The Harlem Renaissance and Langston
Hughes
1. The
Harlem Renaissance
1.1. Harlem: a center for black culture
1.1.1. The
birth of Harlem
The village of Harlem was established
by Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant in 1658. He named the place after the
Dutch city of Harlem: “Nieuw Harlem”. It embraces a 5.5 square mile area
of Manhattan north of 96th Street. In the following two centuries important
and well-known New Yorkers owned large farmlands there but after the 1830s
the farms were abandoned since they failed to be fertile any more.
The recovery from this economic decline started
in 1837 when Harlem became accessible to downtown New Yorkers by the newly built
elevated railroads. Soon Harlem turned to be New York’s most fashionable neighborhood
with numerous terraced houses and luxurious apartment houses. The prosperous cultural
background was provided by several religious, educational and cultural institutions
and facilities (Harlem opera House, a philharmonic orchestra, a yacht club, etc.)
On a street in Harlem
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1.1.2. The way to the decay
Anticipated transportation improvements
of the 1890s started a wave of real estate speculation which soon led to
highly inflated market values and, therefore, to the collapse of the real
estate market which can be dated 1904-05.
Taking advantage of this situation, Philip Payton
and his company acquired five-year leases on white-owned properties and rented
them to Afro-Americans, who began moving to Harlem, an area considered to be
an ideal place to live. But “the creation of a black
Harlem was one example of the general development of large, segregated Negro
communities within many American cities in the years preceding and following
World War I” as an Urban League report in 1914 says.
Up to the 1920s, record number from the American
South and West Indies migrated to Harlem, which soon became the urban cultural
center of black America: poets (Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Arna Bontemps,
Claude McCay etc.), critics (W.E.B. DuBois), literary anthologists (William
Stanley Braithwaite), painters (Aaron Douglas), illustrators, jazz
musicians (Luckey Roberts, Jimmie Lanceford), singers (Jules Bledsoe), composers(George
Gershwin) and actors appeared and made huge success in (in)famous and noisy
clubs. The most famous of them was the Cotton Club, which was considered to
be the core of the Harlem
Renaissance.
While culture was prospering, other
walks of life suffered: rents in Harlem rose dramatically after the war
and demands increased due to the growing population.
 The Cleft Club |
Louis Armstrong |
1.2. Distinct
culture of the district: The Harlem Renaissance
Harlem became a “Mecca for Black artists,
writers and intellectuals in the 1920s.” Their activities are known
as the Harlem Renaissance, the participants of which were influenced by
the experimental styles of European and American literature and music.
The main topic they dealt with is the experience of black people in American
society. Today, Harlem Renaissance is rather a virtual collection of literature
and musical treasure than an artistic movement.
1.2.1. What is special about Harlem Renaissance
authors?
Both music and literature express the
same: black experience within the frame of white culture. Clubs, jazz and
the nightlife in Harlem represented an absolutely different style which
“colored” the traditional cultural life.
The binary oppositions between the two
races appeared in literary and musical pieces emphasizing the double-consciousness,
the so-called “two-ness” (first used by W.E.B. DuBois) of the black artists
and the black community. Actually, the Harlem Renaissance is the birth
of African-American consciousness, the declaration of Afro-American values.
2.
James Mercer Langston Hughes
2.1. Biography
James Langston
Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, February 1, 1902. After his parents
divorced, he was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved
to his mother to Lincoln, Illinois. Afterwards, he went to Cleveland, Ohio and
he graduated from high school there. He visited his father in Mexico and spent
a year at Columbia University but, because of financial reasons, he traveled
to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. When he returned, he settled down
in Harlem, New York, in November 1924. He finished his college education at
Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1929.
In the 1920s, he joined the Harlem Renaissance
and with his outstanding works of art he became one of the leading figures
of the movement.
He died of complications from prostate
cancer in May 22, 1967. His residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem,
New York City, has been given landmark status and renamed “Langston Hughes
Place.”
2.2. The
Poet Laureate
of Harlem
2.2.1. Poems beside the plate
Langston Hughes started writing poems
when he lived with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois and when he spent a
year in Mexico with his father. Being rather poor, Hughes could not have
financed the publishing of his poems, so he had to find somebody who could
help. While he worked in Washington D.C. as a busboy in a restaurant, he
was lucky enough to have a marvelous opportunity to do so. One day Hughes
left three of his poems beside the plate of Vachel Lindsey. He was at that
time a well-known American poet, who read Hughes’s poems and decided to
help him publicize his writings.
In 1926 the first volume of his poetry,
The Weary Blues, was published by Alfred A. Knopf.
2.2.2. Variety
of genres
Although, Langston Hughes is best known
for his poetry, we should not forget about his drama Mulatto, written in
1935 and was performed on Broadway almost 400 times, and about his novels,
either.
Hughes was a prolific short story writer
as well. One the basis of a newspaper article he wrote in the name of Jesse
B. Semple (also called “Simple”), he started writing short-stories with
the same character. Simple was like a puppet of a ventriloquist: it was
Simple whose plain speech, humor, wisdom and common sense expressed the
thoughts of young black Americans.
Simple turned out to be a very apt character,
which is why Hughes wrote a lot about him: Simple Speaks His Mind (1950),
Simple Takes a Wife (1953) and Best of Simple (1961) are the collections
of the Jesse B. Semple short-stories.
Not without Laughter (1930) and Tambourines
to Glory (1958) are the most famous novels of Hughes. He also published
the children’s books Black Misery (1969) and The Sweet and Sour Animal
Book (1936).
In 1994 The Collected Poems of Langston
Hughes was published.
2.3. “Trials,
tribulations, struggles and thoughts of a young Negro”
2.3.1. Between
the lines
Few poems of Hughes contain rhymes,
yet they have a special musical rhythm. Actually, free verse is not his
“invention” since it was Walt Whitman who was the master of it in American
literature Hughes disregarded classical forms in order to put musical,
oral and improvisatory traditions of black culture in his poems. The tune
and the content of them portray the life of black Americans in an excellent
way. And why is musicality so important? Jazz, blues and most African American
cultural elements contain the original musical elements coming from African
tribal rituals. When black people were brought to the American continent
and sold as slaves to wealthy masters and colonizers, they lost everything
but two very important things: the color of their skin and the music/rhythm
than meant their culture in Africa. All the other features they had were
“taken away”: they got a new religion, a new culture, a new lifestyle.
Black people were forced into white culture, or to be more specific, they
were suppressed by culture of the white colonizers. Langston Hughes and
the other Harlem Renaissance writers mixed these traditions with powerful
messages.
Singing about freedom, liberty and equality,
Langston Hughes expresses the dreams of all African Americans. His brief
and clear-cut poems, such as I, Too, Sing America; The Negro Speaks of
Rivers; Dreams; Theme for English B; Refugee in America, etc may be the
best known ones in Harlem Renaissance poetry.
3. Conclusion
After so many ups and downs in its history,
Harlem has become a district of Manhattan where African American live in
a kind of a segregated way. Although the living conditions in the beginning
of the century were very bad, luckily, a group of artists managed to give
a different face to Harlem. Their works (poems, paintings, music, etc.)
labeled not only Harlem lifestyle but also black experience in the frame
of white culture and white society.
Many people think that it was Langston
Hughes who gave real and audible voice to black people. one should decide
whether it is true or not; but one thing is for sure: few could express
the hardship and inferiority of African Americans as aptly as Hughes did.
Every word in his poems should be dealt with great awareness because, although
the poems themselves are short, the words are highly effective, striking
and expressive.
4. Appendix
4.1. Langston Hughes: I, Too, Sing America
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America.
4.2. Langston Hughes: The Negro Speaks
of Rivers
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world
and older than the
flow of human
blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns
were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it
lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the
pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi
when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and
I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
4.3. Langston Hughes: Dreams
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
4.4. Langston Hughes: Theme for English
B
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of
you--
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham,
then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my
class.
The steps from the hill lead down into
Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to
the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the
elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this
page:
It's not easy to know what is true for
you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm
what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear
you:
hear you, hear me--we two--you, me,
talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me--who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and
be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand
life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records--Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me
not like
the same things other folks like who
are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white--
yet a part of me, as I am a part of
you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to
be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of
you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me--
although you're older--and white--
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
4.5. Langston Hughes: Refugee in America
There are words like Freedom
Sweet and wonderful to say.
On my heart-strings freedom sings
All day everyday.
There are words like Liberty
That almost make me cry.
If you had known what I knew,
You would know why.
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