How The Harlem Renaissance Writer Zora Neale Hurston Influenced America

9 Pages 2169 Words

U.S women’s History

Topic: How the Harlem Renaissance Writer Zora Neale Hurston influenced America


Harlem, the “Mecca” of the urban north. A place where blacks could mingle with whites and not worry about the “Jim Crow” laws of the south. Harlem in the 1920’s was a hustling and bustling metropolis of the humanities. You had good music, art, and literature. You had blacks making advances in politics, and other social aspects of life. This caused blacks to make a mad exodus from the south to the urban centers of Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, and other major northern cities. Blacks were weary of the agrarian south and its oppressive political structure and wanted the freedom allowed to their northern neighbors. With factory jobs abundant, a black man in the north had a much better standard of living than his counterpart in Alabama.

However, just because we partied together did not mean that blacks and whites were equal. Blacks still suffered staunch racism, but just in a different climate. Blacks were allowed to make headway in the arts, however most of those that were making it did so as “sambo”, or as a person making fun of the lower class. Just as southerners divided blacks by using their skin tones, northern whites divided blacks by economic class. If you were poor, and undereducated you were looked down upon by the new middle class of blacks as being “niggerish”. You were thought be slowing down the advancement of other blacks because of your lack of culture. The lower classes thought that the middle classes were trying to become white. This made for tension not only with whites, but also among blacks in their own communities. Although many left the “deep south” to avoid the poor agrarian lifestyle of their ancestors, the truth was that the blacks that moved north were not finding all of the great jobs they heard of. In fact, most blacks that did find good paying jobs wer...