Answer:
On February 28, 2014, Humanities Texas held a one-day teacher professional development workshop in Austin focusing on the history and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Professor Cary D. Wintz, Distinguished Professor of History at Texas Southern University, opened the workshop with the following lecture titled "The Harlem Renaissance: What Was It, and Why Does It Matter?" In his remarks, Wintz addresses the origins and nature of the movement—a task, he says, that is far more complex than it may seem.
Wintz is a specialist in the Harlem Renaissance and in African American political thought. Wintz is an author or editor of numerous books including Harlem Speaks; Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance; African American Political Thought, 1890–1930; African Americans and the Presidency: The Road to the White House; and The Harlem Renaissance in the West. He served as an editor of the Oxford University Press five-volume Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present, and the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Routledge). He has also written extensively on Texas history and is an author of one of the standard Texas history texts, Texas: The Lone Star State. He is a native Houstonian and a graduate of Rice University and Kansas State University.
What was the Harlem Renaissance and when did it begin?
This seemingly simple question reveals the complexities of the movement we know varyingly as the New Negro Renaissance, the New Negro Movement, the Negro Renaissance, the Jazz Age, or the Harlem Renaissance. To answer the question it is necessary to place the movement within time and space, and then to define its nature. This task is much more complex than it might seem.
Traditionally the Harlem Renaissance was viewed primarily as a literary movement centered in Harlem and growing out of the black migration and the emergence of Harlem as the premier black metropolis in the United States. Music and theater were mentioned briefly, more as background and local color, as providing inspiration for poetry and local color for fiction. However, there was no analysis of the developments in these fields. Likewise, art was discussed mostly in terms of Aaron Douglas and his association with Langston Hughes and other young writers who produced Fire!! in 1926, but there was little or no analysis of the work of African American artists. And there was even less discussion or analysis of the work of women in the fields of art, music, and theater.
Fortunately, this narrow view has changed. The Harlem Renaissance is increasingly viewed through a broader lens that recognizes it as a national movement with connections to international developments in art and culture that places increasing emphasis on the non-literary aspects of the movement.
Time
First, to know when the Harlem Renaissance began, we must determine its origins. Understanding the origins depends on how we perceive the nature of the Renaissance. For those who view the Renaissance as primarily a literary movement, the Civic Club Dinner of March 21, 1924, signaled its emergence. This event did not occur in Harlem, but was held almost one hundred blocks south in Manhattan at the Civic Club on Twelfth Street off Fifth Avenue. Charles S. Johnson, the young editor of Opportunity, the National Urban League's monthly magazine, conceived the event to honor writer Jessie Fauset on the occasion of the publication of her novel, There Is Confusion. Johnson planned a small dinner party with about twenty guests—a mix of white publishers, editors, and literary critics, black intellectuals, and young black writers. But, when he asked Alain Locke to preside over the event, Locke agreed only if the dinner honored African American writers in general rather than one novelist.
So the simple celebratory dinner morphed into a transformative event with over one hundred attendees. African Americans were represented by W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others of the black intelligentsia, along with Fauset and a representative group of poets and authors. White guests predominately were publishers and critics; Carl Van Doren, editor of Century magazine, spoke for this group calling upon the young writers in the audience to make their contribution to the "new literary age" emerging in America.1
D.