Youth/ OPINION : The Lessons of the Harlem Renaissance

In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics. --Frederick Jackson Turner

Indeed, America is the crucible in which the people of the world are combined. Too often, however, when racial and ethnic hatred arise to heat this crucible, great individuals and ideas go unheard. Such is the case of the literary history of African-Americans, in particular the bittersweet results of the Harlem Renaissance. Had we been more receptive to their ideas and talent, our culture would have been enriched much earlier.

To understand the Harlem Renaissance, we must first examine the history of the African-American’s socioeconomic plight. After Reconstruction, a terrible fire burned through the United States, especially in the South--a fire of prejudice, hatred and segregation. Despite the 14th and 15th Amendments, which theoretically guaranteed former slaves citizenship and the vote, the heat of this fire essentially established blacks as second-class citizens.

Immersed in a climate of racism, the Ku Klux Klan, nativism and pessimism, by the 1920s few black intellectuals still believed that the future of their race lay in the South; they intrepidly “turned North and focused their hope on the emerging black communities in Northern cities.” With the promise of jobs and greater freedom, masses of people migrated to large cities like New York, congregating in slum communities like Harlem. This life, according to writer Cary D. Wintz, “was the experience that bound the otherwise diverse participants to one another.”

For the “New Negro” of the 1920s, Harlem was the mecca of the black world, the capital of black America.

Out of this common backdrop and history came a new kind of blaze--the fire of creativity, identity and hope--as great writers like Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes captured the unifying spirit of the New Negro--a spirit that would reject the “darky” of American minstrelsy and slavery, the ebony beast of “The Birth of a Nation” and the foolish characters of the poor novels of the “Negro Nadir.” But above all, the Harlem Renaissance gave blacks dignity and courage in their struggle. This idea is well-expressed by McKay in his 1919 sonnet, “If We Must Die.”

“Like men,” he writes, “we’ll face the murderous cowardly pack. Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Similarly, an editor of “Fire,” an organ of the Harlem movement, effectively captured the sentiment of this courageous struggle against prejudice--the “Fy-ah, Fy-ah, Lawd, Fy-ah gonna burn ma soul”--that had subjugated the black race. So it was with a common courageous spirit that the Harlem Renaissance writer “gave expression to his or her own vision,” embodying a dream that literature would free humankind and bring pride into the hearts of a troubled people.

Harlem Renaissance novels were disparaged by contemporary critics, one of whom wrote: “Their (Renaissance writers’) novels come and go; in 10 years they are forgotten.” Yet even in the short term, the Harlem Renaissance created journalistic and literary opportunities for blacks. After the Renaissance, for instance, articles by black writers were accepted in the formerly lily-white Saturday Evening Post. Most of all, the movement planted the seed of protest for (people) like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Unfortunately, it would be the 1960s before African-American literature was “brought into the mainstream of literary criticism” by the civil rights and black power movements.

Ultimately, the goals of Harlem Renaissance writers--that “black literature would be the vehicle that ended discrimination and eased the transition from the South to urban America”--were not realized, for the ephemeral “Negro vogue, the white invasion of black literature, did not cause the majority of whites to re-evaluate their racial prejudice,” wrote George S. Schuyler in The Nation in 1926. Though the movement did encourage a new sense of pride in black heritage, in the eyes of most Americans, Negroes remained “lesser.”

African-Americans, and, indeed, many subjugated people have been left only with the hope Hughes captured so well: “We will build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” If we are to build a more livable community, it is time “tomorrow” arrives.

Sadly, the Hugheses of the black community are only now being widely accepted by critics and the public alike. Had a writer like Toni Morrison (winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature) lived in the 1920s, we might never have heard of her. Fortunately, in recent years such brilliant writers have begun to gain acceptance--and often they offer wisdom that is the key to harmony and tolerance. With this wisdom, as well as education and awareness, we can feed the fire of creativity and tolerance--not a fire of destruction such as that which raged last year in Los Angeles, when anger tore the fabric of society, nor (one) of subjugation and prejudice that has burdened African-Americans since Colonial times. Rather let us enhance the fire of creativity that ultimately leads to unity; if we have the insight and the spirit to learn from past experiences, in America we can construct a new crucible that blends color, values and people. We must never again ignore a group’s contributions based on their color or beliefs.

Pilate, one of Morrison’s characters from “Song of Solomon,” echoes this spirit when she says, “I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ‘em all.” We must kindle this new blaze of acceptance and tolerance--one that includes all creeds and colors; when this blaze heats the American crucible, gold will emerge.