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The Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement as it was called,
was one of the richest and most complex artistic eras in American
history. Characterized by an explosive energy, the artistic, literary,
and philosophical movements taking place among African Americans
during the 1920s took Harlem as a center. The neighborhood, consisting
of some two square miles in Manhattan, was both a literal and metaphoric
African-American national capital, the hub of political, social,
creative, and intellectual activities. The unprecedented numbers
of men and women who migrated to Harlem from all over the country
in the first decades of the twentieth century included artists and
writers, musicians and dancers, intellectuals and activists. The
New Negro Movement, however, was not confined to Harlem; rather,
it flourished in many parts of the country, especially in Washington,
Chicago, and in the American South. Some might even argue that the
Harlem Renaissance blossomed, too, among American expatriates in
Europe. The Harlem Renaissance was a sweeping intellectual and social
movement that, though it may have radiated from uptown Manhattan,
affected the whole of American culture.
In Harlem and in other cities, women artists, writers, and hostesses
helped to define the Renaissance, playing major roles in creating,
supporting, and promoting African-American arts and letters. Women
of this period were especially important in building centers of
the New Negro Movement outside of New York City, because women were
more likely than men to be tied to home and family by obligation,
social mores, or economic dependence, and so were often unable to
find their way to Harlem. Georgia
Douglas Johnson, for example, a wife and mother as well
as a poet, hosted a Saturday evening salon in her Washington home
that was, for several decades, a regular meeting place for African-American
writers. Fiction writer Marita
Bonner grew up in Boston, worked as a schoolteacher in Washington,
and married and raised a family in Chicago. Artist Mary
Bell spent the 1920s working as a domestic servant in
Boston.
Eslanda Robeson, writer and wife
of entertainer Paul Robeson, acted as her husband’s agent and
manager and so followed his career from Harlem to London and Switzerland.
Of course, many women artists and thinkers did join the artistic
and intellectual community in Harlem. Augusta
Savage, perhaps the most important sculptor of the Renaissance,
moved to Harlem from Florida in 1922. Writer and anthropologist
Zora
Neale Hurston also relocated from Florida to New York;
sponsored by Charlotte
Osgood Mason, a wealthy white patron, Hurston
was to spend nearly as much time on research trips in the American
South, Haiti, and Jamaica as she did in Harlem. Novelist Nella
Larsen and Jessie
Redmon Fauset, literary editor of The Crisis,
were both central figures of the 1920s Harlem literary scene. Singer
and actress
Ethel Waters became a star in Harlem’s
popular clubs and on Broadway in the late 1920s. Heiress A’Lelia
Walker was perhaps Harlem’s most celebrated hostess
of the day, entertaining the African-American elite along with influential
whites and even European royalty in her Harlem mansion at 108-110
West 136th Street. Grace
Nail Johnson, wife of writer and civil-rights activist
James Weldon Johnson, was a hostess in her own right, referred to
by many as the “grand dame” of Harlem.
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