Question

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Answer 1

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Answer 2

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Answer 3

The Pen and the Paradox: How the Harlem Renaissance Challenged the American Dream
An Elusive Dream

The American Dream is a dream of upward mobility, where one is able to ascend the ladder of success and society using some combination of guile and grit, hard work and determination. But the prerequisite for this dream is opportunity — one must be permitted on the ladder in the first place. Such was the predicament of African Americans living in the "land of opportunity" in the early 20th century, 50 years removed from the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. [1] Technically, they were free, but they had few rights, few opportunities to choose from, and little purchase on the American Dream by which the nation defined itself. [2]
Soldiers of color returning from World War I (1914 – 1918) came home understanding this hypocrisy: that they had taken up the cause of freedom for a nation that did not truly grant it to them. This recognition, coupled with a rash of race riots in the "red summer" of 1919, pushed many in the African American community to demand more from a so-called democracy, where all were supposedly granted a voice and the right to pursue happiness. [3] These first postwar years planted the seeds for a reclaiming of identity known as the New Negro Movement, a movement that would find its epicenter in upper Manhattan and come to be rebranded the Harlem Renaissance.
"A City Within a City"

This push to reclaim democracy and voice by way of celebrating black culture coincided with a great migration of African Americans from the South to northern urban centers. Between 1910 and 1920, roughly 500,000 blacks headed north, away from the racism and segregation of the South and toward the possibility of industrial jobs and a chance for new beginnings. In the 1920s, the number rose to roughly 800,000. During this period, Harlem, covering just three square miles of New York City, became home to around 175,000 of these transplanted men, women, and children, giving it the most concentrated population of African Americans anywhere in the world.1
For several reasons, Harlem came to symbolize the new spirit of identity, self-expression, and opportunity that defined the New Negro Movement. Its size and concentration meant its significance could not be ignored, as the neighborhood came to reflect a sizable portion of New York City's population. It was also legitimized [4] by its origins: It grew from an upper-class white suburb rather than from the decay of a poor, white neighborhood, the cultural norm of the preceding decades.2 As writer James Weldon Johnson described it:
Harlem . . . is a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in
the world. It is not a slum or a fringe, it is located in the heart
of Manhattan and occupies one of the most beautiful and healthful
sections of the city. It is not a 'quarter' of dilapidated tenements,
but is made up of new-law apartments and handsome dwellings,
with well-paved and well-lighted streets. It has its own churches,
social and civic centers, shops, theaters and other places of
amusement. And it contains more Negroes to the square mile
than any other spot on earth."3
Most importantly, Harlem was diverse, a community of blacks from all reaches of America, Africa, and the Caribbean. As noted in the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, this unique makeup "contributed to a highly sophisticated and race-conscious community — something unprecedented in American history. Because of its diversity, Harlem became a testing ground for clashing racial and political viewpoints and for artistic innovation and experimentation."4
Critic and teacher Alain Locke, whose anthology The New Negro collected some of the most prominent writings about the movement, called the Harlem Renaissance a "spiritual Coming of Age"5 that provided African Americans a new opportunity "for group expression and self-determination."6 In short, the Harlem Renaissance allowed African Americans of all kinds a way to participate in the American Dream. But since doors were still shut to the black community in many other areas, creative expression became the primary means of the movement. Though this was primarily literary, the opportunity for expression manifested [5] itself in countless other ways in both the arts — such as dance, drama, and painting — as well as in the social sciences and philosophy, giving a platform to such writers as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay; such musicians as Count Basie and Duke Ellington; and such intellectuals as Locke, Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The ultimate result of this confluence of culture and raising of voices, as described by Locke, was a transforming of "social disillusionment to race pride."7
"Double-Consciousness"

The Harlem Renaissance gave black artists the opportunity to publicly explore and comment on their identity as Americans and their complex participation in the American Dream. What these writers, painters, musicians, and sociologists most often took to task was the fundamental paradox that came along with being black in early 20th-century America: being socially enslaved in the land of the free. In his 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois describes this contradiction as a "double-consciousness," a state where a black person "ever feels his two-ness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."8 [6]
This paradox is at the heart of Claude McKay's 1921 poem "America," which juxtaposes [7] praise and reproach for the nation he had called home since 1912:
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth, [8]
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.9 [9]
McKay is responding in verse to the nation that both allows and inspires him to express himself but that also puts limits on his freedom and threatens his very life. He is entranced by "her might and granite wonders" and emboldened by the vigor that "flows like tides into my blood," but at the same time America steals his "breath of life" and feeds him bitter bread. In the final line, McKay predicts the fate of a nation that professes freedom but oppresses its own, its glory buried by the sands of time.
A Call for Inclusion

Perhaps the greatest poet to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes wrote frequently about the issue of black identity. Even in the haven that was Harlem, Hughes recognized the great hypocrisy at work. As the community grew more vibrant in the arts, the music and dance clubs of Harlem became popular destinations for cosmopolitan whites, and blacks found themselves priced out of their own neighborhood establishments. Hughes explains in his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, that "Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club and never appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of their dark community. Nor did ordinary Negroes like the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown, flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang, and where now the strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers — like amusing animals in a zoo."10
It was the constant tug-of-war between inclusion and exclusion that pressed Hughes, eight years earlier, to write his poem "I, Too":
I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen [10]
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then. [11]

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed —

I, too, am America.11
The poem's first and final lines are a direct reference to Walt Whitman's famous poem of American inclusion, "I Hear America Singing," where Whitman praises the hardworking men and women that, to him, form the nation's backbone and soul. The speaker in Hughes's poem, however, is speaking from outside this idyllic vision.
Whitman's poem catalogs the importance of a wide range of individual voices in making a whole America, but Hughes's poem focuses on a single voice, that of "the darker brother" who is excluded from American society. Hughes repurposes Whitman's line to indicate that not everyone is automatically included in the idealistic way Whitman describes. But Hughes's speaker does not reject Whitman and this American Dream — he wants to fight for it by growing strong and shaming the white majority for keeping "beautiful" Americans with so much to offer in the margins. Hughes's intention is to show that American inclusion, for many, is not a given but a struggle — but that this dream of acceptance and equality is still something worth pursuing. The statement at the poem's end makes clear the speaker's intention to claim his rightful place in America's chorus — "I, too, am America" — despite the paradox that makes the dream so challenging for so many in this land to this day. [12]
Enduring Questions

The artists and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance, throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, took the American Dream to task. In doing so, they engaged this paradox of "double-consciousness" in an effort to better the situation of African Americans and all minorities who faced these same contradictions: I'm part of America, but I'm not; America grants hope and opportunity, but it simultaneously oppresses me. Is it a shared dream? Is it attainable for all? And, if not, does that undercut the very foundation that the dream is built upon? These are the questions at the heart of the poems above as well as countless other verses, songs, stories, and paintings born of this important confluence of time and place. They are questions born at the start of this nation, but that finally achieved a voice, even among the marginalized, generations later amid the explosion of creativity known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Works Cited
1. "New Negro Movement" in Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, vol. 2, ed. Cary D. Wintz, Paul Finkelman (New York: Routledge, 2004), 898.
2. Ibid.
3. James Weldon Johnson, "Harlem: the Culture Capital," National Humanities Center, accessed November 5, 2013, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/community/text1/johnsonharlem.pdf.
4. "New Negro Movement," in Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, vol. 2.
5. Alain Locke, "Enter the New Negro," University of Virginia Department of American Studies, accessed November 5, 2013, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/locke_1.html.
6. Alain Locke, "Harlem," University of Virginia Department of American Studies, accessed November 5, 2013, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/locke_2.html.
7. Alain Locke, "Enter the New Negro."
8. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Rockville, Maryland: Arc Manor, 2008), 12.
9. Claude McKay, "America," Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay, ed. Max Eastman (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 6.
10. Langston Hughes, Autobiography: The Big Sea, in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, vol. 13, (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 176.
11. Langston Hughes, "I, Too," in Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Vintage, 1990), 275.

Answer 4

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Answer 5

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Answer 6

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Answer 7

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Answer 8

The answer is Looking for opportunity in the north. As evidenced in the first few words of the very first sentence. "The American Dream is a dream of upward mobility"