HIST 343 Part V: Racial Relations During the Harlem Renaissance

Racial Consciousness

* New Black identity led to a greater social consciousness, and African-American become players on the word stage, expanding intellectual and social contacts internationally
* The progress -both symbolic and real- during this period, became a point of reference from which the African-American community gained a spirit of self-determination that provided a growing sense of both Black urbanity and Black militancy as well as a foundation for the community to build upon for the Civil Rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s

Racial Pride

* Marcus Garvey inspired racial pride among working-class black in the U.S in the 1920s
* With the close of World War I, African-American soldiers  returned home from the European front with a new sense of pride and purpose, and drove efforts to improving their communities and delving deep into expanding their social order through cultural accomplishments

Blackness’ Assertion

* African-American paintings, writings, and jazz became absorbed into mainstream culture

The New Negro Movement

* Also known as the Harlem Renaissance
* cultural phenomenon that arose from specific historical and political events culminating in the self-definition and further development of African-American culture through literature, music, and theatre

Black Nationalism

* Malcom X
* Racial pride
* Black separatism

Marcus Garvey

* Jamaican-born black nationalist
* inspired racial pride among working-class black in the U.S (1920)

Alain Locke

* A new black cultural identity (1926)
* He declared that through art, “Negro life is seizing its first chances for group expression and self-determination”

Dubois’ Double Consciousness

* always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity

Du Bois’ *The Souls of Black Folk*

* American literature

Locke’s *The New Negro*

* Locke's “New Negro” transformed “social disillusionment to race pride.”