Some in the community derided the existence of such clubs, while others believed they were a sign that Black culture was moving toward greater acceptance. The most successful of these was the Cotton Club, which featured frequent performances by Ellington and Calloway. While it was fashionable to frequent Harlem nightlife, entrepreneurs realized that some white people wanted to experience Black culture without having to socialize with African Americans and created clubs to cater to them. The Savoy opened in 1927, an integrated ballroom with two bandstands that featured continuous jazz and dancing well past midnight, sometimes in the form of battling bands helmed by Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford and King Oliver. With the groundbreaking new music came vibrant nightlife. Tap dancers like John Bubbles and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson were also popular. Some of the most celebrated names in American music regularly performed in Harlem- Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, often accompanied by elaborate floor shows. Jazz became a great draw for not only Harlem residents but outside white audiences also. The music that percolated in and then boomed out of Harlem in the 1920s was jazz, often played at speakeasies offering illegal liquor. Cullen’s reviews for Opportunity magazine, which ran under the column "Dark Tower," focused on works from the African-American literati and covered some of the biggest names of the age. Their wedding was a major social event in Harlem. He followed it up with Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown Girl and went on to write plays as well as children’s books.Ĭullen received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry and married Nina Yolande, the daughter of W.E.B. The neighborhood and its culture informed his poetry, and as a college student at New York University, he obtained prizes in a number of poetry contests before going on to Harvard’s master's program and publishing his first volume of poetry: Color. Cullen, the pastor of Harlem’s largest congregation, in 1918. Countee Cullen was 15 when he moved into the Harlem home of Reverend Frederick A. Poetry, too, flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. Soon many writers found their work appearing in mainstream magazines like Harper’s. Hughes was at that party along with other promising Black writers and editors, as well as powerful white New York publishing figures. Sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, who was integral in shaping the Harlem literary scene, used the debut party for There Is Confusion to organize resources to create Opportunity, the National Urban League magazine he founded and edited, a success that bolstered writers like Langston Hughes. Fauset was the literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis and developed a magazine for Black children with Du Bois. Novelist and du Bois protege Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1924 novel There Is Confusion explored the idea of Black Americans finding a cultural identity in a white-dominated Manhattan. Civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man in 1912, followed b y God’s Trombones in 1927, left their mark on the world of fiction. Two of the earliest breakthroughs were in poetry, with Claude McKay’s collection Harlem Shadows in 1922 and Jean Toomer’s Cane in 1923. This considerable population shift resulted in a Black Pride movement with leaders like Du Bois working to ensure that Black Americans got the credit they deserved for cultural areas of life. Additionally, during and after World War I, immigration to the United States fell, and northern recruiters headed south to entice Black workers to their companies.īy 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the South had moved north, and Harlem was one of the most popular destinations for these families. In 19, natural disasters in the south put Black workers and sharecroppers out of work. Du Bois leading what became known as the Great Migration. Outside factors led to a population boom: From 1910 to 1920, African American populations migrated in large numbers from the South to the North, with prominent figures like W.E.B.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |