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The Harlem Renaissance (known then as the "New Negro Renaissance" refers to the period of artistic boon that occurred in Harlem, New York from 1919 till 1929. A number of events can be said to have led to the birth of the Renaissance: initially, the mass movement of southern blacks from the Jim Crow South to the North--or Great Migration--contributed to a population swell and competition for jobs in cities like Harlem, Boston, Philadelphia, and Manhattan. Marcus Garvey is credited with having been a major influence on the Renaissance, as he rallied African Americans around a political campaign none had ever seen the likes of before. A newly discovered sense of unity began to form, followed by an emphasis on black nationalism in politics, a demand for deeper intellectual insight into the problems of African Americans, and a growing economy that arose from black entrepreneurship. All of these developments contributed in their own ways to the emergence of the Renaissance. ...

William Wells Brown was born into slavery in Lexington, Kentucky in 1814. His mother, known only as "Elizabeth," was the slave of a prominent physician there named Dr. Young. Elizabeth had a total of seven children: Elizabeth, Leander, Benjamin, Joseph, Solomon, Milford, and William. Bought and sold several times before the age of twenty, William Wells Brown spent much of his young adulthood in St. Louis, where he was forced into work in the slave trade along the Missouri River. Finally in 1834, Brown escaped slavery and headed North. After gaining his freedom, Brown married Elizabeth Schooner and the couple had three children. Between 1834 and 1845, Brown relocated to Buffalo, New York where he served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. He worked as a steam boatman on Lake Erie, where he would ferry escaped slaves to Canada ( 1 ). By 1849, Brown traveled abroad to England, where he became a prominent speaker on the issue of Prohibition, and later, abolition. ...

Richard Wright (1908-1960) "Generally speaking, Negro writing in the past has been confined to humble novels, poems, and plays, prim and decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to white America. They entered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of other people. For the most part these artistic ambassadors were received as though they were French poodles who do clever tricks" ( Blueprint for Negro Writing: The Role of Negro Writing... 1403). When Richard Wright penned these words, he embarked on two distinct, yet interrelated projects: first, the writing of "the past" to which he refers here was clearly an indictment of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance and their widespread dependency on white patrons. Second, Wright's call for a new theory of African American writing was germinating: it was a theor...

Nella Larsen (1893-1964). Born to a Danish mother and a West Indian father, Nella Larsen didn't begin her professional life as a writer: instead, she attended the Nurse Training School at Tuskegee, and then headed north to work for the New York Health Department. In 1921, Larsen left the nursing profession to work at the New York Library. By this time, she had already become a fixture in the Harlem literary scene, appearing at events, and publishing short fiction pieces, essays, and magazine reviews (Gates, et al., 1079). Referred to as "Madame X" for the scarcity of details about her personal life, Larsen's fiction tells volumes about life as a woman navigating the boundaries of race in the modern world. However varied her professional life may have been, it was her parentage, one surmises, that had the greatest influence on her writing. While many writers shrink at the notion that their work might have some autobiographical nuance, it seems clear that Larsen...

"I cannot read a book but I can read the people." Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), was born a slave in Hurley, Ulster County, New York to James and Elizabeth, slaves owned by the wealthy Dutch landowner and patron, Johannes Hardenbergh, Jr. Her narrative, penned by amanuensis Olive Wilson, relates her early trials as she was separated from her parents and subject to numerous beatings and mistreatment by subsequent owners. She was sold from the Hardenbergh family into a second Dutch family who were vexed by her inability to speak English. Known as "Isabella," Sojourner changed hands several times and came of age in the household of John I. Dumont, where she was often burdened with the chores of two people. It has been said that she was strong, tall, and stout, and able to outwork most men. One slaveholder commented that she was "better than a man--for she will do a good family's washing in the night, and be ready in the morning to go into the field, wher...

"We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity" (Harper). Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was born in Baltimore, MD, a slave state at the time of her birth. Harper, like her parents, was free. Orphaned at the age of three, she went to live with her mother's sister and her husband, William Watkins, an early civil rights activist. It was alongside her uncle that Harper commenced her devotion to civil rights causes by aiding him as a conductor on the Underground Railroad--thus defying the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Watkins was a minister and ran a school for African American youth. There, young Frances received an "uncommonly thorough education...she showed promise in writing and elocution, a strong interest in radical politics and religion, and a special sense of responsibility and devotion to lofty ideals" (Gates, et al. 491). By the age of twenty, Harper had published her first volume of poetry. Though she gained popularity and h...