Harlem Renaissance - Blog Posts

supportourgoddesses

7 years ago

My English class has been exploring a unit on the Harlem Renaissance. And since Black History Month has been celebrating black achievement for the past few weeks, heres a report on one of my favorite artistic time periods.

The Harlem Renaissance was a period of artistic and cultural revolution for the African-American community, originating in the NYC neighborhood of Harlem. In the early 20th century, African Americans mass-migrated to the North to escape poverty and racial segregation. They relocated in Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York City, searching for jobs and housing. They found social and economic freedom where they came, especially in Harlem, a neighborhood of NYC. Harlem had previously housed rich white people, but low rent and open jobs allowed black migrants to fill the space instead.

Harlem fostered a new sense of community and identity within the African-American community. During the 1920s, this manifested into a period of significant artistic and literary achievement. Black writers, musicians, and artists found pride in their identity, using their work to celebrate black identity and culture. Though these figures faced obstacles because of their color, and racial bias was common, Harlem of the 20s was a social hotspot for African-Americans. Writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston (my personal favorites) wrote extensively on the themes of racism and African-American identity. Musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith shot to fame, performing blues and jazz in Harlem and other cities. They performed in Harlem’s vibrant clubs, a common scene featured in paintings such as Archibad J. Motley’s iconic Nightlife.

Though these icons, and many more, were able to have successful careers, most black Americans were treated poorly. Down South, Jim Crow laws segregated people based on race, leaving non-whites with fewer rights and opportunities. Northern cities weren’t legally segregated, but many African-Americans faced discrimination and lived in poverty. Change would come over long periods of time. But despite these challenges, African-American art and culture flourished for nearly a decade. Today, this inspiring and influential era would be known as the Harlem Renaissance.

The Birth of Unions through the Black Gaze

NO. 1

During the 1940s, the past three decades beforehand for Black Americans have been life-changing: The Harlem Renaissance in the 20s, the Great Depression in the 30s, and then the inauguration of President FDR, who would eventually lead America into WWII, at the beginning of the 40s. Then came the Great Depression, and with it, economic downfall and loss. It devasted the economy, and millions in the country could not find jobs, nor could they keep it. Black Americans suffered harsher during this time since they couldn’t make ends meet; even those who still had jobs, labored in unskilled and service fields, regardless of their actual skills. And whether from the South or the North, these economic pressures made a significant decline in incomes to a third of what they had been in before the Depression.

The Birth Of Unions Through The Black Gaze

NO. 2

‘’Wages had fallen to roughly 60 percent of their pre-Depression level. Declining demand followed the decline in earnings, speeding the downward spiral. The economic crisis affected everyone, black and white, rural and urban, skilled and unskilled. The federal government in 1930 estimated that 17 percent of the white population and 38 percent of the black population could not support themselves without assistance. White men took jobs held by black men, and white women took jobs held by black women, while privileged black folk who were financially stable toward their businesses and homes, lost them.’’ To Ask for an Equal Chance, Greenburg, pg.1-3

NO. 3

The ideas of President F.D.R helped, called New Deal programs increased the number of public jobs. Because these new agencies had nondiscrimination provisions, black workers at all levels of skill had a better chance to obtain these jobs than those in private sectors where racial discrimination remained. And even though black workers still worked in the same menial jobs they found in private employment, many government programs—particularly in northern and western cities—also hired black skilled, clerical, and professional workers, like black social workers, nurses, teachers, office managers, architects, engineers, and administrations, which they all benefited, and had a tremendous impact on black employment. And for the first time, 1932 Section 7A of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) guaranteed workers the right to organize unions, but when the Supreme Court declared it was ‘unconstitutional’, Congress passed the Wagner National Labor Relations Act, which extended 7A’s scope.

NO. 4

Industrial union organizers sought to engage all possible workers in the struggle for union recognition; when racist whites excluded black workers, organizers pointed out that employers hired the latter as strike bearers (scabs). Only by offering union membership to all, regardless of race, could unskilled and industrial unions succeed. Therefore, unions or their leaderships sought to actively recruit African American workers alongside whites. Among these workers? Socialists and Communists. Drawn to this movement, believing that the working class was the victim of an exploitative capitalist system, which the Depression made their arguments even more convincing. Only unity among all workers could overthrow the tyranny of their bosses, the parties insisted, and bring about economic change. They considered racism a tool the wealthy used to divide the workers and dilute their power, which drew in black Americans, welcoming them in through politics and the realities of organizing unskilled workers.

NO. 5

Some unions had already begun organizing around the principles that interracial unions advanced the interests of all workers, something the elite, racists like the Southern Klans and the police were fearful of. Black and white built the United Mineworkers Union, which from its inception in 1890. Since James Ford, a black Communist leader argued that union benefited and helped desperately, and unemployed black Americans, while including them improved the chance for successful organizing, and to better achieve their goals. Ford writes, ‘‘the organization of the people’s immediate needs, better wages, unemployment, and social insurance, better wages, civil and economic, and equal rights, the Communist Party worked on a Popular Front strategy of working with liberal groups when doing so advance its common goals. Therefore, Communists embraced all progressive union activists as coalition partners.’’

NO. 6

Unfortunately, the elite, wealthy, and racists in any work, but especially the police, disliked integration. Police beat, arrested, and even on occasion shot protesters and organizers, often assisted by other angry whites. The Georgia Klan, unhappy at the advancement of black textile workers as a result of a union drive, responded with a violent anti-CIO campaign in 1939, convinced that the communist agitators they were convinced, interpreting the Communists interracial union organizing as a Soviet plot to destroy the United States by undermining traditional race relations and stirring up otherwise ‘contented black Americans to demand equality they did not deserve and even worse—sought to bring down the white race by granting black men readily access to white women. Such rhetoric was used to preserve the economic advantages for white-middle and upper, and middle-class brought anti-union violence to disastrous new heights and bringing an end to what would have been the beginning of economic equity to all.