James, Natasha, Arron, Neima Presentation

Culture and Intellect in the Harlem Renaissance: How the amount of brainpower in Harlem transcended African American Stereotypes

William Henry Johnson, Street Musicians, 1940

“I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians because he fears the strange unwhiteness of his own features. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.”

- Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926)

Palmer Hayden, Midsummer Night in Harlem (1938)

“We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our education like—like our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of the old dead stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.”

- Claude McKay, from Home to Harlem (1928)

W.E.B. Du Bois, (1918)

“Colored people have said: ‘This work must be inferior because it comes from colored people.’ White people have said: ‘It is inferior because it is done by colored people.’ But today there is coming to both the realization that the work of the black man is not always inferior. Interesting stories come to us.”

- W.E.B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926)

Aaron Douglas, Into Bondage (1936)

“In the intellectual realm a renewed and keen curiosity is replacing the recent apathy; the Negro is being carefully studied, not just talked about and discussed. In art and letters, instead of being wholly caricatured, he is being seriously portrayed and painted.”

-Alain Locke, “The New Negro” (1925)

Esquire Magazine,1930’s

“’New York…ideal a place for colored people as exists in America’, for way to many was the 135th street…” -Thadious M. Davis in “Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman's Life Unveiled”

Sid Grossman,Harlem Scene133rd Advance, 1930’s

“As was common during that time in overcrowded Harlem, we’d been sharing an eight room apartment with six other tenants…” -Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in “On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance”

The Bettmann Collection, 125th Street in Harlem, 1935

“Living in Harlem, is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward… Overcrowded and exploited politically and economically, Harlem is the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.” - Anne Petry in “The Street”

Roy DeCarava, Graduation, 1949

“By the mid 30’s, unemployment was running at about 50%... Nearly half of Harlem’s fifty-six thousand black families were on home relief. Tenements were overcrowded and many lacked sanitation facilities.” -Monique M. Taylor in “Harlem Between Heaven and Hell”

New York Architecture Images

“As famous for its exclusionary racial policies as for its fast-stepping revues, the Cotton Club embodied many of the contradictions of the popular Harlem Renaissance; its cultural meaning was shaped by the combined forces of Prohibition economics, postwar trends in musical theater, black performance traditions and innovations, white patronage, and the mass media.” – Encyclopedia Of the Harlem Renaissance.

Harry Pace, Black Swan Records, 1921

“Companies would not entertain any thought of recording a colored musician or colored voice, I therefore decided to form my own company and make such recordings as I believed would sell.”— The Negro In New York, 1939.

Winold Reiss, Harlem At Night, 1924

“I loved that they were real people living in the time of the Harlem Renaissance. The story was rich with culture and character”.— Debbie Allen

Romare Bearden, “The Street” 1975

New York Architecture Images

“The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow--from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air.” - J.A. Rogers, "Jazz at Home," The Survey Graphic, 1925

“As famous for its exclusionary racial policies as for its fast-stepping revues, the Cotton Club embodied many of the contradictions of the popular Harlem Renaissance; its cultural meaning was shaped by the combined forces of Prohibition economics, postwar trends in musical theater, black performance traditions and innovations, white patronage, and the mass media.” – Encyclopedia Of the Harlem Renaissance.

"Seems to me that the institutions that function in this country are clearly racist, and that they're built upon racism."

Stokely Carmichael, American Activist

"This was the mammy caricature, and, like all caricatures, it contained a little truth surrounded by a larger lie. The caricature portrayed an obese, coarse, maternal figure. She had great love for her white "family," but often treated her own family with disdain. Although she had children, sometimes many, she was completely desexualized. She "belonged" to the white family, though it was rarely stated. Unlike Sambo, she was a faithful worker. She had no black friends; the white family was her entire world."

"And who shall separate the dust

What later we shall be:

Whose keen discerning eye will scan

And solve the mystery?

The high, the low, the rich, the poor,

The black, the white, the red,

And all the chromatique between"

"..Products such as coffee and cocoa, made widely available through the use of slave labour, often used images of black people to enhance their luxury status: ‘A whiff of luxury and indulgence, a luxuriousness to which black slave labour used to be the hidden flip side, still clings to these products’"

Emma Robertson, ‘Does You Mean ‘Dis?’ Race and the Marketing of Rowntrees Cocoa in the Twentieth Century

“Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro—and beautiful”?

Langston Hughes, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926)

“African American Man and Woman Standing in Front of Log Cabin,” 1886

“Night throbs a womb-song to the South. Cane-and cotton-fields, pine forests, cypress swamps, sawmills, and factories are fecund at her touch. Night’s womb-song sets them singing.”

- Jean Toomer, from Cane (1923)

James Van Der Zee, Marcus Garvey Rally, 1924

“In the 19th century most blacks lived in lower or mid Manhattan in crowded tenements in segregated but small concentrations. At the turn of the century Harlem was not an African American neighborhood but as more and more Blacks poured into New York, real estate developers and population forces turned Harlem into a Afro-American city within a city that was getting more crowded every day with new arrivals from the south and the West Indies.” –Kurá Hulanda Museum Curator

Dr. Fred Palmer's Skin Whitener

Common Dust, Georgia Douglas Johnson

Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology

Ferris State University