The Harlem Renaissance: Writers Reacting To Their Political Environmen

The Harlem Renaissance emerged during turbulent times for the world, the United States, and black Americans. serviceman War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had left the world in disorder and stimulated anticolonial movements throughout the third world. In America, twenty age of progressive reform ended with the red scare, race riots, and isolationism throughout 1919 and light-emitting diode to conservative administrations through the twenties. While blacks were stunned by racial madness near the end of the decade and were frustrated by the lack of racial progress that progressivism had made, they were now armed with new civil rights organizations and confronted the approaching decade with new hope and determination. Education and employment opportunities had led to the development of a small black middle class. Few blacks thought that their future adjust in the economically depressed rural South and hundreds of thousands migrated to seek prosperity and opportunity in th e North. As these more educated and socially advised blacks settled into New Yorks neighborhood of Harlem, it developed into the cultural and policy-making center of black America.The 1910s also marked the rising of a semipolitical agenda advocating racial equality throughout the black community, especially in the growing black middle class. The National Association for the Advancement of aslant People (NAACP), founded to fight for the rights of blacks, and black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois pushed the agenda. Black nationalist Marcus Garvey and the Universal blackamoor Improvement Associations efforts also reflected the agenda and helped to inspire racial pride among working class blacks in the 1920s. This decade would bear own to the long struggle against political disenfranchisement in the South and a sort from traditional black political alignments in the North. Feminists too, having achieved victory in their course for suffrage, still faced more subtle obstacles on thei r road to equality. In addition, the ghettoization of American cities, the persistence of poverty in the midst of prosperity, and the disproportionate contact of blacks in both of these processes challenged perceptions about the effectiveness of the American system.1 In 1926, professor Alain Locke observed, The younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology. which was shown by a shift from soci... ...nce. NY Doubleday, 1991.Gates, Jr., Henry Louis and McKay, Nellie Y. African American Literature. NY W.W. Norton and Company, 1997.The Harlem Renaissance. University of North Carolina. 20 present 2001.Haskins, Jim. The Harlem Renaissance. Brookfield, CT The Millbrook Press, 1996.Hornsby, Jr., Alton. Black Americans. The knowledge base Book Encyclopedia. Chicago, World Book, Inc., 1992.Langston Hughes. University of North Carolina. 20 March 2001. http//www.unc.edu/courses/eng81br1/lang2.html.Lewis, David Levering, ed. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. NY Viking Penguin, 1 994.Meltzer, Milton. The Black Americans A History in Their Own Words. NY Ty Crowell, 1984.Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vol. NY Oxford Publishing, 1988.Turner, Darwin T. Langston Hughes. The World Book Encyclopedia. Chicago World Book, Inc., 1992.Wintz, Cary D. Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Houston, Rice University Press, 1988.Wintz, Cary DeCordova. Harlem Renaissance. The Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia. Danbury, CT Microsoft, Inc., 1999.