Cracking the Carapace: A Synthesis of the Harlem Renaissance Anonymous 10th Grade

“During the early 1900s, the burgeoning African-American middle class began pushing a new political agenda that advocated racial equality. The epicenter of this movement was in New York, where three of the largest civil rights groups established their headquarters.” (Harlem Renaissance, 2011).

This cultural movement of the 1920s and 1930s, also known as the “New Negro Movement” as referenced in Alain Locke’s 1925 collection of literary passages, was the Harlem Renaissance. During this time in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, art forms of all kinds mirrored the emergence of a new mindset that was adopted during this metamorphosis. The gradual awakening of the “New Negro” was the result of centuries of oppression and injustice at the hands of white tyrants and in some ways, themselves, revealing a period in which black achievements in the arts were allowed to flourish.

Through reflections of the era created by black artists, it is made clear that many black Americans felt that being “colored” was a disability, and in many artistic methods of expression – particularly songs and poems about the blues– it was said that they often wish for death. Dorothy West writes of a character in her short fiction work, The Typewriter, “He...