The Harlem Renaissance

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The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920’s and 1930’s. During a 90 day period in the 1920’s, 12,000 African Americans left the state of Mississippi to head north with a promise of new jobs due to the war, and this was happening all across the south. At the time it was known as the “New Negro Movement” named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke. Although it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, many French speaking black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris where also influenced by the Harlem renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance is believed to have its social roots traced back to the great migration during the First World War and its philosophical roots back to the turn of the century and the work of black historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. Two major authors that played an important role during the Harlem Renaissance were W.E.B. Du Bois, and Claude McKay. W.E.B. Du Bois played a very important part in the creation of the NAACP. Mr. Du Bois was the association’s director of research and editor of its magazine, The Crisis. As the editor of the magazine and the director of research he was able to influence the middle-class blacks and whites as the person who publicized the black protest from 1910 until 1934. When you look at the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk” which was written in 1903 one realizes that Dunois was addressing double-consciousness. A line that addresses double consciousness in this book is: “One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; to souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one black body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” The primary theme shows how blacks were looked at by whites and how blacks looked at themselves. Du Bois was basically describing how the negro’s were longing to attain
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