LEGAL LANGUAGE AND LEGAL ENGLISH

PROJECT

TOPIC: WHAT IS HARLEM RENAISSANCE? (AN ESSAY)

SUBMITTED TO,

MS. PRATIMA DUBE,

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH,

GUJARAT NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY

SUBMITTED BY,

MRINMAY KUSHAL,

BATCH 20172022

REGISTRATION NUMBER: 17A088

These are the books that I have referred to
do justice to the topic in hand and to
understand the concept before I started
making this project:

Harlem Renaissance
By Nathan Irvin Huggins Oxford University Press, 2007 (Updated edition)

The Harlem Renaissance: The One and the Many

By Mark Helbling Greenwood Press, 1999

Harlem Renaissance ReExamined

By Victor A. Kramer; Robert A. Russ Whitston, 1997 (Revised edition)

Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance

By Cary D. Wintz Rice University Press, 1988

Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle : a Biography of the

Harlem Renaissance
By Verner D. Mitchell and; Cynthia Davis Rutgers University Press, 2012

Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the
Harlem Renaissance
By Cherene SherrardJohnson Rutgers University Press, 2007

New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance: Essays on Race, Gender,

and Literary Discourse
By Australia Tarver; Barnes C. Paula Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006

The Harlem Renaissance as Postcolonial Phenomenon

By Philipson, Robert African American Review, Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring 2006

Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the

Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West
By Sharon L. Jones Greenwood Press, 2002

To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem

Renaissance
By Jon Woodson University Press of Mississippi, 1999

Pages from the Harlem Renaissance: A Chronicle of Performance

By Anthony D. Hill Peter Lang, 1996
Black American Poets and Dramatists of the Harlem Renaissance
By Harold Bloom Chelsea House, 1995

New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement

By Lisa Gail Collins; Margo Natalie Crawford Rutgers University Press, 2006

Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American

Identity
By Ron Eyerman Cambridge University Press, 2001

Major Black American Writers through the Harlem Renaissance

By Harold Bloom Chelsea House, 1995

The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Writers,

19231933
By Amritjit Singh Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976
 WHAT IS HARLEM RENAISSANCE?

The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual, social, and artistic explosion that took place
in Harlem, New York, spanning the 1920s. During the time, it was known as the "New Negro
Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke. The Movement also included
the new African American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and
Midwest United States affected by the African American Great Migration, of which Harlem
was the largest. The Harlem Renaissance was considered to be a rebirth of African American
arts. Though it was centred in the Harlem neighbourhood of the borough
of Manhattan in New York City, many francophone black writers from African and
Caribbean colonies that lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance is generally considered to have spanned from about 1918 until the
mid1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro
literature", as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, took place
between 1924 and 1929.

Background

Until the end of the Civil War, the majority of African Americans had been enslaved and
lived in the South. During the Reconstruction Era, the emancipated African Americans,
freedmen, began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural
self-determination. Soon after the end of the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 gave
rise to speeches by African American Congressmen addressing this Bill. By 1875 sixteen
African Americans had been elected and served in Congress and gave numerous speeches
with their newfound civil empowerment. The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 was denounced by
black Congressmen and resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, part of
Reconstruction legislation by Republicans. By the late 1870s, Democratic whites managed to
regain power in the South. From 1890 to 1908 they proceeded to pass legislation that
disenfranchised most Negros and many poor whites, trapping them without representation.
They established white supremacist regimes of Jim Crow segregation in the South and
oneparty block voting behind southern Democrats. The Democratic whites denied African
Americans their exercise of civil and political rights by terrorizing black communities with
lynch mobs and other forms of vigilante violence as well as by instituting a convict labour
system that forced many thousands of African Americans back into unpaid labour in mines,
on plantations, and on public works projects such as roads and levees. Convict labourers were
typically subject to brutal forms of corporal punishment, overwork, and disease from
unsanitary conditions. Death rates were extraordinarily high. While a small number of blacks
were able to acquire land shortly after the Civil War, most were exploited as
sharecroppers. As life in the South became increasingly difficult, African Americans began to
migrate north in great numbers.

Most of the African American literary movement arose from a generation that had memories
of the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Sometimes their parents or
grandparents had been slaves. Their ancestors had sometimes benefited by paternal
investment in cultural capital, including better than average education. Many in the Harlem
Renaissance were part of the early 20th century Great Migration out of the South into the
Negro neighbourhoods of the North and Midwest. African Americans sought a better
standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the South. Others were
people of African descent from racially stratified communities in the Caribbean who came to
the United States hoping for a better life. Uniting most of them was their convergence in
Harlem.

Development

During the early portion of the 20th century, Harlem was the destination for migrants from
around the country, attracting both people seeking work from the South, and an educated
class who made the area a centre of culture, as well as a growing "Negro" middle class. The
district had originally been developed in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for the white
middle and upper middle classes; its affluent beginnings led to the development of stately
houses, grand avenues, and world class amenities such as the Polo Grounds and the Harlem
Opera House. During the enormous influx of European immigrants in the late 19th century,
the once exclusive district was abandoned by the white middle class, who moved farther
north.
Harlem became an African American neighbourhood in the early 1900s. In 1910, a large
block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various African American realtors
and a church group. Many more African Americans arrived during the First World War. Due
to the war, the migration of labourers from Europe virtually ceased, while the war effort
resulted in a massive demand for unskilled industrial labour. The Great Migration brought
hundreds of thousands of African Americans to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit,
and New York.

Despite the increasing popularity of Negro culture, virulent white racism, often by more
recent ethnic immigrants, continued to affect African American communities, even in the
North. After the end of World War I, many African American soldiers—who fought in
segregated units such as the Harlem Hell fighters—came home to a nation whose citizens
often did not respect their accomplishments. Race riots and other civil uprisings occurred
throughout the US during the Red Summer of 1919, reflecting economic competition over
jobs and housing in many cities, as well as tensions over social territories.

Mainstream recognition of Harlem culture

The first stage of the Harlem Renaissance started in the late 1910s. In 1917, the premiere
of Three Plays for a Negro Theatre took place. These plays, written by white
playwright Ridgeley Terrence, featured African American actors conveying complex human
emotions and yearnings. They rejected the stereotypes of the blackface and minstrel
show traditions. James Weldon Johnson in 1917 called the premieres of these plays "the most
important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American Theatre". Another
landmark came in 1919, when the poet Claude McKay published his militant sonnet, "If We
Must Die", which introduced a dramatically political dimension to the themes of African
cultural inheritance and modern urban experience featured in his 1917 poems "Invocation"
and "Harlem Dancer" (published under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, these were his first
appearance in print in the United States after immigrating from Jamaica). Although "If We
Must Die" never alluded to race, African American readers heard its note of defiance in the
face of racism and the nationwide race riots and lynching’s then taking place. By the end of
the First World War, the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and the poetry of Claude McKay
were describing the reality of contemporary African American life in America.

In 1917 Hubert Harrison, "The Father of Harlem Radicalism," founded the Liberty League
and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper, respectively, of the "New Negro
Movement." Harrison's organization and newspaper were political, but also emphasized the
arts (his newspaper had "Poetry for the People" and book review sections). In 1927, in
the Pittsburgh Courier, Harrison challenged the notion of the renaissance. He argued that the
"Negro Literary Renaissance" notion overlooked "the stream of literary and artistic products
which had flowed uninterruptedly from Negro writers from 1850 to the present," and said the
so called "renaissance" was largely a white invention.

The Harlem Renaissance grew out of the changes that had taken place in the African
American community since the abolition of slavery, as the expansion of communities in the
North. These accelerated as a consequence of World War I and the great social and cultural
changes in early 20thcentury United States. Industrialization was attracting people to cities
from rural areas and gave rise to a new mass culture. Contributing factors leading to the
Harlem Renaissance were the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities, which
concentrated ambitious people in places where they could encourage each other, and the First
World War, which had created new industrial work opportunities for tens of thousands of
people. Factors leading to the decline of this era include the Great Depression.

Religion

Christianity played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance. Many of the writers and social
critics discussed the role of Christianity in African American lives. For example, a famous
poem by Langston Hughes, "Madam and the Minister", reflects the temperature and mood
towards religion in the Harlem Renaissance. The cover story for The Crisis magazine′s
publication in May 1936 explains how important Christianity was regarding the proposed
union of the three largest Methodist churches of 1936. This article shows the controversial
question about the formation of a Union for these churches. The article "The Catholic Church
and the Negro Priest", also published in The Crisis, January 1920, demonstrates the obstacles
African American priests faced in the Catholic Church. The article confronts what it saw as
policies based on race that excluded African Americans from higher positions in the church.

Discourse

Various forms of religious worship existed during this time of African American intellectual
reawakening. Although there were racist attitudes within the current Abraham
religious arenas many African Americans continued to push towards the practice of a more
inclusive doctrine. For example, George Joseph Mac William presents various experiences,
during his pursuit towards priesthood, of rejection on the basis of his colour and race yet he
shares his frustration in attempts to incite action on the part of The Crisis magazine
community.

There were other forms of spiritualism practiced among African Americans during the
Harlem Renaissance. Some of these religions and philosophies were inherited from African
ancestry.

For example, the religion of Islam was present in Africa as early as the 8th century through
the Trans Saharan trade. Islam came to Harlem likely through the migration of members of
the Moorish Science Temple of America, which was established in 1913 in New Jersey.

Various forms of Judaism were practiced, including Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform

Judaism, but it was Black Hebrew Israelites that founded their religious belief system during
the early 20th century in the Harlem Renaissance.

Traditional forms of religion acquired from various parts of Africa were inherited and
practiced during this era. Some common examples were Voodoo and Sanitaria.

Criticism

Religious critique during this era was found in literature, art, and poetry. The Harlem
Renaissance encouraged analytic dialogue that included the open critique and the adjustment
of current religious ideas.

One of the major contributors to the discussion of African American renaissance culture
was Aaron Douglas who, with his artwork, also reflected the revisions African Americans
were making to the Christian dogma. Douglas uses biblical imagery as inspiration to various
pieces of art work but with the rebellious twist of an African influence.

Counted Cullen's poem "Heritage" expresses the inner struggle of an African American
between his past African heritage and the new Christian culture. A more severe criticism of
the Christian religion can be found in Langston Hughes' poem "Merry Christmas", where he
exposes the irony of religion as a symbol for good and yet a force for oppression and
injustice.

Music
A new way of playing the piano called the Harlem Stride style was created during the Harlem
Renaissance, and helped blur the lines between the poor Negroes and socially elite Negroes.
The traditional jazz band was composed primarily of brass instruments and was considered a
symbol of the south, but the piano was considered an instrument of the wealthy. With this
instrumental modification to the existing genre, the wealthy blacks now had more access to
jazz music. Its popularity soon spread throughout the country and was consequently at an all
time high. Innovation and liveliness were important characteristics of performers in the
beginnings of jazz. Jazz musicians at the time such as Euboea Blake, Jelly Roll
Morton, Lucky Roberts, James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Fats Waller and Duke
Ellington were very talented, skilful, competitive and inspirational, and are still being
considered to have laid great parts of the foundations for future musicians of their
genre.  Duke Ellington gained popularity during the Harlem Renaissance. According to
Charles Garrett, "The resulting portrait of Ellington reveals him to be not only the gifted
composer, bandleader, and musician we have come to know, but also an earthly person with
basic desires, weaknesses, and eccentricities." Ellington did not let his popularity get to him.
He remained calm and focused on his music.

During this period, the musical style of blacks was becoming more and more attractive to
whites. White novelists, dramatists and composers started to exploit the musical tendencies
and themes of African Americans in their works. Composers used poems written by African
American poets in their songs, and would implement the rhythms, harmonies and melodies of
African American music—such as blues, spirituals, and jazz—into their concert pieces.
Negroes began to merge with Whites into the classical world of musical composition. The
first Negro male to gain wide recognition as a concert artist in both his region and
internationally was Roland Hayes. He trained with Arthur Calhoun in Chattanooga, and at
Fisk University in Nashville. Later, he studied with Arthur Hubbard in Boston and
with George Herschel and Amanda Ira Aldridge in London, England. He began singing in
public as a student, and toured with the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1911.

Fashion

During the Harlem Renaissance, Black America’s clothing scene took a dramatic turn from
the prim and proper. Many young women preferred extreme versions of current white
fashions from short skirts and silk stockings to drop waited dresses and cloche hats. The
extraordinarily successful black dancer Josephine Baker, though performing in Paris during
the height of the Renaissance, was a major fashion trendsetter for black and white women
alike. Her gowns from the couturier Jean Palou were much copied, especially her stage
costumes, which Vogue magazine called "startling." Popular by the 1930s was a trendy, egret
trimmed beret. Men wore loose suits that led to the later style known as the "Soot," which
consisted of wide legged, high waited, peg top trousers, and a long coat with padded
shoulders and wide lapels. Men also wore wide brimmed hats, collared socks, white gloves,
and velvet collared Chesterfield coats. During this period, African Americans expressed
respect for their heritage through a fad for leopard skin coats, indicating the power of the
African animal.

Characteristics and themes

Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride that came to be represented
in the idea of the New Negro, who through intellect and production of literature, art, and
music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes to
promote progressive or socialist politics, and racial and social integration. The creation of art
and literature would serve to "uplift" the race.

There would be no uniting form singularly characterizing the art that emerged from the
Harlem Renaissance. Rather, it encompassed a wide variety of cultural elements and styles,
including a Pan African perspective, "high culture" and "low culture" or "lowlife," from the
traditional form of music to the blues and jazz, traditional and new experimental forms in
literature such as modernism and the new form of jazz poetry. This duality meant that
numerous African American artists came into conflict with conservatives in the black
intelligentsia, who took issue with certain depictions of black life.

Some common themes represented during the Harlem Renaissance were the influence of the
experience of slavery and emerging African American folk traditions on black identity, the
effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas inherent in performing and writing for elite white
audiences, and the question of how to convey the experience of modern black life in the
urban North.

The Harlem Renaissance was one of primarily African American involvement. It rested on a
support system of black patrons, black owned businesses and publications. However, it also
depended on the patronage of white Americans, such as Carl Van Vetches and Charlotte
Osgood Mason, who provided various forms of assistance, opening doors which otherwise
might have remained closed to the publication of work outside the black American
community. This support often took the form of patronage or publication. Carl Van Vechten
was one of the most noteworthy white Americans involved with the Harlem Renaissance. He
allowed for assistance to the black American community because he wanted racial sameness.

There were other whites interested in so called "primitive" cultures, as many whites viewed
black American culture at that time, and wanted to see such "primitivism" in the work
coming out of the Harlem Renaissance. As with most fads, some people may have been
exploited in the rush for publicity.

Interest in African American lives also generated experimental but lasting collaborative work,
such as the all black productions of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess, and Virgil
Thomson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts. In both productions the choral
conductor Eva Jessie was part of the creative team. Her choir was featured in Four
Saints. The music world also found white band leaders defying racist attitudes to include the
best and the brightest African American stars of music and song in their productions.

The African Americans used art to prove their humanity and demand for equality. The
Harlem Renaissance led to more opportunities for blacks to be published by mainstream
houses. Many authors began to publish novels, magazines and newspapers during this time.
The new fiction attracted a great amount of attention from the nation at large. Among authors
who became nationally known were Jean Toomey, Jessie Faucet, Claude McKay, Zara Neale
Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Omar Al Amir, Eric D. Warlord and Langston
Hughes.

The Harlem Renaissance helped lay the foundation for the post World War II protest
movement of the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, many black artists who rose to creative
maturity afterward were inspired by this literary movement.

The Renaissance was more than a literary or artistic movement, as it possessed a certain
sociological development particularly through a new racial consciousness through ethnic
pride, as seen in the Back to Africa movement led by Marcus Garvey. At the same time, a
different expression of ethnic pride, promoted by W. E. B. Du Bois, introduced the notion of
the "talented tenth": the African Americans who were fortunate enough to inherit money or
property or obtain a college degree during the transition from Reconstruction to the Jim
Crow period of the early twentieth century. These "talented tenth" were considered the finest
examples of the worth of black Americans as a response to the rampant racism of the period.
(No particular leadership was assigned to the talented tenth, but they were to be emulated.) In
both literature and popular discussion, complex ideas such as Du Boise’s concept of "twines"
(dualism) were introduced (see The Souls of Black Folk; 1903). Du Bois explored a divided
awareness of one's identity that was a unique critique of the social ramifications of racial
consciousness. This exploration was later revived during the Black Pride movement of the
early 1970s.

Influence

A New Black Identity

"Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes
me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me."  Zara
Neale Hurston.

The Harlem Renaissance was successful in that it brought the Black experience clearly within
the corpus of American cultural history. Not only through an explosion of culture, but on
a sociological level, had the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance redefined how America, and
the world, viewed African Americans. The migration of southern Blacks to the north changed
the image of the African American from rural, undereducated peasants to one of urban,
cosmopolitan sophistication. This new identity led to a greater social consciousness, and
African Americans became players on the world stage, expanding intellectual and social
contacts internationally.

The progress both symbolic and real during this period became a point of reference from
which the African American community gained a spirit of self determination that provided a
growing sense of both Black urbanity and Black militancy, as well as a foundation for the
community to build upon for the Civil Rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s.

The urban setting of rapidly developing Harlem provided a venue for African Americans of
all backgrounds to appreciate the variety of Black life and culture. Through this expression,
the Harlem Renaissance encouraged the new appreciation of folk roots and culture. For
instance, folk materials and spirituals provided a rich source for the artistic and intellectual
imagination, which freed Blacks from the establishment of past condition. Through sharing in
these cultural experiences, a consciousness sprung forth in the form of a united racial identity.

However, there was some pressure within certain groups of the Harlem Renaissance to adopt
sentiments of conservative white America in order to be taken seriously by the mainstream. It
was within these venues that the blues music scene boomed, and since it had not yet gained
recognition within popular culture, queer artists used it as a way to express themselves
honestly. Even though there were factions within the Renaissance that were accepting of
queer culture/lifestyles, one could still be arrested for engaging in homosexual acts. Many
people, including author Alice Dunbar Nelson and “The Mother of Blues” Gertrude “Ma”
Rainey, had husbands but were romantically linked to other women as well. Ma Rainey was
known to dress in traditionally male clothing and her blues lyrics often reflected her sexual
proclivities for women, which was extremely radical at the time. Ma Rainey was also the first
person to introduce blues music into vaudeville. Rainey’s protégé, Bessie Smith was another
artist who used the blues as a way to express herself with such lines as "When you see two
women walking hand in hand, just look me’ over and try to understand: They’ll go to those
parties have the lights down low – only those parties where women can go."

Another prominent blues singer was Gladys Bentley, who was known to cross dress. Bentley
was the club owner of Clam House on 133rd Street in Harlem, which was a hub for queer
patrons. The Hamilton Lodge in Harlem hosted an annual drag ball that attracted thousands to
watch as a couple hundred young men came to dance the night away in drag. Though there
were safe havens within Harlem, there were prominent voices such as that of Abyssinian
Baptist Church’s minister Adam Clayton who actively campaigned against homosexuality.

The Harlem Renaissance gave birth to the idea of The New Negro. The New Negro
movement was an effort to define what it meant to be African American by African
Americans rather than let the degrading stereotypes and caricatures found in black face
minstrelsy practices to do so. There was also The None Negro movement, which not only
challenged racial definitions and stereotypes, but also sought to challenge gender roles,
normative sexuality, and sexism in America in general. In this respect, the Harlem
Renaissance was far ahead of the rest of America in terms of embracing feminism and queer
culture. These ideals received some push back as freedom of sexuality, particularly pertaining
to women (which during the time in Harlem were known as women loving women), were
seen as confirming the stereotype that black women were loose and lacked sexual
discernment. The black bourgeoisie saw this as hampering the cause of black people in
America and giving fuel to the fire of racist sentiments around the country. Yet for all of the
efforts by both sectors of white and conservative black America, queer culture and artists
defined major portions of not only the Harlem Renaissance, but also defined so much of our
culture today. Author of "The Black Man’s Burden", Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote on this
very subject matter, the Harlem Renaissance "was surely as gay as it was black".

Criticism of the movement

Many critics point out that the Harlem Renaissance could not escape its history and culture in
its attempt to create a new one, or sufficiently separate from the foundational elements of
White, European culture. Often Harlem intellectuals, while proclaiming a new racial
consciousness, resorted to mimicry of their white counterparts by adopting their clothing,
sophisticated manners and etiquette. This "mimicry" may also be called assimilation, as that
is typically what minority members of any social construct must do in order to fit social
norms created by that construct's majority. This could be seen as a reason that the artistic and
cultural products of the Harlem Renaissance did not overcome the presence of White
American values, and did not reject these values. In this regard, the creation of the "New
Negro" as the Harlem intellectuals sought was considered a success.

The Harlem Renaissance appealed to a mixed audience. The literature appealed to the African

American middle class and to whites. Magazines such as The Crisis, a monthly journal of
the NAACP, and Opportunity, an official publication of the National Urban League,
employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staffs; published poetry and short
stories by black writers; and promoted African American literature through articles, reviews,
and annual literary prizes. As important as these literary outlets were, however, the
Renaissance relied heavily on white publishing houses and white owned magazines. A major
accomplishment of the Renaissance was to open the door to mainstream white periodicals
and publishing houses, although the relationship between the Renaissance writers and white
publishers and audiences created some controversy. W. E. B. Du Bois did not oppose the
relationship between black writers and white publishers, but he was critical of works such
as Claude McKay's bestselling novel Home to Harlem (1928) for appealing to the "prurient
demand" of white readers and publishers for portrayals of black "licentiousness". Langston
Hughes spoke for most of the writers and artists when he wrote in his essay "The Negro
Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926) that black artists intended to express themselves
freely, no matter what the black public or white public thought. Hughes in his writings also
returned to the theme of racial passing, but during the Harlem Renaissance, he began to
explore the topic of homosexuality and homophobia. He began to use disruptive language in
his writings. He explored this topic because it was a theme that during this time period was
not discussed.

African American musicians and other performers also played to mixed audiences. Harlem's
cabarets and clubs attracted both Harlem residents and white New Yorkers seeking out
Harlem nightlife. Harlem's famous Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington performed, carried
this to an extreme, by providing black entertainment for exclusively white audiences.
Ultimately, the more successful black musicians and entertainers who appealed to a
mainstream audience moved their performances downtown.

Certain aspects of the Harlem Renaissance were accepted without debate, and without
scrutiny. One of these was the future of the "New Negro". Artists and intellectuals of the
Harlem Renaissance echoed American progressivism in its faith in democratic reform, in its
belief in art and literature as agents of change, and in its almost uncritical belief in itself and
its future. This progressive’s worldview rendered Black intellectuals just like their White
counterparts unprepared for the rude shock of the Great Depression, and the Harlem
Renaissance ended abruptly because of naive assumptions about the centrality of culture,
unrelated to economic and social realities.