7 - African American folk roots and Harlem Renaissance poetry

Summary

Our contemporary celebration of African American culture, especially our concern for “authentic” blackness and the vernacular, owes much to the New Negro era. From Hip Hop, to movies depicting black inner city life, to spokenword poetry, to “Chitlin' Circuit” theater, and beyond, black folk expression (either rural or urban) has come to serve as the sign of black cultural identity. Yet the centrality of the vernacular was not always evident in the longer history of African American letters. To be sure, the vernacular has always held a place in African American literary expression, but through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries standard English and Anglo-American literary models were the norm (indeed the ideal for many) in addressing both African American and white audiences. It was the Harlem Renaissance that radically relocated the folk, indeed reinvented an African American literary vocabulary based on folk forms, idioms, and patterns of speech; and in doing so, the Harlem Renaissance bequeathed a legacy that would shape African American literature throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day.

The legacy of Harlem Renaissance artistry begins in the larger context of the New Negro Movement, the late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century political and cultural movement to reclaim the civil rights guaranteed through Reconstruction legislation. The New Negro generation created political organizations, published magazines and newspapers, attended colleges and universities in unprecedented numbers, and pursued professional careers all in the name of African American equality, inclusion, and full citizenship.