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

to evade the powers the Southern white ruling class used to keep its labor force in the South. Millions of black people fought their way out of the South, in what was virtually a mass edition of the old Underground Railroad. With the Great Migration to northern cities such as Harlem, white people fled Harlem's brownstones in a panic, and young black people moved in. African Americans were establishing a place of their own, finding paying jobs, some of which in the artistic field. After acquiring this new money, many black folk chose to buy property, to claim a land uniquely their own for the first time, instilling a sense of self-pride within the black community. With this geographical shift of the black population, came a new mentality of the “new negro”.
The “New Negro” spirit was evident in Harlem more than anywhere else, and it manifested itself above all in the working-class political movements that dominated Harlem’s political scene.

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

noted that the relocation of black professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers, was actually in response to the mass exodus of agricultural workers. Said Locke: “it is the rank and file who are leading and the leaders who are following. A transformed and transforming psychology permeates the masses” (Locke, Alain. The New Negro). Locke argued that the one of the key ways to touch all types of people, especially whites, was through art, as art is what touches the masses most effectively. Yet even with the explosion of the black arts, the racial divide was very present.
Were the barriers between races being eclipsed? Writer Charles Chesnutt, at the turn of the century, had forecasted a multiracial America, where the color line would be erased. Could it be that print, which brought black life into white homes and white life into black homes that was eliminating racial barriers? But this is where the irony lies within this movement and era. At the same time as journalists were hailing African American writers as the best in American literature, and as white New Yorkers were flocking to Harlem to hear African American musicians, American society was becoming more oppressive toward African Americans. The 1920s marked the high point of the Ku Klux Klan, and the lynching of blacks was on the increase. Racial barriers were actually rising (“Harlem Renaissance” Dispute). Not only did whites flock to Harlem to see black performers in clubs, such as the Cotton Club, where black citizens were not permitted to visit, or to shabby speakeasies, such as the Clam Bake and the Hot Feet, but the white world also had an intense interest in what was termed “primitive” culture, a synonym for black culture. With bootlegged liquor, titillating blues lyrics, sultry music, and “long-legged beauties”, the uptown white audiences savored in what was forbidden or alien to their world. They deemed what they saw as erotic and primal, then went back to the comfort of their own homes. Nathan Irvin Huggins, in Harlem Renaissance (1971), wrote “the Negro was the performer in a strange, almost macabre, act of black collusion in its own emasculation. For [the] white world, itself unfulfilled, was compelled to approve only that view of the Negro which served its image” (“Harlem Renaissance” Dispute). Huggins argued that even though African Americans were expressing their own artistic exploits, they were viewed as puppets by white people, further cementing themselves in the white man’s belief that black people were beneath them.
Even though the Harlem Renaissance, or the era of the “new negro” was fully immersive and empowering for African Americans, a full rejection of whiteness, though proclaimed, was ultimately impossible. As Lisa Collins argues, even though Black Arts poetry derives much of its power through its presentation as a “black-only product”, "it achieves its maximum impact in a context where it is understood as being heard directly by whites, and overheard by blacks" (Collins, Lisa Gail). The murderous fantasies about whites that are staples in black poetry are finally most effective if they are directed at white people. So, even within this decidedly black-only movement, white influence was inescapable.