Florence Mills and Ethel Waters

Arthur Schomburg and James Vanderzee

Harlem Churches

SECTION 2
The Messenger and Crusader

The Crisis Magazine

Madam C. J. Walker and A'Lelia Walker

UNIA and Marcus Garvey

SECTION 3

Nella Larson and Alice  DunBar Nelson
 

James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson

Fire! and Survey Graphic
 

SECTION 4
Josephine Baker and James Reese Europe

Harlem Entertainment

Aaron Douglass and Richmond Barthe

In fall 2005, four sections of The College of New Jersey's First Semester Seminar program undertook a project to examine the Harlem Renaissance as a historical moment.  Viewed from four disciplinary perspectives, the courses explored the theme of struggle and transcendence as the African American gift to the modern self.  Through film, history, literature, and religion, the FSPs interrogated the notion that art and culture were political tools for the powerless and that a unifying theology of hope underscored the black vision of the world.  The courses also examined how Harlem as a social space inspired and mobilized a multitude of people suffering under the weight of American hegemony and rapid economic change beyond America’s shores. 

What emerged in Harlem was counter-discursive response to Jim Crow and the psychology of colonization that was also instrumental in affecting change.  In short, the Harlem Renaissance produced a multitude of liberation narratives that contested the American ideal.  As Mark Anthony Neal skillfully intimates in, What the Music Said, and Harold Cruse boldly proclaims in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, there is a paradox to the Harlem Renaissance and it rests at the core of America’s very notion of itself.  In Cruse’s words, “[T]his dilemma rests on that fact that America, which idealizes the rights of the individual above everything else, is in reality, a nation dominated by the social  power of groups, classes, in-groups, and cliques—both ethnic and religious.” (The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 7) 

The Harlem Renaissance demonstrated where an individual’s conscious power to influence the behavior of a group could serve as a model for others.  As the web links on this page illustrate, that power of the individual to generate new narratives of hope and success, provided the foundation for politics of identity that have dominated the political and cultural landscape since the 1960s.