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Essay on Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance (HR) is the name given to the period from the end of World War I and through the middle of the 1930s Depression, during which a group of talented African-American writers produced a sizable body of literature in the four prominent genres of poetry, fiction, drama, and essay. Today most historians recognize 1917 as the year in which the Harlem Renaissance began. Three events occurred that help to justify this choice. First was the publication of two poems by Claude McKay in Seven Arts, the first work by a black writer to appear under a white imprimatur since Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s dialect pieces twenty years before.
Second was the opening on Broadway of three plays about black life by a white writer, Ridgely Torrence. These plays were remarkable not only because they were performed by black artists but because they contained none of the usual racial stereotypes (Kramer, 12). Finally, on 28 July Harlem experienced its first Silent Parade when some ten to fifteen thousand blacks marched down Fifth Avenue to protest against continued racial inequities. Eighteen years later, in the grip of the Great Depression, the first race riot erupted in Harlem and it is this year, 1935, that is generally regarded as marking the end of the Renaissance.
Harlem Renaissance artists insisted that the African American be accepted as "a collaborator and participant in American civilization," in the words of the educator and critic AlainLocke......
