The Great Migration During The Harlem Renaissance

The Great Migration was not only the movement of African Americans from rural-South to other urban areas of United States, but it also lead to the transformation of their thoughts. They arrived with their hopes and their dreams of a new and different life, seeking relief from labor exploitation and white violence. During the Great Migration, African Americans began to build a new place for themselves in public life, actively confronting economic, political and social challenges and creating a new black urban culture. The New Negro Renaissance is the most widely discussed period of African-American literary history not only because of ongoing scholarly debates over its origins, beginning, and end, but also because of its fundamental importance

to twentieth-century thought and culture. Those who came brought with them dynamic cultural forms that could now find full expression. The art was unique because it was drawn directly from a communal lifestyle, the rituals, folk, oral, and musical customs of Africa. It was unique also because it had developed for the most part in isolation, apart from the mainstream, transforming and adapting the very culture that sought to suppress it.These New Negro Renaissance art forms were innovative, experimental, and intentional: the most recognized black leaders believed this production would permit people to transcend racial difference, that their excellence in the artistic domain would ensure their acceptance into the human race. They thought they would finally receive the full benefits of America's promised democracy.
The “New Negro” is defined as the assertiveness, self-confidence, and active refusal to obey Jim Crow laws of racial segregation of African Americans.

In the early 19th century, Hubert Harrison and Matthew Kotleski founded the militant "New Negro Movement," which is also known as the Harlem Renaissance, that came into focus during the years following Great Migration and World War 1.This movement insisted on self-definition, self-expression, and self-determination. The “New Negro” term that was popularised by Alain LeRoy Locke during the Harlem Renaissance, gave paramount importance to ideologies that were related to the factors of Great migration like race-conscious demands such as political equality, an end to segregation and lynching, as well as calls for armed self-defense when necessary. The strong emphasis on race pride, solidarity and self help had been a significant part of literary and political self-expression, and economic and moral improvement among African-Americans . The black experience during the Great Migration became an important theme in this artistic movement which had an enormous impact on the culture of the era. The many debates during these years regarding art and propaganda, representation and identity, assimilation and militancy have enriched the perspectives on issues of art, culture, politics, and

ideology.
The Renaissance was many things to many people, but it is best described as a cultural phenomenon in which the high level of black artistic and cultural production received mainstream recognition, where racial solidarity was equated with social progress, and where the idea of blackness became a commodity in its own right. The Renaissance coincided with the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the Lost Generation, and its impact was keenly felt on an individual and collective level within the African-American community as well as on America's robust cultural industries, music, film, theater—all of which fully benefited from the creativity and newly discovered contributions of African Americans.It remains the period to which we attribute the development, if not the birth, of every major artistic and literary form that we now associate with African-American life and culture. During the Renaissance African-American visual art came of age, and gave birth to various fields of modern black painting, sculpture, printmaking, and photography. Blacks appeared in films and in popular musicals. The first black filmmakers also emerged during the height of this Renaissance. Black business leaders, owners of funeral homes, insurance companies, and newspapers helped to create a new black business base, just as organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) helped in meeting the needs and concerns of African-American migrants.
The New Negro Movement was considered by many as the "golden age" of black art because of the level of cultural production that was achieved.

Its role as a catalyst for great art within the period and beyond cannot be underestimated. The movement laid groundwork for all later African American literature and had an enormous impact on subsequent black literature and consciousness worldwide. It also showed significant impacts in journalism, fiction, poetry, music, sculpture, and paintings that still stand out as important figures of African American history.The visibility and intensity of the period symbolized a major shift in the degree to which black people could and did claim the authority to speak about and represent themselves and their

experience.