The Crisis literary editor Jessie Fauset published many of the young writers who would become literary lights of the Renaissance. However, in 1924 Opportunity upstaged both The Crisis and Fauset by announcing itself as the vehicle that would usher Harlem’s writers to mainstream publishers, critics, and reviewers.
In March 1924, sociologist Charles Johnson, director of the Urban League and editor of Opportunity, hosted a now-legendary dinner at the Civic Club, widely hailed as “the first act of the Harlem Renaissance.” The dinner was not so much the start of the Renaissance as its public coming-out. The evening was planned as a tribute to Fauset for her tireless efforts on behalf of Black writers and for the publication of her novel There Is Confusion. Instead, the event served to highlight the younger writers and offered them valuable introductions to members of the white literary establishment who were in attendance.
Two writers who would become the brightest stars of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, were absent that evening. Having already published works in The Crisis and Opportunity, both were on the brink of very promising literary careers, but neither had relocated to New York. By August 1924, the literary flowering that had started with the publication of Jean Toomer’s Cane in 1923 was fully under way, attracting a bevy of young artists drawn by the energy, community, and opportunity of the Black Mecca.
Significantly, a future literary great made his arrival in Harlem that summer as well. James A. Baldwin was born at Harlem Hospital in August 1924. He would come of age in a Harlem shaped by, but quite different from, the heady days of the 1920s.
In spite of the cultural ascendancy of Harlem, the summer of 1924 offered continued challenges to Black people. That summer the Ku Klux Klan was present and influential at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and lynching was still prevalent throughout the South. Harlem was fully aware of these horrific conditions, as many of its inhabitants had fled virulent racism. Once they arrived in Harlem, they devoted themselves to the fight against it. If the artists sought creative freedom, they also saw themselves as participants in a larger movement that asserted the humanity of Black people. Johnson, Du Bois, and others saw the arts as central to the struggle for full citizenship.
In 1925 Howard University philosopher Alain Locke guest-edited a special issue of the journal Survey Graphic, titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.” Devoted to life in Harlem, featuring essays by Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and a number of promising younger writers, the special issue quickly sold out. Its popularity led to the anthology The New Negro, also edited by Locke and published in 1925, which according to Arnold Rampersad not only served to “certify the existence of a great awakening in Black America but also to endow it with a Bible.”
Meanwhile in 1925 Hughes, who first published in The Crisis, and Hurston, whose writings would appear in Opportunity, came from Washington, D.C., to Harlem. The painter Aaron Douglas relocated as well. In May the New York Herald Tribune became the first publication to use the phrase “Negro Renaissance” to describe the flowering of art. The Crisis launched its literary prizes and a research project on the social conditions of American Blacks. The first prizes were issued in August 1925.
Although best known for an abundance of literary work, the Renaissance produced music and visual art as well. Louis Armstrong parted with his mentor King Oliver to join the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra and came to the city that was as big as his sound—New York. Bessie Smith and other blues queens were among the most popular musical artists of the day. Both Hurston and Hughes attended rent parties and after-hours joints where they might hear Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and Willie “the Lion” Smith, musical giants who would join the partying crowd after they’d finished performing in some of Harlem’s whites-only clubs. Also in attendance were Black workers and Black debutantes, whites in search of a little excitement, and members of Harlem’s thrilling, vibrant, and brilliant queer community.
Like their contemporaries, Hurston and Hughes found sponsors among wealthy whites, philanthropist friends of the Negro. Amy Spingarn, an artist and philanthropist, gave Hughes the funds he needed to attend Lincoln University. Hurston met Annie Nathan Meyer, author and founder of Barnard College, at the second Opportunity dinner in March 1925. Meyer offered her a spot at Barnard that evening and later helped her find the resources she needed to attend.
In 1926 some of the movement’s inherent tensions surfaced. Nowhere is this more notable than in two of the year’s most significant publications, the singular issue of the journal FIRE!! and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” is the aesthetic manifesto of a generation. It is boldly assertive, unabashedly in love with Black people, and insistent on the value of Black vernacular culture. Hughes’s metaphor of the racial mountain takes on several meanings. Here it is an “urge within the race toward whiteness.” It is that which the Black artist must climb “in order to discover himself and his people.” It is the rocky road, but one that ends with the younger Black artists “building temples for tomorrow…on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” If “Racial Mountain” provides the theory, FIRE!! is the practice.
FIRE!! appeared only once, in November 1926, but remains a lasting document of the period. Having been nurtured and chided by their elders, Hughes, Hurston, and Douglas, along with Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and others, joined forces to produce a groundbreaking publication. The issue contained fiction, drama, essays, and visual imagery focusing on both urban and rural Blacks. The group met at Hurston’s or Douglas’s apartment, where they edited manuscripts, made design decisions, and produced a work by Black people free of the oversight of their Black elders and white funders. The issue contained Nugent’s beautiful and impressionistic story of queer desire, “Smoke, Lilies and Jade”; Hurston’s “Color Struck and Sweat”; poetry by Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Helene Johnson; and drawings by Douglas and others. It was a beautiful hand grenade, a modernist gem.
At the beginning of 1927, Hurston received a fellowship under the direction of Columbia’s Franz Boas. Armed with a pistol and driving herself, she ventured south to collect folklore in a land where the threat of racial violence, lynching, and rape was real. She would spend the next two years there collecting material that she eventually published in the groundbreaking Mules and Men.
If Hurston turned her attention to folklore, 1928 saw the ascendancy of the novel as preferred form: Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem. Du Bois’s Dark Princess. Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun. Newcomer Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. Larsen, who would later be dubbed the “mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance,” was for a brief moment a favorite writer of Du Bois for her depiction of the Black elite and the talented tenth, and what he saw as her critical dissection of the absurdity of racial classification. What he missed was her exploration of female sexual desire and her critique of the elite’s adherence to respectability and its own racial hypocrisy. Quicksand would be followed by Passing in 1929. Both novels were critical successes and ensured Larsen a prominent place among Harlem’s literary lights.