Countee Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance.
The Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois (editor), Oswald Garrison Villard, J. Max Barber, Charles Edward Russell, Kelly Miller, William Stanley Braithwaite, and Mary Dunlop Maclean. The Crisis has been in continuous print since 1910, and it is the oldest Black-oriented magazine in the world. Today, The Crisis is "a quarterly journal of civil rights, history, politics and culture and seeks to educate and challenge its readers about issues that continue to plague African Americans and other communities of color."
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an editor, poet, essayist, novelist, and educator. Her literary work helped sculpt African-American literature in the 1920s as she focused on portraying a true image of African-American life and history. Her black fictional characters were working professionals which was an inconceivable concept to American society during this time. Her story lines related to themes of racial discrimination, "passing", and feminism.
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, was a historian, writer, bibliophile, collector, and activist. He also wrote many books. Schomburg was a Puerto Rican of African and German descent. He moved to the United States in 1891, settling in New York City, where he researched and raised awareness of the contributions that Afro-Latin Americans and African Americans have made to society. He was an important intellectual figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Over the years, he collected literature, art, slave narratives, and other materials of African history, which were purchased to become the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, named in his honor, at the New York Public Library (NYPL) branch in Harlem.
Aaron Douglas was an American painter, illustrator, and visual arts educator. He was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He developed his art career painting murals and creating illustrations that addressed social issues around race and segregation in the United States by utilizing African-centric imagery. Douglas set the stage for young, African-American artists to enter the public-arts realm through his involvement with the Harlem Artists Guild. In 1944, he concluded his art career by founding the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught visual art classes at Fisk University until his retirement in 1966. Douglas is known as a prominent leader in modern African-American art whose work influenced artists for years to come.
Niggerati was the name used, with deliberate irony, by Wallace Thurman for the group of young African-American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. "Niggerati" is a portmanteau of "nigger" and "literati". The rooming house where he lived, and where that group often met, was similarly christened Niggerati Manor. The group included Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and several of the people behind Thurman's journal FIRE!!, such as Richard Bruce Nugent, Jonathan Davis, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas.
Gwendolyn B. Bennett was an American artist, writer, and journalist who contributed to Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, which chronicled cultural advancements during the Harlem Renaissance. Though often overlooked, she herself made considerable accomplishments in art, poetry, and prose. She is perhaps best known for her short story "Wedding Day", which was published in the magazine Fire!! and explores how gender, race, and class dynamics shape an interracial relationship. Bennett was a dedicated and self-preserving woman, respectfully known for being a strong influencer of African-American women rights during the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout her dedication and perseverance, Bennett raised the bar when it came to women's literature and education. One of her contributions to the Harlem Renaissance was her literary acclaimed short novel Poets Evening; it helped the understanding within the African-American communities, resulting in many African Americans coming to terms with identifying and accepting themselves.
The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) is an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and African-American art and literature edited by Alain Locke, who lived in Washington, DC, and taught at Howard University during the Harlem Renaissance. As a collection of the creative efforts coming out of the burgeoning New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance, the book is considered by literary scholars and critics to be the definitive text of the movement. Part 1 of The New Negro: An Interpretation, titled "The Negro Renaissance", includes Locke's title essay "The New Negro", as well as nonfiction essays, poetry, and fiction by writers including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond.
Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp Johnson, better known as Georgia Douglas Johnson, was a poet and playwright. She was one of the earliest female African-American playwrights, and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
"New Negro" is a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation. The term "New Negro" was made popular by Alain LeRoy Locke in his anthology The New Negro.
Alain LeRoy Locke was an American writer, philosopher, and educator. Distinguished in 1907 as the first African-American Rhodes Scholar, Locke became known as the philosophical architect—the acknowledged "Dean"—of the Harlem Renaissance. He is frequently included in listings of influential African Americans. On March 19, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed: "We're going to let our children know that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe."
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.
William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite was an African-American writer, poet, literary critic, anthologist, and publisher in the United States. His work as a critic and anthologist was widely praised and important in the development of East Coast poetry styles in the early 20th century. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1918.
Lewis Grandison Alexander was an African American poet, actor, playwright, and costume designer who lived in Washington, D.C., and had strong ties to the Harlem Renaissance period in New York. Alexander focused most of his time and creativity on poetry, and it is for this that he is best known.
A black mecca, in the United States, is a city to which African Americans, particularly singles, professionals, and middle-class families, are drawn to live, due to some or all of the following factors:
Elise Johnson McDougald, aka Gertrude Elise McDougald Ayer, was an American educator, writer, activist and first African-American woman principal in New York City public schools following the consolidation of the city in 1898. She was preceded by Sarah J. Garnet, who became the first African-American woman principal in Brooklyn, New York while it was still considered a separate city. McDougald's essay "The Double Task: The Struggle for Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation" was published in the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic magazine, Harlem: The Mecca of the New Negro. This particular issue, edited by Alain Locke, helped usher in and define the Harlem Renaissance. McDougald's contribution to this magazine, which Locke adapted for inclusion as "The Task of Negro Womanhood" in his 1925 anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, is an early example of African-American feminist writing.
Eugene Gordon was a journalist, editor, fiction writer, World War I officer, and social activist. He cofounded and edited the Harlem Renaissance literary magazine Saturday Evening Quill and edited a magazine put out by the Boston John Reed Club. He wrote primarily on subjects related to racial discrimination and social justice. He published some fiction under pseudonyms, using Egor Don and Clark Hall and Frank Lynn.
Wilfred Adolphus Domingo was a Jamaican activist and journalist who became the youngest editor of Marcus Garvey's newspaper, the Negro World. As an activist and writer, Domingo travelled to the United States advocating for Jamaican sovereignty as a leader of the African Blood Brotherhood and the Harlem branch of the Socialist Party.
The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke is a 2018 biography of Alain LeRoy Locke written by historian Jeffrey C. Stewart. The biography examines the life of Locke, an African-American activist and scholar who mentored many African-American intellectuals and writers and whom many see as the "father" of the Harlem Renaissance. Published by Oxford University Press, The New Negro won the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
The Howard School of International Relations is a school of academic thought originating at Howard University in the decades between the 1920s and 1950s. Articulated by scholars such as Merze Tate, Ralph Bunche, Alain Locke, E. Franklin Frazier, Rayford Logan, and Eric Williams, the Howard School emphasized race and empire in the study of international relations. These scholars posed a sustained critique of dominant international relations theories such as racial hierarchy, which vindicated the Jim Crow era in the U.S. as well as the practice of colonialism in the world through the 1960s.
