Go There To Know There

This site, my course, this section, would be remiss without sharing with my students the music of the Harlem Renaissance. Music so powerfully identifies a generation, an age, and to hear the sounds of Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, one is instantly swept back in time to the days of the Cotton Club.  "Juke Joints" and nightclubs began to spring up throughout Harlem during the early days of the Renaissance and immediately became the haven for Harlem notables and nightlife. There a space was created to ignite the imaginations of Langston Hughes ("Dream Boogie," "Weary Blues,") and Claude McKay ("The Harlem Dancer") among many, many others eager to capture the zeitgeist of the day. Not surprisingly, the nightclubs and musical performers of Harlem would draw revelers from all around, including white folks eager to soak up the culture of African American jazz and blues. Individuals like Carl Van Vechten would frequen...

The Smithsonian Institute's website on the National Museum of African American History & Culture best summarizes the aims and circumstances of the African American Women's Literary Renaissance when it observes:                   (Source). The Black Arts Movement, the creative companion to the Black Power Movement and Black Panther Party, began to dwindle alongside its ancillaries by the year 1974. In that time, the violence of the day, along with increased vilification by the U.S. government (COINTELPRO), led to the end of Black militancy for a time. Many of the movements most prominent figures--Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Stokely Carmichael had either departed the U.S., or seemed to have disappeared altogether for a time.  The nation had given sway to a calm--some might say of resignation, but perhaps more of a shift--to a quieter rebellion. Many women of the movement, like Angela Davis, had become notable sch...

  In 2017, the world lost one of the most important and influential writers, poets, and essayists of African American--and American Literature. Maya Angelou passed away today in her Winston-Salem home at the age of eighty-six. Marguerite Johnson was born in 1928, and "before she and her brother [Bailey] were old enough to start school, her parents divorced. Angelou and her brother grew up in Stamps, Arkansas," and were cared for by "their grandmother, Annie Henderson." In the autobiographical text that has been recognized as Angelou's finest,  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , the author recounts the events of her first seventeen years, and the methods of surviving the Jim Crow South taught to her by her benevolent and resilient grandmother. However, a traumatic event she endured at age ten drove her into a state of silence that was broken only by her love of literature (Hill). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings could easily be located in a feminist genre, ins...

 "All art is a kind of confession" (Gates, et al.). James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York, in 1924 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Religion had come with many African Americans from the Deep South into storefront churches along the main drags of Harlem. Born to an unmarried mother, however, James had a troubled childhood that was defined by poverty and want. When his mother married, it was David Baldwin, a lay preacher, who expounded on a gospel of a jealous and angry god. Though the boy did have a run at street preaching in his youth, he would ultimately renounce Christianity and find peace in books. The library was a quiet respite for the child whose home life had become chaotic.  The time he spent with books in his youth would pay off, as he began a promising career as a teen. He wrote for a church newsletter, as well as for his school. He would later establish relationships with such notable figures as Countee Cullen and Richard Wright, who would help cu...

Hoodoo Priestess Marie Laveau ( photo credit ). "In African American literature, the vernacular refers to the church songs, blues, ballads, sermons, stories, and, in our own era, hip-hop songs that are part of the oral, not primarily the literate (or written-down) tradition of black expression. What distinguishes this body of work is its in group and, at times, secretive, defensive, and aggressive character: it is not, generally speaking, produced for circulation beyond the black group itself (though it sometimes is bought and sold by those outside its circle)" As Gates' definition suggests, the Vernacular encompasses the cultural creations of African Americans not simply as a form of catharsis or self-expression, but as a means of resistance. African American folk expression has been defined by scholars as "double-voiced," indicating that folk songs, sermons, jokes, and other modes of expression retained a meaning for the culture--and a separate mean...

The Cult of Domesticity--or, more pejoratively-- The Cult of True Womanhood , to the codification of social, sexual, and moral behavior for women in the 19th Century from 1820 until 1860.  It was Catherine Beecher, sister to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who identified the four pillars of virtue that would hold women to behavioral convention and keep them under masculine control.  By referring to this set of beliefs as pertaining to a "cult" reveals the depth of its impact on women's lives. Below are the four pillars of modest behavior, expected of all women of the middle class.  Piety : As Victorian society was divided into separate spheres--that of men (exterior world of business and work); and that of women (the home), 19th century women were thought to represent the 'heart' of the Victorian home, and therefore were believed responsible for embodying Christian asceticism, faith, modesty, and were entrusted with the religious instruction of children. Purity :...

Photo from The Academy of American Poets Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was one of the most beloved and celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Among his many contributions, Hughes helped to "define the spirit of the age" by underscoring the connections among multiple expressive forms--namely poetry's kinship to jazz--of the era. As our text explains, Hughes's autobiography, The Big Sea offers a rare, first-hand account of the scenes, sights, and happenings of one of the most important eras in African American literary--and cultural--history (Gates et al. 1289). Born in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes hailed from an illustrious family line: as Gates points out, Hughes was the grandson of a prominent Kansas politician; and his brother, John Mercer Langston, was, among other things, "founding dean of the law school" at Howard. Despite his auspicious family tree, Langston grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, in virtual poverty. In the years that followed, Hughes wo...

Dr. Dubois by Carl Van Vechten One of the most prominent of all African  American leaders of the 20th century, William Edward Burghardt DuBois (1868-1963), a self-proclaimed "race man" was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. DuBois was educated primarily in the North at Harvard and in Germany where he prepared for his Ph.D. However, it was when attended school at Fisk that he was confronted the appalling racism prevalent in the South: an experience that helped to shape his political philosophy and life's work. By the time he became a professor at Wilberforce University in Ohio, DuBois was a published author. DuBois had made it his mission to seek out "forums beyond academe from which he could address fundamental problems of race and justice in the United States" and one of those forums was the written page.  He was published in such prestigious literary journals as The Atlantic Monthly and The Dial , and his essays focused on sociological aspects of the ...