The Harlem Renaissance

Why did African Americans move to Northern cities?
Jobs
Escape Jim Crows laws
Which African American leaders helped to fight discrimination and violence?
Founded in 1909, the NAACP urged African Americans to protest racial violence
 James Weldon Johnson served as executive secretary of NAACP
Headed anti-lynching laws, wrote books and wrote the lyrics of the Black National Anthem

MARCUS GARVEY – Universal Negro Improvement Association 

Marcus Garvey believed that African Americans should build a separate society (Africa)

 He left a powerful legacy of black pride, economic independence and Pan-Africanism

HARLEM, NEW YORK

 Harlem, NY became the largest black urban community

 Harlem suffered from overcrowding, unemployment and poverty

 However, in the 1920s it was home to a literary and artistic revival known as the Harlem Renaissance

AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITERS

 The Harlem Renaissance was primarily a literary movement

 Led by well-educated blacks with a new sense of pride in the African-American experience

LANGSTON HUGHES

 Missouri-born Langston Hughes was the movement’s best known poet

 Many of his poems described the difficult lives of working-class blacks

 Some of his poems were put to music, especially jazz and blues

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

 She often wrote about the lives of poor, unschooled Southern blacks

 Zora Neale Hurston wrote novels, short stories and poems

LOUIS ARMSTRONG 

 Jazz was born in the early 20th century 

 In 1922, a young trumpet player named Louis Armstrong joined the Creole Jazz Band

 Later he joined Fletcher Henderson’s band in NYC

 Armstrong is considered the most important and influential musician in the history of jazz

EDWARD KENNEDY “DUKE” ELLINGTON

 In the late 1920s, Duke Ellington, a jazz pianist and composer, led his ten-piece orchestra at the famous Cotton Club

 Ellington won renown as one of America’s greatest composers