which [John L.] Spivak writes. I had been lecturing on my poetry at some of the Negro universities of the South and, with a friend, I was driving North again in a small automobile. All day since sunrise we had been bumping over the hard red clay roads characteristic of the backward sections of the South. We had passed two chain gangs that day This sight was common. By 1930 in Georgia alone, more than 8,000 prisoners, mostly black men, toiled on chain gangs in 116 counties. The punishment was used in Georgia from the 1860s through the 1940s. , one in the morning grading a country road, and the other about noon, a group of Negroes in gray and black stripped [sic] suits, bending and rising under the hot sun, digging a drainage ditch at the side of the highway. Adopting the voice of a chain gang laborer in the poem “Road Workers,” published in the New York Herald Tribune in 1930, Hughes wrote, “Sure, / A road helps all of us! / White folks ride — /And I get to see ’em ride.” We wanted to stop and talk to the men, but we were afraid. The white guards on horseback glared at us as we slowed down our machine, so we went on. On our automobile there was a New York license, and we knew it was dangerous for Northern Negroes to appear too interested in the affairs of the rural South. Even peaceable Negro salesmen had been beaten and mobbed by whites who objected to seeing a neatly dressed colored person speaking decent English and driving his own automobile. The NAACP collected reports of violence against blacks in this era, including a similar incident in Mississippi in 1925. Dr. Charles Smith and Myrtle Wilson were dragged from a car, beaten and shot. The only cause recorded: “jealousy among local whites of the doctor’s new car and new home.” So we did not stop to talk to the chain gangs as we went by.

But that night a strange thing happened. After sundown, in the evening dusk, as we were nearing the city of Savannah, we noticed a dark figure waving at us frantically from the swamps at the side of the road. We saw that it was a black boy.

“Can I go with you to town?” the boy stuttered. His words were hurried, as though he were frightened, and his eyes glanced nervously up and down the road.

“Get in,” I said. He sat between us on the single seat.

“Do you live in Savannah?” we asked.

“No, sir,” the boy said. “I live in Atlanta.” We noticed that he put his head down nervously when other automobiles passed ours, and seemed afraid.

“And where have you been?” we asked apprehensively.

“On the chain gang,” he said simply.

We were startled. “They let you go today?” In his journal, Hughes wrote about meeting an escaped convict named Ed Pinkney near Savannah. Hughes noted that Pinkney was 15 years old when he was sentenced to the chain gang for striking his wife.

“No, sir. I ran away. In his journal, Hughes wrote about meeting an escaped convict named Ed Pinkney near Savannah. Hughes noted that Pinkney was 15 years old when he was sentenced to the chain gang for striking his wife. That’s why I was afraid to walk in the town. I saw you-all was colored and I waved to you. I thought maybe you would help me.”

Gradually, before the lights of Savannah came in sight, in answer to our many questions, he told us his story. Picked up for fighting, prison, the chain gang. But not a bad chain gang, he said. They didn’t beat you much in this one. Guard-on-convict violence was pervasive on Jim Crow-era chain gangs. Inmates begged for transfers to less violent camps but requests were rarely granted. “I remembered the many, many such letters of abuse and torture from ‘those who owed Georgia a debt,’” Spivak wrote. Only once the guard had knocked two teeth out. That was all. But he couldn’t stand it any longer. He wanted to see his wife in Atlanta. He had been married only two weeks when they sent him away, and she needed him. He needed her. So he had made it to the swamp. A colored preacher gave him clothes. Now, for two days, he hadn’t eaten, only running. He had to get to Atlanta.

“But aren’t you afraid,” [w]e asked, “they might arrest you in Atlanta, and send you back to the same gang for running away? Atlanta is still in the state of Georgia. Come up North with us,” we pleaded, “to New York where there are no chain gangs, and Negroes are not treated so badly. Then you’ll be safe.”

He thought a while. When we assured him that he could travel with us, that we would hide him in the back of the car where the baggage was, and that he could work in the North and send for his wife, he agreed slowly to come.

“But ain’t it cold up there?” he said.

“Yes,” we answered.

In Savannah, we found a place for him to sleep and gave him half a dollar for food. “We will come for you at dawn,” we said. But when, in the morning we passed the house where he had stayed, we were told that he had already gone before daybreak. We did not see him again. Perhaps the desire to go home had been greater than the wish to go North to freedom. Or perhaps he had been afraid to travel with us by daylight. Or suspicious of our offer. Or maybe [...] In the English manuscript, the end of Hughes’ story about the convict trails off with an incomplete thought—“Or maybe”—but the Russian translation continues: “Or maybe he got scared of the cold? But most importantly, his wife was nearby!”

Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates. Copyright 1933 by the Langston Hughes Estate

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Steven Hoelscher is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Lesson Plan

Feb. 15, 2013, 9:18 p.m.

Lesson plan: The Harlem Renaissance

Estimated Time

Grade level, opening activity.

• First, watch " The Harlem Renaissance's cultural explosion, in photographs " above to help introduce the artistic legacy of the Harlem Renaissance (may skip if this has already been discussed in class).
• Discuss the social, political and economic climate of America in the 1920s and 1930s.
• What was the Great Migration, and what influenced African-Americans to move from the South to places like Harlem?
• What were some of the unusual circumstances African-Americans faced in New York City at the the time of the Great Migration?
• Why do you think this migration contributed to an explosion of art and culture in Harlem?
• Give students a copy of the poem and ask them to underline all of the places and locations mentioned in it. Have students read the poem a third and final time and highlight or circle all of the people mentioned. Ask students why they think Harlem became a social and cultural center for African-Americans in the 1920s and 1930s.
• Optional: Choose selections from Alain Locke’s "The New Negro," poems by Langston Hughes ("Cultural Exchange," "Democracy," "Freedom’s Plow") James Weldon Johnson ("Lift Every Voice and Sing") and Countee Cullen ("Yet Do I Marvel" and "Heritage") or excerpts from the writings of Zora Neale Hurston. Have students work either individually or in small groups to answer the following questions about the documents: Who is the intended audience? What is the subject matter? How does this reflect the themes of the Harlem Renaissance?
• Optional: Have students write a found poem in which they alternate phrases or lines from Harlem Renaissance poems with original lines of their own. Host a poetry slam during which students will read their found poems aloud.

Extension Activities

• Ask students to research one type of performance that took place at the Apollo Theater. Options include comedy, dance and many types of music including jazz, hip-hop, swing and rock. Have students create a timeline of performances of that genre and then highlight a performer of their choosing in a short biographical essay.
• Performing arts educators may consider having students recreate a famous Apollo Theater performance or having students create an original performance piece inspired by one of the Apollo’s legendary performances. Visual arts educators may have students create a work of art in the style of one of the great Harlem Renaissance artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden or Aaron Douglas.
• Host a tribute to the Apollo during which students can recite their original poems or poems they have studied as part of this lesson, display their artwork, sing songs popularized at the Apollo or perform live music made famous by Harlem Renaissance musicians.

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Illustrations by Annamaria Ward

100 years ago, artists and writers were forging new visions of Blackness—across America and abroad. Introducing Harlem Is Everywhere, a brand new podcast from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hear how music, fashion, literature, and art helped shape a modern Black identity. Presented alongside the exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, the podcast is hosted by writer and critic Jessica Lynne. This five-part series features a dynamic cast of speakers who reflect on the legacy and cultural impact of the Harlem Renaissance.

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• MAR 19, 2024

5. Art as Activism

What was the political legacy of the Harlem Renaissance? In the final episode, we’ll explore the lasting impact of the art and organizing that happened during the 1920s and ’30s and how it paved the way for the civil rights movement. We’ll highlight some key political events of the time and explore the work of artists such as Romare Bearden and Augusta Savage. We’ll also touch upon what it means for The Met to tell this story in 2024, more than fifty years after its controversial exhibition “Harlem on My Mind.” Learn more about the exhibition at metmuseum.org/HarlemRenaissance Objects featured in this episode: Romare Bearden, The Block, 1971 Augusta Savage, Lift Every Voice and Sing (The Harp), 1939 Guests: Mary Schmidt Campbell, curator, writer, historian and former president of Spelman college Jordan Casteel, artist Denise Murell, curator of the exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism Bridget R. Cooks, Chancellor’s Fellow and professor of art history and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine Original poem: Major Jackson’s “The Block (for Romie)” For a transcript of this episode and more information, visit metmuseum.org/HarlemIsEverywhere #HarlemIsEverywhere Harlem Is Everywhere is produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with Audacy's Pineapple Street Studios. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• MAR 12, 2024

4. Music & Nightlife

What were the sounds of the Harlem Renaissance? Jazz and blues exploded onto the scene. People flocked to uptown venues like the Savoy Ballroom, where they could dance the Lindy Hop all night long. In this episode, we’ll learn how the music of the Renaissance was part of a larger boundary-breaking nightlife that involved gambling, speakeasies, and hole-in-the-wall clubs where people could express gender and sexuality in new ways. We’ll learn about the artists, musicians, and performers who embodied this spirit of creative experimentation and transgression—and whose work remains fresh decades later. Learn more about the exhibition at metmuseum.org/HarlemRenaissance Objects featured in this episode: James Van Der Zee, [Person in a Fur-Trimmed Ensemble], 1926 Jacob Lawrence, Pool Parlor, 1942 Archibald Motley Jr. paintings: The Liar, 1936; and Picnic, 1934 Guests: James Smalls, art historian and professor Richard J. Powell, art historian and professor Christian McBride, Grammy Award winning musician and composer Original poem: Carl Phillips’s “At the Reception” For a transcript of this episode and more information, visit metmuseum.org/HarlemIsEverywhere #HarlemIsEverywhere Harlem Is Everywhere is produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with Audacy's Pineapple Street Studios. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• MAR 5, 2024

3. Art & Literature

How did the literature of the Harlem Renaissance play a central role in conversations around Black identity in America and abroad? In this episode we’ll learn about publications like Opportunity, The Crisis, and Fire!! which each promoted a unique political and aesthetic perspective on Black life at the time. We’ll learn about Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston before they became household names and explore how collaboration and conversation between artists, writers, and scholars came to define the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance. Learn more about the exhibition at metmuseum.org/HarlemRenaissance Objects featured in this episode: Laura Wheeler Waring’s covers of The Crisis, September 1924 and April 1923 Winold Reiss, Cover of Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, February 1925 Winold Reiss, Langston Hughes, 1925 Aaron Douglas, Miss Zora Neale Hurston, 1926 Guests: Monica L. Miller, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English and Africana Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University John Keene, poet and novelist For a transcript of this episode and more information, visit metmuseum.org/HarlemIsEverywhere #HarlemIsEverywhere Harlem Is Everywhere is produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with Audacy's Pineapple Street Studios. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• FEB 20, 2024

2. Portraiture & Fashion

What role did fashion play in the Harlem Renaissance? Artists at the time were committed to creating a new image of Black life in America and abroad. In this episode, we’ll explore how Black self-representation evolved during this period through the photography of James Van Der Zee and paintings by artists like William Henry Johnson and Archibald J. Motley, Jr. We’ll also examine how fashion conveyed community values and offered new modes of individual expression that challenged racist stereotypes and created a shared sense of dignity. Learn more about The Met's exhibition at metmuseum.org/HarlemRenaissance Objects featured in this episode: James Van Der Zee, Nude, Harlem, 1923 (1970.539.27) William Henry Johnson, Street Life, Harlem, ca. 1939–1940 James Van Der Zee, Couple, Harlem, 1932 (2021.446.1.2) Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Black Belt, 1934 Guests: Bridget R. Cooks, Chancellor’s Fellow and professor of art history and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine Robin Givhan, Senior critic-at-large, The Washington Post For a transcript of this episode and more information, visit metmuseum.org/HarlemIsEverywhere #HarlemIsEverywhere Harlem Is Everywhere is produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with Audacy's Pineapple Street Studios.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

1. The New Negro

What was the Harlem Renaissance? During the Great Migration, major cities across America proved fertile ground for artists and intellectuals fleeing the Jim Crow South. In this episode we hear about Alain Locke’s famous anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, which gathered some of the best of fiction, poetry, and essays on the art and literature emerging from these communities. Locke’s anthology demonstrated the diverse approaches to portraying modern Black life that came to characterize the “New Negro”—and embodied some of the highest ideals of the era. Learn more about The Met's exhibition at metmuseum.org/HarlemRenaissance Objects featured in this episode: Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr., Self-Portrait, ca. 1941 (43.46.4) Winold Reiss, Roland Hayes, cover of Survey Graphic, March 1925 (F128.9.N3 H35 1925) Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction, 1934 Guests: Denise Murrell, curator of The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism; Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large, Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History and professor of African/African American Studies at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; distinguished scholar in the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fall 2023 Monica L. Miller, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English and Africana Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University Bridget R. Cooks, Chancellor’s Fellow and professor of art history and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine Mary Schmidt Campbell, former president of Spelman College; former executive director and chief curator emerita, The Studio Museum in Harlem For a transcript of this episode and more information, visit metmuseum.org/HarlemIsEverywhere #HarlemIsEverywhere Harlem Is Everywhere is produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with Audacy's Pineapple Street Studios.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• JAN 31, 2024

Introducing: Harlem Is Everywhere

Introducing Harlem Is Everywhere, a brand new podcast from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hear how music, fashion, literature, and art helped shape a modern Black identity. Presented alongside the exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, the podcast is hosted by writer and critic Jessica Lynne. The series features a dynamic cast of speakers who reflect on the legacy and cultural impact of the Harlem Renaissance. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• © 2024 The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Customer Reviews

Incredibly well-produced show! Loving this series and everything else The MET has been putting out. What a great learning resource!

Excellent Educational Tool

So glad there’s a podcast entirely surrounding the topic of the Harlem Renaissance - a great tool for teachers!

Fantastic show! Can wait to see the exhibition

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Langston Hughes & the Harlem Renaissance

How it works

Langston Hughes is and will forever be a prolific play write but that did not come without struggle from his own people his strong ability to work well with others and his strong story telling skills that articulated black life. Langston Hughes was a spokesman at a time where very few black people had a voice very much not so in the public eye and the other black writers disliked Langston because they thought he had a stereotypical view of black life.

Despite Heyward’s statement much of Hughes early work was roundly criticized by many black intellectuals for portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view of black life’’. Their argument was that the stereotypical view further portrayed into the light of what society already thought was typical view of a black person and black life.

Another element that shaped Hughes well known career was his ability work well with other writers. Hughes and Bontemps made important co throughout their edited collection African-American poetry in 1949 the two edited the poetry of the negro 1746-1949 a volume that documented the evolution of African-American poetry and showcased works by well-and lesser-known Harlem renaissance poets.’’

The third element that helped shaped Hughes career was his strong sense for short story writing which helped him breakdown doors for many critics some of his most short stories also depict real life. “Hughes reached many people through his popular fiction character Jesse b Semple shortened to simple. Simple is a poor man who lives in harlem a kind of comic no good, stereotype Hughes turned to advantage.’’ These stories where simple and his greatest strengths because they told the true stories if the forgotten people in a extremely and openly racist country at that time. Langston Hughes uses poetry to express black life through what seemed simplistic at first glance but way deeper when you take time and analyzed it. He told the truth about our culture. In this essay three ways I will show that Hughes drawed from his own life was the ways he wrote about black life and being black his criticism drove him forward probably the most and lastly his grandmother which was the most important women in his life.

The first story i chose to examine was Thank you, ma’am the story was about a boy who tried to steals a woman purse at first glance. But the story had a lesson in for the boy and every one else who read it which was Hughes can use a simplistic view and give the story a much deeper meaning. She also means to instill values or virtues into the boy roger who tried to rob her which are kindness, dignity, trust, forgiveness and choice. ‘’But you put yourself in contact with me said the women . If you think that contact is not going to last a while you got another thought coming. When I get through with you sir you are going to remember Mrs. Luella bates Washington jones. ‘’ To me Hughes wrote the character Ms. Washington as a grandma figure or mother really any strong black women. What I think Ms. Washington meant by she never would forget was that her was what she was going teach him. When she grabbed him and dragged him to the house it could’ve easily have been the police station. Even deeper into the story which shows more of Hughes trying to connect Ms. Washington to a mother character in general or someone who influenced him in his own life. Which is feeding him and making him clean up in the bathroom sink.

Then at the end is when roger gets the sense that he will never forget the women who clothed him bathed him and gave him ten dollars to buy the shoes he tried to rob her for. Which ties into one of my autobiographical elements with his short story writing which can be so simplistic but can go into several deeper levels. Which actually helped white critics get a new perspective and more realistic experience with black life and break down some but not all stereotypes. Ms. Washington is a example of Hughes grandmother a strong black woman who was fierce and was vibrant with life. The next piece of work I chose to by Hughes was mother to son a poem about his mother and her life saying it was rough ad difficult but she was determined not to quit and tells him not quit either. The poem is essentially simple story about black people living in 1922 back at the time when this poem was written. It captures the story of his mother and the things shes felt in life the poem also hints at at her struggles a unfair society those at a time with those who didn’t have fairer skin. It shows how strong she was as a woman and sets the tone of the poem with her struggles but her always persevering. Hughes word choice for this poem was superb to for example the way he uses metaphors to express the negative conations in her life. ‘’ Well son I’ll tell you life for me aint been no crystal stair It’s had tacks in it,

and splinters, and boards torn up and places with no carpet on the floor bare. ‘’ This also ties into imagery to because one could only imagine how a person would walk through and still go to work or just go through a whole day. This poem ties into the one of my three ways of hughes using a strong woman his poems by showing her perseverance and wisdom from her years that she lived life through its ups and downs. She refers to climbing how tough it was and how she kept climbing through the years. In the poem she describes a crystal stair which would mean to have gone through with some type of ease of course in this case she means money. I think hughes wrote this poem to express struggles of life. She also demands her son not to give up she says “ so boy don’ you turn your back don’t you sit down on the steps cause you find its kinder hard’’. As a reader and from personal experience in mine and pretty sure in Hughes life at the time we find that if we sit and wallow in our own misery and don’t climb the stair case of life then life will seem twice as hard and even more unbearable. Another way to view Hughes mother to son was that himself described to “illuminate the negro condition at that time period in america at that time. ‘’ He wrote this poem obviously to reflect the time period at the time the mother in the poem gives the son her experiences and her ups and downs. This poem was influenced by hughes grandmother who he lived with his most of his young life. The poems that hughes writes illuminates a lot of peoples life then and today and how they feel in their life dreary and bleak. This poem uses elements like or poetic elements such as extended metaphors symbolism to reveal the mothers in the poem hard life. The message in the poem also conveys to find the light you might have to go into the darkness.

It also conveys to be optimistic during hard times and not let them stop you from climbing the staircase of success. Writing poems like mother and son and using extended metaphors and imagery creates a vivid image and lets the reader paint their own picture of the woman and her hardships. Even though this poem does paint a sort of sad image of her life it paints her determination and hopes for his and his life.

To refer back to the crystal stair and the mother referring her life to and basically saying started from nothing and had no help. When you picture the crystal stair how Hughes uses you think of a step or way to climb up. When Hughes used the phrase the crystal stair it was clear he meant for the reader to understand that the mother in the poem was born into poverty. For example when hughes uses this line “ and boards torn up, and places with no carpet on the floor paints a clear image of poverty. Shows the mother circumstances and the household she was raised on. In this poem you notices that the son never speaks I think this to emphasize the mothers life experience and to relate to African American life.

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Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance Research Paper

Introduction, works cited.

Peter Stuyvesant set up the Harlem village in 1658. The man who was a governor in the Dutch republic named the new establishment after a popular Dutch city known as Nieuw Harlem. The new village took almost 6 miles of Manhattan 96 th Street.

In the first two centuries following its establishment, famous New York residents who had big tracts of land in the area took residence in the establishment. Towards the middle of the 19 th century, the wealthy farmers abandoned the farms since they had lost their productivity. This opened the door for downtown New Yorkers to reside in the land.

This had been made easier by the newly laid railroad network. Within a short period, Harlem was transformed in to one of the trendiest neighborhoods in the whole of New York. There were many religious, learning and artistic establishments, which gave the area a rich cultural background. (Angelfire)

By the turn of the 19 th century, people were so optimistic about an upgrade of the existing transportation network in the area. This gave rise to heightened speculation in the real estate industry something that led to exaggerated market rates and the subsequent disintegration of the sector at the beginning of the 20 th century. Taking full credit of the collapse, an American by the name of Philip Payton entered into contracts that saw him acquiring property owned by whites for renewable leases of five years.

In turn, Philip and his friends rented the property to Black Americans who considered Harlem a better place to reside. Within a short period, Harlem had been transformed in to an establishment for blacks only. This was heightened by the animosity that existed between whites and Negroes in the period that preceded World War 1. (Poets. Org)

By the time the war had ended, blacks from every part of America were moving to Harlem. Among those who were moving to the establishment included black poets, critics, literary anthologists, painters, illustrators, musicians, composers and actors.

Within a short time, Harlem became a sort of an urban artistic center for black Americans. However, the increasing population and high demand soon gave way to skyrocketing rental prices. This left culture as the only prospering thing within Harlem. A few years after World War 1 ended, Harlem became to black artists what Mecca is to Muslims.

The activities that they engaged in are what came to be termed as the Harlem Renaissance. What influenced most of the participants was the style that Europeans and white Americans were using in their literature and music. To most of the artists within the renaissance, the only topic they addressed was the experiences of blacks within an American society that was predominantly white. (Hill 20)

The music and writing style within the Harlem Renaissance carried the same theme of black experience in light of a white society. Within the Harlem, all the club experience carried the same colored theme. This made African Americans to create a self-awareness attitude something that brought a greater rift between blacks and whites.

As a young man, Langston Hughes had settled in Harlem while pursuing his college education. From his early days, Langston had a flair for poetry and he read a wide collection of poems from various authors. By the time he settled in Harlem, he was on his way towards becoming an established poet.

Although Langston’s poems, spoke of the experiences of black Americans in light of a white culture, he took a different route from the rest of his counterparts in the Harlem renaissance. Where his counterparts would focus on only one genre of writing, Langston decided to mix two or more genres in a single work.

A good example is his first book of poetry known as The Weary Blues. In the book, Langston mixed jazz, blues and a light touch of traditional verses. This was a complete new level of writing that other poets in Harlem were not used to. This became a great influence for future works produced within the Harlem Renaissance. (Poets. Org)

Another thing that made Langston Hughes to be of great influence to the Harlem renaissance was the success he acquired as a poet within the movement. This especially came in 1930 after he published his first work of fiction known as Not Without Laughter.

This was achieved with the help of a rich white woman known as Charlotte Mason. The novel was such as success that Langston bought his first car. Considering that he was only 28 years at the time, this was a great inspiration to other writers in the Harlem to work hard.

During this time, most artists in the Harlem Renaissance were not doing very well and Langston’s success must have been a big morale booster. Besides poetry, Langston also wrote novels, short stories, newspaper articles, and drama. This ability to write in almost all genres made him acceptable across the cultural divide. (Solloway, Bacon, & Muscanell)

In his writings, Langston used simple plain language laced with jokes, insight, and intellect to express his thoughts. Instead of complaining about the plight of back Americans in his works, Langston praises the two important aspects of the African culture namely their dark skin and their rich music. Instead of seeking to become equal to whites as most of his black artists sought, Langston appreciated and praised being African.

This can be seen in some of his most famous poems like I, Too, Sing America. This acceptance of his being a black American received criticism from his fellow artists who claimed that he paid attention on living as a low-class black in America. Despite the widespread criticism, Langston Hughes influence was so immense such that upon his death in 1967 the street leading to his house that was formerly known as 127 th Street was renamed Langston Hughes Place in his honor. (World Class Poetry)

After experiencing many upheavals in its history, Harlem has evolved in to a region of Manhattan where Black Americans live in an isolated manner. Although the standards of living were pathetic at the beginning of the 20 th century, a bunch of artists managed to give Harlem a different outlook.

Their literary works defined Harlem way of life and the general black experience in the context of white tradition. It is widely believed that Langston Hughes gave genuine and loud voice to the black society. Although this is still an opinion that is open to criticism, one thing that is undisputed is that very few artists if any within Harlem could articulate the adversity of and lowliness of black Americans as succinctly and fittingly as Langston did.

Despite their somewhat direct manner, it is important to consciously analyze every single word in his poems since the words he uses are highly effective and often carry a hidden meaning. It is also true that Langston Hughes is a respected icon in Black American literature. It is therefore without doubt that he helped in ushering the Harlem Renaissance and gave the African-American voice a much-needed respect and acceptance.

Angelfire. Kari’s Thoughts on Poets of the Harlem Renaissance , n.d. Web.

Hill, Christine. Langston Hughes: Poet of the Harlem Renaissance . New Jersey: Enslow Publishers, Inc, 1997. 16-21. Print.

Poets. Org. Langston Hughes , 2010. Web.

Solloway, J, Bacon, A, & Muscanell, M. James Langston Hughes (1902-1967). Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance , n.d. Web.

World Class Poetry. Langston Hughes. The Black Poet Laureate, 2008. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2018, May 16). Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. https://ivypanda.com/essays/langston-hughes-and-the-harlem-renaissance/

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IvyPanda . (2018) 'Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance'. 16 May.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance." May 16, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/langston-hughes-and-the-harlem-renaissance/.

1. IvyPanda . "Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance." May 16, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/langston-hughes-and-the-harlem-renaissance/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance." May 16, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/langston-hughes-and-the-harlem-renaissance/.

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Eng 102 - The Argumentative Essay: Harlem Renaissance

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Harlem Renaissance

Issues and Controversies in American History  is an excellent source for information on the Harlem Renaissance . 

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The issue:  Should Harlem Renaissance writers and artists primarily seek to integrate with mainstream culture and advance the political goals of the civil rights establishment through their works? Or should Renaissance artists be free to express authentic and distinctly African American themes?

• Arguments for cultural integration:  In order to counter more than a century of racist stereotypes of blacks in American pop culture, Renaissance artists have an obligation to convey "respectable" images of African Americans to white society. In other words, art should be used as a political means, not for its own sake. Once black culture is accepted and integrated into mainstream culture, then political, social and economic equality will follow. Furthermore, the whole notion of "black art" is stereotypical in its own right; artists should express a wide array of themes and subject matter that aims to transcend racial identity.
• Arguments against cultural integration:  Countering racist portrayals in popular culture is crucial to achieving equality for African Americans, but not at the cost of sacrificing authentic and realistic forms of black artistry. A Renaissance artist should capture the unique voice of the black masses, not the whitewashed, "proper" portrayals that cater to the elite tastes of the black bourgeoisie and white society. The melting pot of cultural integration should be rejected in favor of the mosaic of cultural harmony, in which many cultures coexist apart from one another. Only when African Americans are accepted and respected for their own unique culture can genuine equality follow.

Harlem 1900-1940 . The website for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture contains an online exhibition on black life in Harlem during the era of the Harlem Renaissance. Includes timeline of events, images, text, bibliography, and resources for teachers.

Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia . A project Ferris State University, the Jim Crow Museum website houses an exhaustive collection of artifacts documenting the Jim Crow era.

Rhapsodies in Black . The Institute of International Visual Arts presents an online exhibition of text and images highlighting the history and culture of the Harlem Renaissance. 

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow . The website for the PBS series includes brief summary text and images exploring the Harlem Renaissance. Links to related topics and larger themes provided.  

Second Resource:

The Gale In Context: U.S. History database provides access to Academic Journals, Magazines, Primary Sources, Reference Books, and Biographies related to the Harlem Renaissance . 

The Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918- c. 1937) was an important period in the development of African American culture. During this era, a group of influential figures in the creative arts helped to turn the New York City neighborhood of Harlem into a major center of African American music, literature, politics, and culture. It was less a movement than an attempt by artists to support each other in a cultural environment during a period in American history when there was not broad support for African American creative expression.

Also called the “New Negro Movement,” the Harlem Renaissance was merely the most famous of several urban clusters of African American expression. Cities such as Chicago, Kansas City, Memphis, and Cleveland were also...

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MLA Citations are provided for all featured articles and associated sources.

"Harlem Renaissance."  Gale U.S. History Online Collection , Gale, 2020.  Gale In Context: U.S. History , https://link-gale-com.ezproxy.tmcc.edu/apps/doc/CSVSGR697740729/UHIC?u=tmcc_main&sid=UHIC&xid=5f9a33e3. Accessed 9 Apr. 2020.

The EBSCO ebook collection provides access to dozens of books dedicated to the Harlem Renaissance.

Use the Table of Contents to identify specific aspects of the Harlem Renaissance. 

Subjects:  SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / American / African American Studies; American literature--African American authors--History and criticism; African American arts--New York (State)--New York--20th century; African American arts--20th century; African Americans--Intellectual life--20th century;  Harlem Renaissance ; African Americans--New York (State)--New York--Intellectual life--20th century

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MLA Citations are provided:

Huggins, Nathan Irvin.  Harlem Renaissance . Vol. Updated ed, Oxford University Press, 2007.  EBSCOhost , search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=362479&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

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The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism , at New York’s Metropolitan Museum: Rewarding, incomplete look at contributions of African-Americans to art and culture in first half of 20th century

Clare hurley , fred mazelis 17 may 2024.

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Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, February 25-July 28, 2024

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism  is an imposing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York of 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film and ephemera from the period of cultural awakening in the US between 1920-1940 that has come to be called the Harlem Renaissance.

These works of art, in a variety of styles, were part of a flowering that included not only the visual arts but also literature, essays, drama, dance and—perhaps most famously—jazz. The Harlem Renaissance indelibly influenced the art of the early 20th century in America and in much of the rest of the world. The influence of African folk art on European and American artists beginning in the late 19th century helped establish a new idiom befitting the radical transformation of the modern era.

Important as this exhibition is, however, it falls considerably short of doing full justice to its subject matter. The cultural transformations are not examined in their social and historical context, not understood as the complex product of material life. They are instead for the most part presented in isolation, as the product simply of the consciousness of their creators. The introduction to the exhibition itself, after correctly explaining that the Harlem Renaissance was “the first African American-led movement of international modern art,” declares, in the jargon of identity politics, that the exhibition “explores how artists…visualized the modern Black subject.” This is thoroughly inadequate and misleading.

The exhibition opens with two striking portraits, one of historian, sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and the other of Alain Locke (1885-1954), the writer, philosopher and the first black Rhodes Scholar, who is often called the “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance. Both portraits were done in 1925 by Winold Reiss, a German-born artist not widely enough known and acknowledged today. These men elaborated the theoretical basis of the movement, first championed by Locke as the “New Negro Movement,” and then renamed the Harlem Renaissance to signal a greater emphasis on its cultural and aesthetic aspects.

Some of the writers who became prominent in the early years included Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Jean Toomer (1894-1967), Countee Cullen (1903-1946) and Langston Hughes (1901-1967). Claude McKay (1890-1948), the Jamaican-American poet and writer, joined the revolutionary movement for a number of years, and attended the 4th World Congress of the Communist International in 1922 in Moscow.

Charles Alston (1907-1977), Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), Horace Pippin (1888-1946) and William H. Johnson (1901-1970) were among the better-known visual artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance, while others who feature prominently in the Met exhibition, like Archibald J. Motley, Jr. (1891-1981) and Olivia Wheeling Waring (1887-1948), are less familiar.

The exhibition is divided into sections including street life, the European connection, photography and, perhaps most vividly, portraits. These run the stylistic gamut from sensitive, traditionally realist paintings by Waring, such as  Girl in a Pink Dress  (1927), of a young flapper, and  Girl with a Green Cap  (1943), reminiscent of the society portraits of American expatriate John Singer Sargent, to Alston’s mesmerizing  Girl in a Red Dress  (1934), with her elongated neck and semi-stylized features evoking an African sculptural archetype as much as a young girl.

By contrast, the thoroughly modern, flat and brightly colored forms of Johnson’s  Street Life  (1939-40),  Man in a Vest  (1939-40) and  Woman in Blue (1942) wholeheartedly embrace abstraction over realistic representation. Johnson, in fact, did not live in Harlem, but in Europe and North Africa from 1926 until 1938 and in Denmark after the war, until he died in a New York hospital, a victim of mental illness.

Several of the portraits are of Harlem Renaissance figures: one of writer and NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson (1943) by Waring, a rather demure one of the outspoken Hurston, by Douglas (1926), and one of Douglas himself (1930) with his palette, by Edwin Harleston. Finally, there is another Reiss portrait of Hughes, likewise created in 1925, looking dreamily over an open page while a Constructivist background in blue suggests his thoughts.

The exhibition conveys the spirit of Harlem’s legendary cabarets and barrooms, with figures hunched excitedly over poker games and pool tables (one by Lawrence) or jitterbugging to the wail of saxophones (several by Johnson). The style of these paintings tilts more to the modern; some, like Hale Woodruff’s  The Card Players  (1930), have a Post-Impressionist feeling, reflecting a European, specifically Parisian kinship.

Though the Harlem Renaissance had its origins very much in Harlem, the Met show also includes work done in other US cities. A number are by Motley, a Chicago resident, another artist who deserves more serious appreciation. In addition to his lively, lavender-infused scenes of working class leisure time, his portraits of his father (1922), his Uncle Bob (1928) and his grandmother (1922), the latter included only in the catalog, are exceptionally moving.

The exhibition’s selection of sculpture includes a powerful bronze head of actor Paul Robeson by Jacob Epstein (1928) and another thoughtful-looking Hughes by Teodoro Ramos Blanco (1930s), as well as standout pieces by Augusta Savage— Gamin  (1929) and  Lift Every Voice and Sing   (The Harp) (1939), the latter based on James Weldon Johnson’s hymn of the same name, christened the black national anthem in the era of struggle against Jim Crow segregation.

The Harlem Renaissance cannot be understood apart from a detailed examination of the Great Migration. The exhibition makes brief mention of the latter, but without explaining its significance. Until 1910, going all the way back to colonial times, both before and after the abolition of slavery, 90 percent of the black population remained in the South, in general in rural areas. With the Great Migration, there was a movement from South to North; there was a movement from country to city, even in the south; and there was a movement to wage labor. All this took place alongside the emergence of socialism as a mass movement in Europe, and the first successful socialist revolution, in Russia in 1917.

The battlefields of the First World War may have been in Europe, but the impact of the war was also felt across the United States. The closure of borders to new immigrants during the war intensified the demand for labor. As soldiers returned, many of them radicalized not only by the carnage of modern warfare but also by contact with socialism, they joined masses of black, white and Latino laborers who had moved to the cities, including those millions who began to flee the Jim Crow South.

Moreover, to speak of the “white” population in the big US cities is a gross oversimplification. In the large Jewish, Italian and other immigrant neighborhoods of New York, little English was spoken in 1920. It was the relative freedom and cross-pollination of these cultures—including new audiences for music of the rural South, for instance—that provided the basis for the exhilarating developments in culture and in art of which the Harlem Renaissance is one of the greatest expressions.

The Renaissance was a heterogeneous movement, encompassing artists who were politically engaged and others who were not, some who espoused a somewhat nationalistic outlook, as well as those who focused on the fight against Jim Crow and for full integration and first-class citizenship. It included those whose aim was that of joining the middle class or developing a black elite, and others who, especially as the artificial boom of the so-called Jazz Age was followed by the Great Depression, turned to the left, to the working class.

Much of this, however, is simply passed over in the present exhibition.

There is almost no mention of the political ferment that dominated the US during the 1920s and 30s. The exhibition becomes as significant for what it leaves out as for what it includes. The political and industrial struggles of the working class, the fight to build the labor movement in the 1930s, are almost entirely absent, although they were far from absent in the lives and work of some of the prominent representatives of the Harlem Renaissance. There are only two works by Lawrence, for instance, the most famous African American painter from the 1940s onward, but none from his famous “Migration Series.”

The left-wing political associations of many of the artists, principally in the orbit of the Communist Party, are also entirely ignored.

Du Bois, correctly acknowledged by the exhibition as one of the key intellectual spokesmen of the Harlem Renaissance, was a founder of the NAACP in 1909, but was fired by that organization in 1948, one of the early victims of the rapidly developing anti-communist Cold War atmosphere. Du Bois’ political views were inconsistent over his long life, but he insisted on the fight for equality and integration and maintained some sympathy for Marxism, and he joined the Communist Party a few years before he died.

Robeson, the most famous victim of McCarthyism, was blacklisted because of his sympathy for the Soviet Union. He also had his passport withdrawn, thus effectively destroying his career as one of the most acclaimed bass-baritones in the world. The exhibition makes no mention of his treatment.

Catlett, the American-born sculptor and graphic artist, is also represented in the exhibition, but the lengthy caption accompanying her  Head of a Woman  (1942-44) simply concludes that “Catlett spent much of her career as an arts instructor, working throughout the United States and Mexico at a time when many other Black American expatriate artists opted for Paris.” Omitted is the reality that Catlett, who went to work in Mexico in 1946, several years later was declared an “undesirable alien” by the US embassy in Mexico City. She was unable to visit her mother before she died, and was unable to return to the US until a protest on her behalf in 1971.

Hughes, another one of the half dozen most famous figures in the Harlem Renaissance, was sympathetic to the Communist Party for much of the 1930s and 40s. He was part of a group of 22 African Americans who toured the USSR in 1932. In 1953, he was hauled before Joe McCarthy’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and grilled on his political associations. Hughes, fearing for his career, supplied McCarthy with a denunciation of communism, and for the rest of his life mostly stayed away from political subjects.

While all of these figures were tragically misled or misguided by Stalinism, essentially accepting the lie that the bureaucratic regime in the Soviet Union was building socialism, their left-wing sympathies form an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance, and they paid a significant price for their political principles.

Providing descriptions of the work and role of Du Bois, Hughes, Catlett and others without mentioning their political views or victimization amounts to intellectual and historical dishonesty. The reason for this selective account of their careers is the near-universal tendency within art and curatorial circles to see culture in racial or ethnic categories, along with the disparagement of the history of the struggle for socialism.

This reactionary and bankrupt outlook finds a reflection in the rather sorry-looking, small gallery labeled “Activism” toward the close of the exhibit. The half-dozen or so works include a well-known photograph of an NAACP march in New York City in 1917 against Southern lynchings. A particularly glaring example of historical falsification is a caption for a drawing of the Scottsboro Boys by Douglas, which fails to mention that the Communist Party played the leading role in the legal defense and political campaign against this notorious racist frame-up in the mid-1930s, after the NAACP refused to touch the case.

At the same time, the indisputable impact of African folk art on European art as a whole—Picasso’s  Demoiselles d’Avignon  (1907) being the most iconic example—is presented only by a few drawings by Picasso and Matisse, of black sitters. The impact of African art on Harlem Renaissance artists, rather than seen as part of the broader transformation of modern art as a whole, is instead presented as more authentic in the case of African-American artists—because they were black.

The exhibition does not deny the collaboration, in subject matter and technique, between black and white artists, as in the examples of Matisse, Man Ray and others. Underlying this, however, is the idea that the aim and final destination of the African-American artists was for the most part a separate “black art,” a contention belied by the actual history of the Harlem Renaissance.

By reducing the Harlem Renaissance to a movement in which “Black artists created art about Black subjects,” the exhibition does a serious disservice to the international character and enduring impact of this cultural movement. In spite of these drawbacks, however, the exhibition is well worth seeing, keeping its gaps and its weaknesses very much in mind. It should be a starting point for further study of the work of the artists, writers and intellectual figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

• Marcus Garvey and the reactionary logic of racialist politics 2 March 2023
• Photographer Roy DeCarava, chronicler of African-American life (1919-2009) 7 January 2010
• Jacob Lawrence dead at 82: a major American painter 16 June 2000
• The painter Jacob Lawrence 31 May 2002

10 Powerful Langston Hughes Poems Everyone Needs to Read

Langston hughes poems guaranteed to move you.

L angston Hughes is one of the most prolific yet most underrated American poets of all time. He was the first Black writer and poet to make his living through his words. He led the Harlem Renaissance, which saw Black poets and writers come together to express their thoughts and opinions. Heck, he practically invented jazz poetry, a form focused on rhythm, and his work remains a staple of the art form to this day. Langston Hughes poems are about the ordinary Black man—his struggle, his mundane life, his beauty and his dreams.

There’s no better way to describe Hughes’s poetry than with his own words: “If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.” Hughes is at the top of the list of Black poets who really managed to convey just what the experience of being a person of color in 20th-century America was like, with all its prejudices and societal changes.

When he left the world in 1967, he left behind a massive body of work, including poems, poetry books, novels, plays, essays and so much more. As for his poetry, it is as varied as the forms he wrote in. Hughes published works dealing with racism, Black history and conditions of living. He wrote tender love poems . And he penned stirring verses that praised physical beauty, especially that of the Black man, which led many people to speculate about his sexuality.

While “Dreams” is arguably his most famous poem (and certainly merits a read), it’s not the sole example of the poet’s mastery. Hughes’s bibliography is long and well worth your time and attention. To get you started, we’re focusing on 10 of the most powerful Langston Hughes poems. Consider this your introduction to the incredible potency of the celebrated poet’s words and their rhythms.

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1. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

Ancient, dusky rivers.

One of the most famous Langston Hughes poems is also one of his earliest: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was published in 1921 in The Crisis , the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Rivers have always been a strong symbol in Black poetry and music—you can hear it in classic blues. Here, Hughes deviates from traditional poems about nature to use the river as a symbol of the scale and importance of Black history. Through it, he reminds readers that Black people have seen the entire world through its most important rivers.

2. “Mother to Son”

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

But all the time

I’se been a-climbin’ on,

And reachin’ landin’s,

And turnin’ corners,

And sometimes goin’ in the dark

Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you turn back.

Don’t you set down on the steps

‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now—

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

Through this famous poem, Hughes explores the other side of parental relationships. A mother figure gets real with her son about how unfair life can be—but not to discourage him. On the contrary, her words of sorrow soon turn into encouraging phrases urging him to move forward with life. It’s a great example of a Mother’s Day poem that shows how precious mothers can be.

3. “Homesick Blues”

De Railroad bridge’s

A sad song in de air.

De railroad bridge’s

Every time de trains pass

I wants to go somewhere.

I went down to de station.

Ma heart was in ma mouth.

Went down to da station.

Heart was in ma mouth.

Lookin’ for a box car

To roll me to de South.

Homesick blues, Lawd,

‘S a terrible thing to have.

Homesick blues is

A terrible thing to have.

To keep from cryin’

I opens my mouth an’ laughs.

“Homesick Blues” is one of the most famous Langston Hughes poems and expresses the familiar desire to return home. In the case of the poet, who was born in Joplin, Missouri, home is the South. Formulated like a classic blues song, this great poem about life can be called blues poetry, a predecessor of sorts to jazz poetry, which Hughes delved into later in his career.

4. “Harlem Night Song”

Let us roam the night together

I love you.

The Harlem roof-tops

Moon is shining

Night sky is blue.

Stars are great drops

Of golden dew.

In the cabaret

The jazz-band’s playing.

“Harlem Night Song” is a great example of the sort of work that elevated Hughes’s status and led him to become one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance. Whether read as a love poem for women or for men , the beautiful ballad wonderfully captures the feelings and essence of the movement.

5. “Hard Daddy”

I went to ma daddy,

Says Daddy I have got de blues.

Went to ma daddy,

Ma daddy says. Honey,

Can’t you bring no better news?

I cried on his shoulder but

He turned his back on me.

Cried on his shoulder but

He said a woman’s cryin’s

Never gonna bother me.

I wish I had wings to

Fly like de eagle flies.

Wish I had wings to

I’d fly on ma man an’

I’d scratch out both his eyes.

It’s no secret that Hughes did not have the best of relationships with his father. His parents were separated, and his dad lived in Mexico. When an 18-year-old Hughes visited and told him of his dream of being a writer, he refused to fund his son’s education unless it was in engineering. But this isn’t the true source of the tension between the two men: As the poet himself stated, the elder Hughes’s apparent disdain for his own people drove a wedge between them. While “Hard Daddy” is not exactly a Father’s Day poem , it does manage to explore just how tragic such a parental relationship can be.

6. “Fantasy in Purple”

Beat the drums of tragedy for me.

Beat the drums of tragedy and death.

And let the choir sing a stormy song

To drown the rattle of my dying breath.

Beat the drums of tragedy for me,

And let the white violins whir thin and slow,

But blow one blaring trumpet note of sun

To go with me

to the darkness

where I go.

“Fantasy in Purple” is a fantastic example of Hughes’s famous jazz poetry, alive with the rhythms and themes of the 20th-century African American music this great poet loved so dearly. While it could be interpreted as something as sorrowful as a funeral poem , it remains open to interpretation. On the surface, Hughes tackles themes of loss and tragedy, but through the poem, he also honors the music of his time.

7. “The Jester”

In one hand

I hold tragedy

And in the other

Masks for the soul.

Laugh with me.

You would laugh!

Weep with me

You would weep!

Tears are my laughter.

Laughter is my pain.

Cry at my grinning mouth,

If you will.

Laugh at my sorrow’s reign.

I am the Black Jester,

The dumb clown of the world,

The booted, booted fool of silly men.

Once I was wise.

Shall I be wise again?

One of Hughes’s many strengths is his use of comedy tropes to express the exact opposite. While at first, “The Jester” appears to be a mere funny poem , as the reader progresses, it becomes clear that comedy is Hughes’s way of expressing sorrow, suffering and frustration, particularly that of fellow Black Americans.

8. “The White Ones”

I do not hate you,

For your faces are beautiful, too.

Your faces are whirling lights of loveliness and splendor, too.

Yet why do you torture me,

O, white strong ones,

Why do you torture me?

Serving as both a cry for more tolerance and an offering of racial peace, this inspirational poem is a perfect display of how simple yet powerful Hughes’s words could be. What grants “The White Ones” its devastating power is the way its conveyed emotions change in the span of a few lines, from praise to conviction.

9. “Prayer”

I ask you this:

Which way to go?

Which sin to bear?

Which crown to put

Upon my hair?

I do not know,

I do not know.

Religion isn’t often an overt theme in contemporary poetry, but that wasn’t always the case. Themes of God and spirituality were some of the most pressing in the poetry of previous generations. Hughes’s take on the subject is this short poem that manages to convey feelings of existentialism and doubt in a few lines.

10. “Poème d’Automne”

The autumn leaves

Are too heavy with color.

The slender trees

On the Vulcan Road

Are dressed in scarlet and gold

Like young courtesans

Waiting for their lovers.

The winter winds

Will strip their bodies bare

The sharp, sleet-stung

Caresses of cold

Will be their only

French for “Autumn Poem,” Hughes’s “Poème d’Automne” is a reflection on love and warmth in the cold of the world. Many great American writers spent time in Paris in the early 20th century, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Baldwin —Hughes is no exception. He lived in a little hotel room there and worked odd jobs, as he did while traveling the world in his early years. If the poem has inspired you to experience a Parisian autumn of your own, know that the City of Light is one of the best cities for literature lovers of all kinds.

• New York Times : “The Darker Brother”
• Washington Post : “An African American in Paris”