Harlem Renaisance Movie
Movie Biography Project
In this project you will explain how one individual helped African Americans in the Harlem Renaissance to find their voice and redefine what it meant to be:
-
- “Negro”
- “American”
How did their work encourage racial pride? Was the artist successful? How did their artwork produce a new definition of the “negro?”
You must tell the story of your person by providing the following information:
10 photographs including
- 3 of the person
- 4 of their artwork
- 2 of where they lived/performed
- 1 of another person on the list who they had an effect on or who had an effect on them
You must narrate the story of
-
- What your person did in the Harlem Renaissance
- When they became famous and for what
- How their work reflects the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance of:
- African roots; back-to-Africa
- Dignity
- Racial Consciousness
- Their relationship with another figure in the Harlem Renaissance
- How your person answer the questions:
- How did their work encourage racial pride? How did it show African Americans not following white standards?
- Was the artist successful?
- How did their artwork produce a new definition of the “negro?”
2/22 choose person – begin to fill in role card
2/23 library – fill in role card
2/24 library – find pictures
2/28 library – use moviemaker or photostory
2/29 library – use moviemaker or photostory
3/1 – movie due
- Marcus Garvey – United Negro Improvement Association; back to Africa -
- Langston Hughes – poet -
- Paul Lawrence Dunbar – poet
- Charles Chesnutt – novelist
- James Weldon Johnson – poet – sonnet
- Claude McKay – poet – Harlem Shadows – If We Must Die
- Jessie Fauset – Confusion – novel about black middle class life
- Alain Locke – philosopher
- Billie Holiday – jazz singer
- Ella Fitzgerald – jazz singer -
- Zora Neale Hurston – Their Eyes Were Watching God -
- Countee cullen – Heritage
- Nella Larsen – Quicksand
- WEB DuBois – intellectual, philosopher
- Bessie Smith – blues singing -
- Jelly Roll Morton – piano -
- Duke Ellington – composer -
- Louis Armstrong – trumpet, band leader -
- Cab Calloway – jazz
- Dizzy Gillespie – - trumpet
- Count Basie – jazz
- Fats Waller – jazz pianist -
- Josephine Baker – jazz singer
- Bill Robinson- actor
- Marian Anderson – opera singer
- Bert Williams – comedian, actor -
- Ma Rainey – singer
- Aaron Douglas – painting -
- Jacob Lawrence – painting
- James VanderZee – photographer in Harlem
- Paul Robeson – actor, singer
- Addison Scurlock – photographer in Washington D.C.
- Margaret Walker Alexander – poet
Places:
Savoy Ballroom
Lenox Avenue
Apollo Theater – symbol of African American culture
Cotton Club
The 1920s and 1930s Through the African American Experience
How did the Harlem Renaissance artists challenge the accepted idea of African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance? How did it encourage racial pride? Were the artists successful? How did their artwork produce a new definition of the “negro?”
By the end of World War I, African Americans had participated in another war fighting for democracy. African Americans on the home front migrated North and participated in the war effort in jobs and by helping the soldiers’ families. The Chicago Race Riot in 1919 marked a new militancy among African Americans.
In the 1920s and 1930s, African Americans expressed this new sense of identity as the “New Negro” in the arts including:
§ Music – jazz
§ Poetry
§ Visual Art
§ Dance
§ Literature
§ Photography
§ Drama
§ Philosophy
§ Politics
African Americans rejected the styles of Europeans and white Americans and celebrated their dignity, creativity, and their roots. They asserted their freedom to express themselves on their own terms, not worrying about what the dominant society would think about them. They rejected the images portrayed by black face performers and minstrel shows.
In this 3 week unit, you will learn about Harlem’s cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. You will evaluate how powerful music and art can be in changing the image of African Americans during the 1920s and 1930s. You will evaluate the role of art in relationship to political and economic changes.
2/24 Read the “Harlem Renaissance” 365-6. 1. What was the “formula” created by white Americans of black people? 2. How did black artists during the Harlem Renaissance define themselves? 3. Why did Locke say “The pulse of the negro world has begun to beat in Harlem? 4. What did Brawley say defined the “Negro genius?” 5. Africans Americans wanted to take nobility from their suffering. What does that mean?
- What prompted Claude McKay to write “If We Must Die”? 7. Who was novelist Jean Toomer related to and how did he define the New Negro?
2/25 Read Josephine Baker Sees the World on p. 366. 1. How did Baker say she used her performances as a singer? 2. Read Langston Hughes, 366-8. List 3 things you should know about Langston Hughes. 3. How did Hughes define the New Negro? 4. Read his poem “Mother to Son.” What is the main idea of this poem? 5. How can you identify with his message? 6. Read Paul Robeson. What are 3 things we should know about Robeson? What is his definition of the New Negro?
2/26 Read about Zora Neale Hurston, the New Negro Woman and the Harlem Renaissance and White America, 368-371. 1. How did Hurston define herself in relationship to whites? 2. In the section “New Negro Women,” what were the 3 prescribed jobs for Black women? 3. What power did African American women have?
- What are 3 new activities that black women did?
2/27 The Jazz Age – 371-2
- Define jazz. List 3 different aspects of the music.
- What factors blended together to make jazz?
- According to Louis Armstrong, what was jazz built on?
- List 3 male jazz musicians.
- Name 3 women singers.
3/2 Political Goals and Setbacks in the 1920s
- Give one example of a positive act by a president for African Americans
- Give one example of a negative act by a president toward African Americans
- Why did African Americans turn to the communist Party?
- Read the Conclusion on p 373. What are three things that changed for African Americans from 1919 to 1930?
Chapter 15 The New Politics of the Great Depresssion
3/3 375-8 Opening Vignette: The Scottsboro Boys
In March 1931, nine black youths were arrested in Scottsboro, Alabama, following a fistfight with white youths on a train. But they were charged with rape. In previous years, they might have been promptly executed, but the nation was in the midst of economic catastrophe. Seeing an opportunity to unite workers against “the Scottsboro Frame-Up,” the Communist Party took up their cause, spurring various forms of black militancy and catalyzing debates about the future of black politics.
- What is different about African Americans’ reaction to the Scottsboro case?
- Why did the Communist party get involved?
3/4 378-80 African Americans in Desperate Times
All Americans were profoundly affected by the Great Depression, but black Americans experienced added hardships due to racial discrimination. Unemployment reached 25 percent, but black unemployment was twice that in many cities. Intensified competition for urban jobs disadvantaged black people, but, with floods, boll weevil infestations, and falling cotton prices, the conditions for rural black southerners were more dire.
- How did experiences of black and white Americans compare for unemployment in the Great Depression?
- When was the Great Depression?
- What is evidence that Blacks in the south were worse off than blacks in the north?
Final essay 3/16
3/5 380-2 Scottsboro Campaign, Black Radicalism
In this crisis, Communist appeals proved effective. In the late 1920s the party had established the League of Struggle for Negro Rights to combat racial discrimination as well as economic oppression. Now its Scottsboro campaign attracted new members-to the dismay of NAACP leaders. Birmingham laborer Angelo Herndon enthusiastically joined the Scottsboro effort and became a Communist organizer; poet Langston Hughes agreed to serve as president of the league. Hughes risked his career, but the risks for black workers like Herndon were more serious. The threat of violence loomed large in Alabama, where the Sharecroppers Union was campaigning for sharecropper rights. Bloody clashes followed, and when Herndon was arrested in an Atlanta protest, his case, too, became a rallying point for Communists. As the 1932 election approached, the Communist Party attempted to strengthen black support by running a black vice presidential candidate, James Ford. Most black people still voted Republican, but Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency.
- What did the Communists stand for?
- How did they support African Americans
- Why did African Americans support Republicans?
- What federal programs did black workers benefit from?
3/6 Many African Americans rejected the NAACP’s goal of integration. The Depression sparked both leftist radicalism and black nationalism. In Detroit, former Garveyite Elijah Poole joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Elijah Muhammad. Historian Carter G. Woodson argued that African Americans had to rely on their own resources. And a small group of college-educated clergy, including Martin Luther King Sr. in Atlanta and Adam Clayton Powell Sr. in Harlem, advocated a social gospel version of Christianity to achieve economic equality and social justice. Cult preacher Father Divine appealed to black and white followers with his Peace Missions and Peace Kitchens. At Howard, a new intellectual elite supported Scottsboro efforts, launched boycotts against businesses discriminating against black workers, and championed Ethiopia following its invasion by Italy. Bunche, in particular, took an international view, studying the stirrings of anticolonialism in Africa and warning of the rise of fascism in Europe. The success of Roosevelt’s New Deal confirmed their sense that America could solve its economic problems without revolution, and many accepted positions in New Deal agencies.
A New Deal for African Americans?
The most influential African American in the New Deal was Mary McLeod Bethune, revered educator and founder of the National Council of Negro Women. Though reluctant to leave Bethune-Cookman College, she recognized the significance a position in the National Youth Administration would have for “Negro women coming after me, filling positions of high trust and strategic importance.” Her ability to collaborate with people who held differing views served her well as a New Dealer. She realized that Roosevelt was no racial liberal, but she urged the president to tackle racial discrimination even as she defended him against his harshest black critics. Her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt also allowed her to influence the president. With Robert Weaver, another “advisor for Negro affairs” in the New Deal, she assembled the Black Cabinet, giving visibility to black participation in the Roosevelt administration.
Weaver and Hastie, an assistant solicitor in the Interior Department, and others were often critical of the New Deal’s failings: a failure to pass anti-lynching legislation, discrimination in the distribution of relief payments, exclusion of the two largest categories of black workers (agricultural laborers and domestic servants) from minimum-wage rules, overtime rules, and Social Security coverage. Critiques of the New Deal were expressed in the National Negro Congress, founded by black labor leader A. Philip Randolph to achieve more far-reaching social change. But Roosevelt successfully countered criticism though his savvy appointments of African Americans, and more and more blacks concluded that the New Deal, despite its limitations, was the best available political option.
For many, jobs and training through the NYA and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided the best wages they ever received. Moreover, new federal protections to unions also benefited African Americans. In 1936, they voted Democratic overwhelmingly, abandoning the party of Lincoln and joining the northern liberal-labor coalition that competed with southern conservatives for control of the party.
Black Artists and the Cultural Mainstream
WPA projects gave many black unemployed artists, actors, musicians, and writers their first opportunity to earn a living while developing their talent. Working for the Writers’ Project in Chicago, Margaret Walker met Richard Wright. The exchange such projects fostered, she recognized, helped end “the long isolation of the Negro artist.” Others who received crucial support included Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, and Shirley Graham.
Paul Robeson’s fame brought success not dependent on federal programs, and he could accept the risks that came with leftist political ties. In an era when black actors were confined to comic bit roles, Robeson resolved to accept only parts that portrayed blacks in a positive light. He sustained his career as a singer even as a gulf opened between his preference for traditional African American music, such as slave spirituals, and the commercially popular music of the day. For him, the entry of American Americans into the nation’s cultural mainstream represented a loss of cultural integrity. While some southern blues singers, such as Leadbelly and Josh White, maintained the old traditions, many African Americans welcomed the new trends. The appeal of swing bands led by Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway transcended racial lines.
When singer Marian Anderson was denied permission to perform at Constitution Hall, Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for a concert at the Lincoln Memorial that drew 75,000.
Richard Wright exemplifies the decline of leftist radicalism and his Native Son a new writing based not on political aims or on pleasing white audiences but on conveying the complexities of American race relations. A southerner who migrated to Chicago, Wright had joined the Communist Party but his political views had continued to evolve. In the late 1930s, he lost patience with the party’s endless ideological bickering and pressures for ideological conformity and began to openly criticize Communist propaganda. In Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of his best-selling novel, he echoed Scottsboro’s story of class and racial oppression, but he made Thomas guilty, then examined the crime as resulting from a series of tragic misunderstandings rooted in racial and class differences.
3/3 Black Artists and the Cultural Mainstream
Photo Story Biography Project
In this project you will explain how one individual helped African Americans in the Harlem Renaissance to find their voice and redefine what it meant to be:
-
- “Negro”
- “American”
How did their work encourage racial pride? Was the artist successful? How did their artwork produce a new definition of the “negro?”
You must tell the story of your person by providing the following information:
10 photographs including
- 3 of the person
- 4 of their artwork
- 2 of where they lived/performed
- 1 of another person on the list who they had an effect on or who had an effect on them
You must narrate the story of
1. What your person did in the Harlem Renaissance
When they became famous and for what
How their work reflects the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance of:
African roots; back-to-Africa
Dignity
Racial Consciousness
2. You must have some music in the background which reflects music they played or is appropriate to your subject and time period.
3. Relationship with another figure in the H.R.
4. Answer the questions:
How did their work encourage racial pride?
Was the artist successful?
How did their artwork produce a new definition of the “negro?”
2/24 choose person – begin to fill in role card
3/2 library – fill in role card
3/3 library – find pictures
¾ library – find music
3/5 library – put photo story together
3/8 to 3/10 show your photo stories in class.
3/16 write essay
- Marcus Garvey – United Negro Improvement Association; back to Africa
- Langston Hughes – poet
- Paul Lawrence Dunbar – poet
- Charles Chesnutt – novelist
- James Weldon Johnson – poet – sonnet If We Must Die
- Claude McKay – poet – Harlem Shadows
- Jessie Fauset – Confusion – novel about black middle class life
- Alain Locke – philosopher
- Billie Holiday
- Ella Fitzgerald
- Sarah Vaughan
- Zora Neale Hurston – Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Countee cullen – Heritage
- Nella Larsen – Quicksand
- WEB DuBois – intellectual, philosopher
- Bessie Smith – blues singing
- Jelly Roll Morton – piano
- Duke Ellington – composer
- Louis Armstrong – trumpet, band leader
- Cab Calloway
- Dizzy Gillespie
- Count Basie
- Fats Waller
- Josephine Baker
- Bill Robinson
- Marian Anderson
- Bert Williams
- Ma Rainey
- Aaron Douglas – painting
- Jacob Lawrence – painting
- James VanderZee – photographer
- Paul Robeson – actor, singer
Places:
Savoy Ballroom
Lenox Avenue
Apollo Theater – symbol of African American culture
Cotton Club
Biography Research Card
Harlem Renaissance
Keep track of your sources and page numbers as you write the info down.
1. Name________________________
2. Date of Birth__________________ Date of Death____________________
(you might not be able to find the exact dates)
- Event which made this person famous – include date, event, what they produced
- Timeline of his/her life including events which they are most known for
- Relationship to whites
- Where they lived and performed
- Best quote of individual including its context and its meaning:
- One person from the list who had an effect on your artist and how
- Relationship of your person to:
- African Roots
- Dignity,
- Racial Consciousness
8. How your individual defined
a. New Negro
b. American
9. Two sources used in proper bibliographic form:
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