- During the Great Migration, many African Americans left the South and migrated to the cities of the North for employment oppurtunities.
- One area that flourished with African Americans was the nieghborhood of Harlem in New York City, which became the culutural center of black America.
- In the late 1800s and continuing through the early 1990s, literature and art began to flourish with such authors as Claude McKay and artists such as Bob Cole.
- Young writers and authors such as Langston Hughes began to fuel the rise of the Harlem Renaissance and literature would continue to thrive with all the young writers beginning to take shape.
- Music and literature during the Harlem Renaissance was very diverse and there was no common type that was expressed and the lives of African Americans were expressed through songs and poems.
- There were some racial issues of the work done during the Harlem Renaissance because some works made African American stereotypes, but W.E.B. Du Bois really spoke up for all the black people.
- African American musicians played to audiences of blacks and whites and many of the more successful musicians played exclusively in dowtown New York.
- The Harlem Renaissance was affected greatly by the Great Depression in the mid-1930s because many blacks artists and writers left the city so it was on a decline.
- The Harlem Renaissance ended because many writers and musicians stopped working and young artists were not associating with the Harlem Renaissance anymore.
- African American art and literature was changed forever due to this time period and it showed that African Americans could thrive in literature just like the whites could.
Countee Cullen
- He was a very important important poet during his time and wrote about the lives of African Americans.
- He won many poetry contests at a young age and eventually moved on to New York University, where he produced many works for many literary magazines.
- He contributed to the Harlem Renaissance by producing many volumes of poetry including Color in 1925 and Copper Sun in 1927.
- Cullen died very unexpectedly in 1946 due to kidney failures and complications from high blood pressure.
- He will always be remembered for his poetry works he created during the Harlem Renaissance and he always tried to avoid using steroetypes in his works.
W.E.B. Du Bois
- He graduated Harvard University with a doctoral degree the first African American to do so.
- Du Bois wrote many famous books that influenced the Harlem Renaissance, including Black Reconstruction in 1935 that desribed how important African Americans were in the past.
- During the Harlem Reniassance, Du Bois was a prominent civil rights activist who fought for the rights of all African Americans.
- Du Bois made national attention when he argued against Booker T. Washington's view on African Americans while saying that blacks should work their way up in society to guarantee themselves civil rights.
- He helped young writers such as Langston Hughes rise up in the Harlem Renaissance so they could contribute their own works.
- Du Bois founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and he led them to fights for civil rights.
Claude McKay
- McKay was a Jamaican-American writer and poet and he wrote three books during the Harlem Renaissance, including Home to Harlem in 1928, which was a best-seller.
- At a young age, he was attracted to the Communist Party when he was in London, but he never became an official member of the party.
- He emerged as one of the first voices of the Harlem Renaissance and he was one of the first major poets of the Harlem Renaissance.
- In his literature, he expressed racial awareness for African Americans that would help African Americans gain freedom and rights.
- He also made a book of his own poems, called Selected Poems, but he died of a heart attack at the age of 59.
Information Sources- Microsoft Student with Encarta
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