Taking a look at the Harlem Renaissance
Documentary explores New York's vibrant past
Archived article from Oct 29, 1999
By Alice Roche Cody
New York is a city like no other. For almost 400 years, this rich and diverse metropolis has been the cultural, artistic and financial center of the United States.
In a monumental effort to capture and document the city's vibrant past, director Ric Burns presents "New York: A Documentary Film," which premieres Nov. 14 to 18 at 9 p.m. on PBS. The 12-hour series, a special presentation of "The American Experience," chronicles New York's history from the arrival of the Dutch in the early 17th century to the present day.
The series features contemporary and archival visuals along with commentary from New York artists, writers, architects, politicians, actors, directors and historians. The distinguished group includes filmmaker Martin Scorsese, writer Anna Quindlen, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and David Levering Lewis, Rutgers' Martin Luther King Jr. University Professor of History.
In 1994, when Lewis was finishing his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919," Burns invited him to be in the documentary's planning group. "I was in at the ground level and was pleased to be a part of it," says Lewis. "It's an exciting project. The history of New York is quite a challenge."
For the film, Lewis, who recently received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, provided commentary on the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s and 1930s. This reawakening of black culture, he says, is best understood as a political movement masquerading as a literary movement.
According to Lewis, the period of the Harlem Renaissance began shortly after World War I when Americans became wary of the racial strides made by African-Americans during the war. Because immigration to the United States had nearly stopped, many African-Americans had moved to the North to fill low-level jobs, he says. "This created demographic and cultural tensions, and when the war ended, there was a move to return to the way things were." As a result, race riots erupted from Washington, D.C., to Omaha, Neb.
Meanwhile, a number of white artists and writers, disillusioned by what they considered a homogeneous and puritanical America, fled to Paris, creating an artistic void that helped spur the growth of African-American novels, poetry and plays. As writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston gained recognition, the NAACP began actively recruiting African-American artists to Harlem.
The novels of Jessie Fauset and Jean Toomer are often cited as among the first to provide a dignified, compassionate portrait of African-Americans. Their goal, says Lewis, was to shift the public's attitude. "The characters in these books were culturally WASP," he observes, "except that these people still suffered the indignities of racism. These African-American writers hoped mainstream America would conclude that the stereotypes of African-Americans were wrong, that genius is colorblind. The early novels show ideal lives where African-Americans were just like everyone else."
Around 1926, however, African-American writers rebelled. They began crafting stories about working people, love, sex and finding a job -- the issues they saw in their own communities. "People said, 'We want Bessie Smith, not the opera,'" Lewis remarks. Langston Hughes released his manifesto "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," and works such as "Home to Harlem" by Claude McKay and "The Blacker the Berry" by Wallace Thurman emerged.
"The momentum builds with a lot of controversy," says Lewis. "Some people were afraid that these novels would confirm racial stereotypes, while others said there's nothing wrong with authenticity." The movement, however, came to an abrupt end: "The Depression comes, and that takes the wind out of almost everybody by the early 1930s."
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