The Harlem Renaissance: Origins, Influences, and Currents

The Survey, an American magazine covering social issues for international audiences, invited Howard University philosopher and first African American Rhodes Scholar Alain Locke to guest edit its March 1925 Graphic Supplement.

That invitation provided Locke with the perfect vehicle for envisioning the New Negro through literature and the visual and performing arts. As the issue showcases, Locke brought together leading and aspiring writers, artists, intellectuals, and performers, like Paul Robeson, who made up what is now referred to as the Harlem Renaissance.

The issue drew from wider trends and currents that began in the 1910s, including the migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north and west, U.S. entry into World War I, and the rise of mass production. Those trends are evident in the reproduction of A College Lad, Winold Reiss’ portrait of Harold Jackman, which was featured in the issue. The drawing presented an image of the New Negro: someone young, educated, sophisticated, contemplative, and often more at ease in the modern, industrial city of New York, especially the neighborhood of Harlem.

The positive response to the Survey’s “Harlem Number” compelled Locke to expand his vision of the New Negro into the landmark anthology of the period. Locke drew on the special issue but expanded his canvas significantly, adding more sections dedicated to the arts flourishing in Harlem to better frame the energy and promise of African American culture. The result was The New Negro: An Interpretation, a beautifully bound and illustrated book that both celebrated the moment and secured it for posterity.

The expanded art coverage included Reiss’ portraits of prominent African American leaders and artists. A German-born immigrant himself, Winold Reiss’ involvement underscored the collaboration between visual artists and writers and editors like Locke as well as the anthology’s international inflection, including its efforts at capturing the diversity and racial pride within Black communities in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. Important figures illustrated included Mary McLeod Bethune, noted educator and founder of Bethune-Cookman College.

Other illustrations depicted major authors. Florida-born James Weldon Johnson, pictured here, also began his career as an educator in Jacksonville, where he co-wrote the Black national anthem “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”

Countee Cullen was raised in the heart of Harlem by his uncle, the Reverend Frederick Cullen, and attended school at New York University and Harvard. A poet who was popular with both African American and white audiences, Cullen saw the period as an opportunity to develop his mastery of conventional poetic forms.

Jean Toomer, another subject of Reiss’s in The New Negro, was a poet, playwright, and novelist who consistently sought to experiment in his writing and was lauded for doing so.

Toomer’s most celebrated work Cane was published two years before The New Negro and featured poetry as well as fiction, reportage, drama, and abstract drawings. His interest in modernist experimentation is obvious even in the stripped-down aesthetic of the cover, though the dust jacket itself was more decorative. Such interplay between print and material culture is a frequent but less discussed feature of the Harlem Renaissance, partly because of the greater emphasis placed on the performing and visual arts.

By contrast, the dust jacket for Color, the first book of poetry by Cullen, is a transitional design that gestures back to the Art Nouveau style while incorporating Art Deco elements—a visual cue to Cullen’s commitment to conventional poetic forms. Artist Charles Cullen, no relation to the poet, designed the cover. Charles Cullen was another artist whose collaborations with writers was integral to Locke’s conception of the New Negro.

The New Negro, and literary works like Cane and Color, illustrate the important relationship between word and image in the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Equally important was the influence of musical performance. W. C. Handy, often referred to as the Father of the Blues, was just as invested in preserving the legacy of the blues as Locke was in establishing the Harlem Renaissance as a major cultural moment and movement.

Handy’s Blues: An Anthology, featuring a frontispiece drawn by Miguel Covarrubias, documented and celebrated the music he had worked so hard to popularize.

For established writer and activist James Weldon Johnson, Douglas illustrated God’s Trombones, an iconic collection of sermons in verse. Just as Johnson retells biblical myths in the vernacular, Douglas juxtaposes resonant images of an African past in New World settings.

Here, too, the influence of music is critical, both to Johnson’s poetry and Douglas’ sense of the verve of everyday life.

This poetry spread from the same issue, including contributions from Arna Bontemps and Georgia Douglas Johnson as well as emerging poets, is a reminder of the role The Crisis and other periodicals played in cultivating new talent.

As the May 1927 issue of The Crisis demonstrates, performing artists were integral to establishing the international profile of the Harlem Renaissance. With her choreography and stage presence, Josephine Baker took Paris by storm and helped popularize the homegrown musical art form of jazz—especially its penchant for syncopation and improvisation—worldwide.

The white photographer, writer, and patron Carl Van Vechten was important in documenting and circulating the movement and preserving its legacy through his photographs, networking skills, and advocacy for emerging writers and artists behind the scenes. Pictured here with Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias , the controversial Van Vechten reminds us that, despite the racism and cultural appropriation of the period, the Harlem Renaissance was also interracial in nature.

One of Van Vechten’s important relationships was with anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston was prolific and contributed much to the landscape of the Harlem Renaissance: she preserved folk life, especially in Florida; she expanded the language of prose fiction; and she created indelible images of black working-class women.

The fiction Hurston and others published later in the Harlem Renaissance was as expressively illustrated as the earlier poetry. Covarrubias’ dust jacket complements the stories of black life Hurston tells in Mules and Men .

Covarrubias’ Negro Drawings drew on many Harlem Renaissance themes. For instance, the portraits here demonstrate the importance of self-presentation.

The church service and the couple dancing here highlight the tensions between the sacred and the secular. Responding to the era’s hopeful sense of new opportunities, this collection of drawings also underscores Covarrubias’ cross-cultural artistic practices and deep investment in capturing the diversity and vitality of black experience.

A work like Negro Drawings, with its artist’s Mexican background, reminds us of the global circulation of these texts as well as the Harlem Renaissance’s continuing resonance across place and time. The Jamaican-born Claude McKay’s novel Banjo—with another dust jacket by Douglas—literalizes these global currents in its depiction of an international black community on the Marseille waterfront.

As Banjo’s setting in Marseille demonstrates, the Harlem Renaissance was not just about Harlem. France, Jamaica, Liberia, among other countries, were also destinations and points of origin. In the United States, other cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, and Atlanta—figured prominently as destinations for migration and as sites of creative output during the period. In his memoir Black Boy, Richard Wright captures this story of movement, from his boyhood in Mississippi to his early adulthood in Chicago. Wright’s book also prompts readers to reflect on the endurance of black life in the face of racial violence that both shaped the Harlem Renaissance and continues to resonate a hundred years beyond.

An important reason the Harlem Renaissance continues to hold so many people’s imagination is that it still reflects a sense of possibility: for change, racial pride and comity, and a fuller embrace of the human spirit. This exhibit celebrates the leading role that literature and visual and performing arts played in capturing the lived experiences of this cultural moment, as well as in shaping its enduring legacy.