Historian+12

=**Harlem Renaissance History**=

The Harlem Renaissance was shaped by the Great Migration. The movement was the result of increased industrialization in the North and the limitations of the rural South, it greatly impacted race relations in the United States. Seeking jobs and a better way of life than what was offered in the South, African Americans began moving to northern cities during the early 20th century. Migration to urban centers and an increase in jazz clubs and black publishing were occurring in the Caribbean and Europe as well. Urban African-American intellectuals and activists rejected the stereotypes that had bound rural workers and called for a new investigation of black life and culture that depicted real experience. At the same time, respect for the artistic achievements of African Americans grew as their literature, art, and music flourished. Not only fiction, poetry, and drama, but also critical essays and political analyses were shared through such periodical literature as “ The Crisis”. Writers like anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, poet Countee Cullen, and novelist and songwriter James Weldon Johnson produced great art as they explored new perspectives from which to evaluate the place of African Americans in U.S. Society.  The impact the Harlem Renaissance had on the African-American community was a show of achievement in art, writing, and music. By leaving the South, many blacks gained the right the vote, the right to attend integrated schools and enjoy integrated public accommodations, and the opportunity to hold political office. Economically, African-Americans continued to earn considerably less than whites, usually under worse conditions, but their standard of living improved from that in the rural South. Between 1940 and 1970, the mean income for African-American men tripled, home ownershipdoubled, and more African Americans completed school.The increased opportunities for African Americans in the North fueled the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The South was unstable due to the loss of workers from the Great Migration, which contributed to the movement, and expectations were higher by the changes experienced in the North and West.People in the North became aware of the racial injustices in their communities as things grewheated in the South, however, and the tensions of ghetto life led to race riots in thenorthern cities that African Americans had migrated to. Nonetheless, the Great Migration helped to make race relations a national problem rather than just a Southern one, and it greatly impacted the lives of African Americans. There were many black leaders during the Harlem Renaissance. Such as W.E.B DuBois and Booker T. Washington. Booker T. Washington was born a slave in Hale's Ford, Virginia, reportedly on April 5, 1856. After emancipation, his family was so stricken with poverty that he worked in salt furnaces and coal mines at the age of nine. When he was 16 his parents allowed him to quit work to go to school. They had no money to help him, so he walked 200 miles to attend the Hampton Institute in Virginia and paid his tuition and board there by working as the janitor. Dedicating himself to the idea that education would raise his people to equality in this country, Washington became a teacher. He first taught in his home town, then at the Hampton Institute. In 1881, he founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. As head of the Institute, he traveled the country unceasingly to raise funds from blacks and whites both; soon he became a well-known speaker. In 1895, Washington was asked to speak at the opening of the Cotton States Exposition, an unprecedented honor for an African American. His Atlanta Compromise speech explained his major thesis, that blacks could secure their constitutional rights through their own economic and moral advancement rather than through legal and political changes. Although his conciliatory stand angered some blacks who feared it would encourage the foes of equal rights, whites approved of his views. Thus his major achievement was to win over diverse elements among Southern whites, without the support the programs he envisioned and had brought into being would have been impossible. Washington helped to establish the National Negro Business League. Shortly after the election of President William McKinley in 1896, a movement was set in motion that Washington be named to a cabinet post, but he withdrew his name from consideration, preferring to work outside the political arena. He died on November 14, 1915. Another leader, black American historian and sociologist, W.E.D. Dubois who helped lead the way to civil rights, the Pan-American, and the Black Power movement in the United States. DuBois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He grew up with more privileges and advantages than most blacks during that time. He graduated high school at the age of sixteen and attended Fisk University, and later received a doctoral degree for Harvard University. During his college years, DuBois developed his racial consciousness and wanted to improve the conditions for all 

 blacks. He wrote collections of essays in which he described the key themes of the black experience, especially the "efforts of black Americans to reconcile their African heritage with their pride in being United States citizens". DuBois also challenged the views of Booker T. Washington. DuBois, unlike Washington, did not believe in compromising with the whites in politics and education. He believed inequality of economic and educational opportunities for blacks, and end to segregation, and the prohibition of discrimination in courts, public facilities, and trade unions. DuBois was also one of the founding fathers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). All DuBois's efforts in racial equality have been celebrated and remembered.

**Works Cited:**
**[]** **http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1988/2/88.02.02.x.html** **http://teachers.sheboygan.k12.wi.us/tgentine/documents/HarlemRenaissance.pdf** **http://asms.k12.ar.us/classes/humanities/amstud/97-98/harren/LEADERS.HTM**