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As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, Harlem always seemed like a magical place. I learned about the Studio Museum in Harlem and artists like Alma Thomas and Romare Bearden. Langston Hughes’ poems were featured on posters in my local library, and everyone knew Duke Ellington because of his signature tune, “Take the A Train,” written by Billy Strayhorn. There was the Apollo Theater, where Ella Fitzgerald first sang, and dance groups such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Dance Theater of Harlem. Harlem was synonymous with the arts. But what I didn’t know was how this happened.
My senior thesis in college was on the dinner party that started the Harlem Renaissance. It was amazing to me that a group of creative giants had prioritized art to serve as a case study in marrying talent with opportunity. The people I used to meet often he said that art could make a difference, but the Harlem Renaissance showed me that it really was possible. By the early 1920s, Black Americans were excluded from many of the areas in which other Americans were building generational bases of power and wealth: from labor unions to Wall Street and Congress. But as historian David Levering Lewis has noted, “no exclusionary rules had been established about a position in the arts. Here was a small crack in the wall of racism, a crack worth trying to widen.”
So on March 21, 1924, two black academics, Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson, invited more than 100 guests to the Civic Club in Manhattan with a grand plan to give young black artists a chance to sample the opportunities they would rarely have. they had previously had: book talks with major publishing houses, their artwork displayed in museums, their songs on the radio and Broadway. The party, as we wrote relatively recently in the Times, was a great success. In the decade that followed, more than 40 major works by Black Americans were published. Written by Levering Lewis When Harlem was in Vogue that no more than five black American authors published major books between 1908 and 1923;
What we know now, and what we will continue to explore in this series on the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance, is how this kind of creativity and hope can take on an astonishing speed. From the incomparable voice of author Zora Neale Hurston and the painted murals of Aaron Douglas to the singing styles of Louis Armstrong, Harlem was forever changed after the Civic Club dinner. Wallace Thurman, a poet who lived in Harlem during the Renaissance, noted that the neighborhood had become “almost a Negro Greenwich Village. Every other person you meet is writing a novel, a poem or a play.”
It is not too difficult to draw a line between the work that began then and the work that exists now: the poetry of Mahogany L. Browne and Kwame Alexander, the black superheroes imagined by Eve L. Ewing and Malcolm Spellman, or the novels by Colson Whitehead, Edwidge Danticat, and James McBride; The Harlem Renaissance reshaped the landscape of American culture and for black artists around the world the opening of the possible widened.
