By 1926, when Hughes published this poem in his book The Weary Blues, the artistic movement that we know as the Harlem Renaissance was at the height of its fame and productivity. The Harlem Renaissance, an informal gathering of writers, painters, musicians, and philosophers who worked in the Harlem section of New York City in the 1920s, started soon after World War I ended in 1918 and withered away by the time the Great Depression began with the stock market crash of 1929. To some extent, we can say that it is a happy coincidence that some of the world’s greatest talents all ended up in the same place at the same time. Looking more deeply, though, we see that the outpouring of expression during the Harlem Renaissance was driven not just by talent but by an urgent need to express a cultural identity. Harlem in the 1920s was the place where the artistic sensibilities of black America were inevitably destined to attract the attention of the world.
In the nineteenth century the majority of African Americans lived in the South because they were descendants of slaves who had been brought here to farm the massive plantations in that region. After the Confederate Army of the South surrendered in 1865, bringing an end to the Civil War, slavery was abolished in this country. The Southern legislatures, however, passed laws that made it impossible for blacks to become socially or economically equal to whites. These “Jim Crow laws” (named after an offensively stupid and lazy black character from a 1832 minstrel show) blocked voting or land ownership by blacks by holding them to nearly impossible “intelligence tests” or “economic criteria” that most whites would have also failed to meet if they had been required. In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court gave its approval to these discriminatory laws by deciding in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that states could offer “separate but equal” facilities to blacks for education, transportation, and public accommodations. The pretense toward fairness in this ruling ignored the fact that the accommodations were almost never equal: less government money found its way to black hospitals, bus lines, parks, etc., and private enterprises certainly offered blacks only their worst. It was not until 1954 that the Supreme Court ruled the “separate but equal” doctrine unfair, in a case called Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
Early in the twentieth century, though, Southern blacks found some form of relief from the unequal conditions with the Industrial Revolution and the growth of major manufacturing centers in Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and New York. There was still terrible discrimination in the North, but it was not formally established in the laws. In addition, the factories of the North, producing steel and automobiles, needed laborers, and they paid good wages to workers with no prior experience. When World War I began in Europe in 1914, the push to provide munitions made the North even more inviting to African Americans. A laborer making $1.10 per day in the South could make $3.75 in a Northern factory, while a woman working as a domestic in the South for $2.50 per week could make $2.10 to $2.50 a day in the North. The war also opened manufacturing opportunities for blacks by narrowing the number of immigrant workers coming from Europe. The black population in Northern cities ballooned; in New York City alone, the number of blacks went from 60,666 in 1900 to 152,467 in 1920, growing throughout the twenties to 327,706 by 1930.
The urban African Americans began to seek their own identity in ways that they never had a chance to when they were dispersed on farms throughout the South. During the war, approximately 367,000 blacks served in the Armed Forces. Although still facing considerable discrimination in the military, black servicemen brought home a new awareness of how small and temporary many American prejudices were. Military service exposed many white Americans to blacks for the first time, and they learned respect. The characteristics that racists had claimed about in blacks in order to oppress them for decades — claiming that they were simple, naive, ignorant and primitivistic — ironically started looking good to intellectuals, in light of the sophisticated and rational war that had just taken so many lives barbarically.
After the war, the Harlem section of New York City, where blacks comprised over 90 percent of the population, became recognized as a center for artistic and intellectual activity. It offered blacks both the security of a small, self-contained community and, at the same time, as part of America’s publishing and entertainment capital, it offered access to national and international audiences. At night, New York’s wealthiest went “up to Harlem” in search of clubs that served liquor, which had been made illegal in 1920 by the Constitution’s Eighteenth Amendment. Rich intellectuals rubbed shoulders with poor intellectuals: Hughes himself was in fact “discovered by” prominent poet Vachel Lindsay when he slipped some poems to Lindsay while waiting on his table. Together, writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance raised the world’s consciousness of what life was like for Americans of African descent.
Compare & Contrast
- 1922: A. E. Staley of Decatur, Illinois, opened the first soybean refinery in the United States. Previously, soybeans had been used for livestock feed.
1940: The U.S. soybean crop reached 78 million bushels, up from 5 million bushel in 1924.
1944: 12 million acres of U.S. farming land were devoted to growing soybeans. Products created out of oils derived from soybeans included livestock feed, enamel, solvents, plastics, insecticides, steel hardening agents, and beer.
1945: Soybean production reached 193 million bushels, almost three times the level of just five years before.
1966: Bac-Os were developed by General Mills. Made from isolate soy protein, they taste like bacon.
Today: Soybeans will soon outpace wheat as the United States’ second largest crop. (The nation still, however, grows more than three times as much corn as either soybeans or wheat.)
- 1922: Twenty-eight-year-old Angelo Sicilano won a contest sponsored by Physican Culture magazine, naming him the “World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man.” Taking the name Charles Atlas, he opened his own gymnasium in Manhattan in 1926, and by 1927 his corporation was charging $1,000 per student for mail-order body-building lessons.
1956: The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sport was established.
1985: Starting with the motion picture Rambo: First Blood, Part II, Hollywood produced a string of movies with muscle-enhanced male action stars. Health clubs became more popular than discos as places for young adults to meet. By the end of this trend former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarznegger had become the most popular movie star in the world.
Today: Despite increased awareness of the importance of physical fitness and the multi-billion dollar fitness industry, more than 60 percent of all adults are more than twenty percent over their body weight.
- 1922: States were allowed to establish laws that required blacks and whites to live in separate places, stay in separate hotels and motels, ride separate sections of buses, use separate drinking fountains, sit in separate areas of movie theaters, attend separate churches, seek treatment at separate hospitals, etc.
1955: Rosa Parks, an African-American bus rider in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. The boycott that followed her arrest, organized by Dr. Martin Luther King, brought the matter of segregation to the Supreme Court, who ruled in 1956 that segregation of public transportation was illegal.
1964: The Johnson administration passed the Civil Rights Act that President Kennedy had been working on before he was assassinated. Among other provisions, the Act required that schools should be desegregated, so that African Americans would not be left to receive inferior educations in second-rate schools.
Today: Despite laws that legislate against discrimination, blacks and whites in America usually live, shop, and attend school in different places.
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