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As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, Harlem always seemed like a magical place. The studio in Harlem studied at the He Museum and artists such as Alma He Thomas and Romere He Bearden. Langston Hughes' poems are featured on posters in my local library, and everyone knows about Duke Ellington thanks to his signature song, “Take the A Train,” written by Billy Strayhorn. I did. There was also the Apollo Her Theater, where Ella Fitzgerald sang for the first time, and dance troupes such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Dance Theater of Harlem. Harlem was synonymous with art. But what I didn't know was how it happened.
My senior thesis in college was about the dinner party that launched the Harlem Renaissance. I was amazed that a group of creative giants prioritized the arts as a case study in connecting talent and opportunity.people I knew well Said Art can bring about change, and the Harlem Renaissance showed me that it really is possible. In the early 1920s, black Americans were excluded from many areas where other Americans had built their bases of power and generational wealth, from labor unions to Wall Street to Congress. However, as historian David Levering Lewis has pointed out, “there were no exclusionary rules laid down regarding status in the arts. There were small cracks in the wall of racism here, and attempts were made to widen them.” It was a crack worth doing.”
So on March 21, 1924, two black scholars, Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson, arrived at Manhattan's Civic Club with a grand plan to give young black artists a rare opportunity. We invited over 100 guests. They had previously had book deals with major publishers, their work exhibited in museums, and their songs rotated on radio and Broadway. As we recently wrote in the Times, the party was a huge success. Over the next ten years, more than 40 of his major works by black Americans were published.Levering Lewis writes: When harems were popular Fewer than five black American authors published significant books between 1908 and 1923.
What we know now, and what we will continue to explore in this series about the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance, is how that kind of creativity and hope can have incredible speed. From author Zora Neale Hurston's unparalleled voice to Aaron Douglas' murals to Louis Armstrong's song stylings, Harlem was forever changed after dinner at the Civic Club. Poet Wallace Thurman, who lived in Harlem during the Renaissance, said the area had become “almost a black Greenwich Village.” Everyone else you meet is writing novels, poetry, or drama. ”
Between the poetry of Mahogany L. Brown and Kwame Alexander, the black superheroes imagined by Eve L. Ewing and Malcolm Spellman, or the novels of Malcolm Spellman, there is a gap between the work that began then and the work that exists today. It's not that difficult to draw the line. Colson Whitehead, Edwidge Danticat, James McBride. His Harlem Renaissance reshaped the American cultural landscape and widened the scope of what was possible for black artists around the world.