Harlem Renaissance

2 Pages 526 Words

I may have heard Zora Neale Hurston or Bessie Smith from Professor Brockington in class before but I didn’t know of Georgia Douglas Johnson? Augusta Savage? Nella Larsen? These and dozens more were women of the Harlem Renaissance, which I’m going to talk about in my report.
It was the early twentieth century, and the world had already changed tremendously compared to the world of their parents and grandparents. Slavery had ended in America more than half a century earlier. While African Americans still faced tremendous economic and social obstacles in both the northern and southern states, there were more opportunities than there had been. After the Civil War, education for black Americans and black and white women had become more common. Many were not able to attend or complete school, but a substantial few were able not only to attend and complete elementary or secondary school, but college. Professional education opened up to blacks and women. Some black men became professionals in many fields like physicians, lawyers, teachers, and businessmen. Some black women also found professional careers as teachers, librarians. These families in turn saw to the education of their daughters.
Some saw the returning black soldiers from World War I as an opening of opportunity for African Americans. Black men had contributed to the victory, too. Surely America would now welcome these black men into full citizenship.
Black Americans were moving out of the rural South, and into the cities and towns of the industrial North. They brought "black culture" with them: music with African roots and story telling. The general culture began adopting as its own elements of that black culture: this was the so called Jazz Age. Hope was rising though discrimination, prejudice and closed doors on account of race and sex were by no means eliminated. But there were new opportunities. It seemed more worthwhile to challenge those injustices perhaps the injus...