Charles Chesnutt: The Harlem Renaissance

Narrative

“It was a time when the Negro was in vogue” (“Harlem Renaissance” Dispute). This ironic comment by one of the period’s leading writers, Charles Chesnutt, evokes the irony and mystery of the Harlem Renaissance. Between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression, African American musicians, writers, and performers dominated the American cultural scene. Another name for the period, the “Jazz Age,” reflects the cultural importance of African American culture at this historical moment. The roots of this era were in the Great Migration, the movement of millions of African Americans from a condition of near slavery in the agricultural South to the industrial North. This migration was accomplished only with strong determination

For the first time, African American writers, musicians, poets, and intellectuals were renowned for their contributions to world culture with hopes to achieve equality and civil rights ("Harlem Renaissance." History.com). Works produced during the Harlem Renaissance appealed not just to blacks, but crossed over to white audiences as well, seemingly the beginning of racial integration. In its fullest sense the Harlem Renaissance was a multilayered movement. Built off of this, and centered in Harlem, was the organizational, ideological, and political expression of the mass movement, proclaiming the existence of a world-embracing black identity. Finally, resting on top was the literary and artistic movement, centered in Harlem, which gave black identity a cultural form. The new outlook of “New Negroism” that working-class migrants brought with them from the South, attempted to capture the essence of the “New Negro,” but no one captured the spirit of the renaissance better than the leading contemporary commentator of that time, Alain Locke, remembered as the “father of the New Negro” (Stuart, Andrea). He expressed that at the root the New Negro was the “migrating peasant” who moved from medieval America to modern America, or in other words from the agricultural South to the industrial North. He