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The Harlem Renaissance remains exciting, inspiring, and irresistible in the first half of the 21st Century for the same reason that the many people who lived it found it exciting, inspiring, and irresistible in the first half of the 20th Century. Despite the soul-crushing challenges of war, racism, sexism, and political oppression of every kind, poets of the Harlem Renaissance shined a light of hope with the defiant brilliance of their songs, visual artists empowered their communities with the strength of visions that reinforced individual dignity, writers lent the power of their pens in service to the voices and lives of their people, and advocates for democracy stood their ground until justice was duly recognized and properly served. In this, the world’s first Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, we do something more than witness the triumphs and tragedies of poets such as Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer, novelists like Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, musicians like Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, and performance artists such as Lena Horne and Paul Robeson. Through their challenges and victories, we are encouraged to identify and claim our own challenges and victories. Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance takes us inside the clubs, theatres, and relationships that made Harlem, New York City, the one-time “Party Capital of the World,” and one of the greatest cultural centers of any era. It also places on bold display the genius that gave the world ragtime, Jazz, the blues, gospel, swing, and all night dancing. Whereas previously we thought of the Harlem Renaissance primarily as the literary achievement of a handful of writers, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance demonstrates that it was a triumphant exultation of creative genius across the cultural board and one that spread both nationally and internationally. Moreover, through leaders such as James Weldon Johnson, A. Philip Randolph, and W. E. B. Du Bois, it laid the foundation for what would grow into the extraordinary Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This is the kind of book one is happy to share with another but even happier to give as a gift while keeping one’s own.
Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
“We are drawn to the Harlem
Renaissance because of the hope
for black uplift and
interracial interaction and empathy
that it embodied and because there
is a certain element of romanticism
associated with the era’s creativity,
its seemingly larger-than-life
heroes and heroines, and its most
brilliantly lit terrain, Harlem, USA.”
––Clement Alexander Price, Race,
Blackness, and Modernism
During the Harlem Renaissance
In the pages of the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, my co-author on the project, Sandra L. West, and I accepted the challenge of attempting to provide meaningful insight into the people, places, and events that became the Harlem Renaissance. That the Harlem Renaissance represents one of those rare moments in history when the greater integrity of the human spirit triumphed brilliantly over the lesser impulses of human bigotry and prejudice remains indelibly evident.
The music, sculpture, paintings, poems, and novels of the era continue to inform the sensibilities of students of human nature in general and African-American culture in particular, just as they continue to stand in their own right as enduring works of art transcending the fertile grounds of history, geography, and race from which they sprung. What is possibly less evident is that the leaders and followers of the Harlem Renaissance were every bit as intent on using black culture to help make the United States a more functional democracy as they were on employing black culture to “vindicate” black people. If the founding fathers and mothers had presented America with a good start in those goals and principles stated so eloquently in the U. S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Emancipation Proclamation, then women and men such as journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, historian and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, performing artist Florence Mills, author and political activist James Weldon Johnson, philosopher Alain Locke, sociologist Charles S. Johnson, and author Langston Hughes all thought the first half of the twentieth century a good time to put such goals and principles into life-saving practice.
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