The Harlem Renaissance

Billie Holliday sang of it in 1939:

Southern trees bearing strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

In words penned by a Jewish schoolteacher, Holliday testified in the song “Strange Fruit” to the “bitter crop” of the “pastoral” south — the lynched bodies of African-Americans. Along with restrictive segregationist laws and the debt-saddling sharecropping system, mob violence was a central feature of the dangerous life 6 million black people left behind between 1916 and 1970 as they fled the rural South in what has been called “The Great Migration.” Labor shortages during WW I provided the first opening, and 400,000 AfricanAmericans flowed North between 1916 and 1918 alone.

The industrial North did not welcome the newcomers with open arms, but they gained a foothold nonetheless and sent money back for family and friends to join them. Among cities across the North, no destination attracted greater numbers than New York City, and no neighborhood more so than the several square miles known as Harlem. Overbuilt in the 1880s as an exclusive suburb for upper- and middle-class whites, the neighborhood offered available housing in the 1910s and 1920s. Black-owned businesses, churches, shops, restaurants and nightclubs sprang up along the increasingly crowded and cosmopolitan streets of Harlem. Writers, singers, musicians, scholars and artists came from all over. A “renaissance” of the “New Negro” was underway.

The denizens of the Harlem Renaissance read and contributed essays, poems and stories to The Crisis, the monthly NAACP magazine launched in 1910 by founding editor W.E.B. Du Bois; to the “race-conscious” Voice, which first appeared in

1917, and to the National Urban League’s Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, which first came out in 1924. They read about themselves in scholar Alain Locke’s magazine issue, Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro. They sought each other’s