Through Their Eyes: The Poets Of The Harlem Renaissance And The Black Experience In America
With renewed racism fueled by Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan, African Americans looked to the urban North, where the world wars had created jobs and a hope of escape from rural poverty. From 1913 through the end of WWII in 1945, thousands of African Americans migrated from the South to the North. Known as the “Great Migration,” this population shift changed the face of American cities as African Americans arrived and settled in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philly, and most importantly New York City. As the most famous and vibrant cultural center of black American life, Harlem was transformed by this influx of artists and intellectuals, but it was not easy. In Harlem, the South Side of Chicago, and other neighborhoods were suffering from abysmal housing conditions due to the sudden influx of so many African Americans. Regardless, Harlem soon became an important center of cultural awareness that attracted many writers including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston (Mitchell 2-3).
By the mid-1920s, the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing. The Harlem Renaissance sparked arguments between those who wanted to celebrate their “primitive” African heritage and those who believed that these writers should use their talents to help blacks achieve social, political and economic equality in America. For most of the younger writers including Hughes, Hurston, and the relatively conservative Cullen, the essence of the renaissance was freedom – freedom to create as they pleased, without regard to politics. It was during this time that some writers decided to use their “voice” to one, criticize the veiled racism they constantly faced and two, creatively explore their connection with Africa. This struggle to represent a “split identity” left many Renaissance writers feeling conflicted. It is exactly that conflict – that turmoil within, that Hughes, Hurston and Cullen used to explore and define what it meant to be an American, but also an...
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