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Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was the most significant artistic period in African-American history.   Since the abolition of slavery, great social and cultural transformations were taking place and the Harlem Renaissance reflects that change.   Now that they had freedom to express themselves on their own terms, African-Americans began to explore their own culture and celebrate it through their artistic and intellectual means.   The Harlem Renaissance redefined how the world viewed the African-American population and fostered a new African-American cultural identity.
The Harlem Renaissance movement was given definition by Alain Locke’s “The New Negro”.   Locke gave definition to the terms “Old Negro” and the “New Negro” which helped to explain the change African-Americans were experiencing at that time.   “So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down’, or ‘in his place’, or ‘helped up’, to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.” (985)   That’s how Locke defined the “Old Negro”, while the “New Negro” was defined as one with new self-confidence and political awareness.   “The intelligent Negro of today is resolved not to make discrimination an extenuation for his shortcomings in performance, individual or collective; he is trying to hold himself at par neither inflated by sentimental allowances nor depreciated by current social discounts.” (988)
“The New Negro” also helped explain what was occurring in Harlem and why.   “Take Harlem as an instance of this.   Here in Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life.   It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the...