In African American history, the period immediately following World War I is called the Harlem Renaissance. This is basically 1920-1929. A renaissance is a rebirth. Essentially this is the Nineteen Twenties. It was a cultural reawakening, especially in music and literature. This was made possible by the mass migration of blacks to the North, creating a black consumer market and the greater freedom of the North.

The Apollo Theatre and the Cotton Club in Harlem thrived as centers of black entertainment. White people, too, came to Harlem for the music and entertainment. The African American musical Shuffle Along appeared in 1921. It was written and produced by African Americans. F.E. Miller, Aubrey Lyle, Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. The musical launched the career of singer Florence Mills. The most famous song from the production was "I'm Just Wild About Harry." (JHF, Slavery To Freedom, p. 374. It was enormously popular, and crossed over, and when it reached Broadway it featured whites in blackface. In 1923 Lyle and Miller followed this success with a musical called Runnin' Wild. It featured a song and dance which had been handed down from generation to generation among the slaves. This dance became the Charleston. The premier African American film maker of this period was Oscar Micheaux. He had his own production company, called Oscar Micheaux Company, where he produced more than thirty silent movies until he went bankrupt in the Depression of 1929. His first film was called Birthright, in 1918. His most famous film is probably Body and Soul, produced in 1925, which featured Paul Robeson. Talking films were very expensive to produce, and it cost 20,000 to re-equip each theatre, so it was hard for Micheaux and black producers to keep up in the Thirties. By the Fifites there were no black-owned film production companies at all. (See Black Film, White Money, by Jesse Rhines). After the Thirties, there would be no films about black people, by black people, until Melvin Van Peebles produced Sweetback about 1970, followed by The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks.

MUSIC IN THE TWENTIES

This was the age of jazz, and blues, and Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Jelly Roll Morton, Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Josephine Baker, were all on the scene simultaneously in the Twenties Billie Holiday (Eleanora Fagan) began singing in 1930 (recorded her first song with Benny Goodman in 1933, appeared at Apollo in 1935). Her life was immortalized by the film Lady Sings The Blues. Ella Fitzgerald began singing in 1935.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

In literature, writers such as James Weldon Johnson (Book of American Negro Poetry, 1922) and Alain Locke (The New Negro, 1925) published their works. Johnson is remembered for a song he composed, "Lift Every Voice And Sing," sometimes referred to as the black national anthem [see photograph, Franklin, p. 366] There were also the poets such, as Claude McKay (Harlem Shadows, 1922; the novel Home To Harlem, 1928) [see photograph, p. 365], Countee Cullen (Color, 1925) and Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues, 1926). There is a photograph of Hughes on p. 369. Hughes is the best known and most popular of the Harlem Renaissance poets, and is called the poet laureate of the period. His poems include "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair" and "I, Too Sing America," and "What Happens to a Dream Deferred?" [see JHF, Slavery To Freedom, p. 369]. Two women authors of the period were Jessie Fausett (There Is Confusion, 1922); and Nella Larsen (Quicksand, 1928) and (Passing, 1929). These books dealt with the theme of the so-called tragic mulatto, caught between the black world and the white world. For the characters, trying to pass in the white world always beings heartache and death. Another very lyrical writer of the Harlem Renaissance was Jean Toomer (a man), who wrote Cane in 1923.

The Depression of 1929 brings us to a new period of history, but in the Thirties two other very important African American writers emerged on the scene. One was Zora Neale Hurston. She wrote Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Mules And Men (1935); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). [See photograph, p. 379]. The puritans in the NAACP and elsewhere criticized her work because it was too "earthy." The second writer was Richard Wright, who published Native Son in 1940.

ART

The most famous African American artist from 1900 to 1940 was Henry Ossawa Tanner. He had first come to the attention of the world when he exhibited paintings at the Paris Exposition of 1900. His most famous painting is called "The Banjo Lesson." It was painted in 1903. It shows an older black man teaching a boy to play the banjo. Perhaps this man is the child's father. It is a symbol of paternal love and nurturance, contrary to the stereotype of the absent or indifferent black male father figure. It is shown following p. 380 of your textbook.

Another significant artist was Aaron Douglass, famous for the murals at Fisk University Library in 1929 [see JHF, From Slavery To Freedom, p. 375].

WHITE LITERATURE ABOUT AFRICAN AMERICANS

Also in the twenties it became fashionable for white writers to write plays about black people. The most famous example of this genre was Porgy, featuring Porgy and Bess, written by DuBose Heyward and Dorothy Heyward [see JHF, From Slavery To Freedom, p. 372-373]. It was a depiction of black life in Charleston, and has been called a black version of Carmen (but written by whites about blacks). In 1926 Carl Van Vechten, a prominent white patron of African Americans and the Harlem Renaissance, published a novel called Nigger Heaven, about the Harlem underworld. Critics dismissed it as too full of gangsters, cabarets, jazz and gin. It had about it too much of the street. For Van Vechten, Harlem was exotic and primitive, which was exciting and entertaining. Du Bois felt it stigmatized and stereotyped black people as low-lifes. He said Van Vechten was an authority on dives and cabarets. The decent, respectable, church-going black middle class didn't like this type of material, whether the authors were black or white, because it did not present a positive image and it did not show the "race" with its "best foot forward." Van Vechten's image was a distorted image. But unless black people themselves produce literature and plays and films about themselves, the images will always be distorted. That is why, today, Spike Lee and John Singleton are so significant, although it could be argued that Steven Spielberg has produced decent films about black people (Amistad) even though he is white.