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Essay on Blacks and the Harlem Renaissance
The development of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s and 1930s was based on the influences of the southern migrant community and French intellectualism. African American experiences in the South produced a folk tradition, while racial freedom in France promoted the growth of political theory and provided connections to French Africa and the Caribbean. Between the two world wars, African Americans fresh from the South's fields and factories poured into Harlem, the south side of Chicago, and other northern ghettos in search of economic opportunity and political liberty.
Within a few years, a number had "fundamentally changed" themselves into what black philosopher Alain Locke as early as 1925 termed the "New Negro," burying old stereotypes of illiteracy and inferiority and claiming a new race-proud and independent identity. During the 1920s and 1930s, New Negro intellectuals drew on the migrants' shared southern experiences and African heritage to produce what became known as the Harlem Renaissance, an extraordinary artistic and cultural movement. In politics, too, for the planners in the Harlem Renaissance also sought to promote racial equality with whites by validating black cultural achievements--to attain "civil rights by copyright" to borrow historian David Lewis's pithy phrase. Yet even as Harlem was becoming the Negro cultural and intellectual capital of the world, Paris was also emerging as an important site of African American intellectual life.
Having grown up in a country where, as Lewis notes, "Uncle Tom and Frederick Douglass were social equivalents, while the illiterate redneck was the superior of W. E. B. Du Bois," blacks found in France a welcome release from the strictures of Jim Crow. Further, for the New Negro intellectuals, Paris became a link to African intellectuals of French Africa and the Caribbean. Whether through the Pan-African political movement of the early and mid-1920s that sought equality and opportunity for all those scattered through the African diaspora......
