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The Harlem Renaissance by Conseula Francis, Assistant Professor of English In his seminal 1903 work Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. DuBois argued that African Americans possessed a "double consciousness." He wrote, "One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings: two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." The Harlem Renaissance, in many ways, was an attempt at resolving this conflict. The dates of the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro movement, are often in dispute. It is safe to say, though, that the years after World War I and up to the Great Depression saw a marked increase in the literary production of African Americans and a concerted effort on the parts of some to use that literary production as a path to social justice. Arguing that there existed something in New Negro artists that had not existed before—namely, a transformed consciousness rooted in a new sense of self-respect and self-dependence—older, established African Americans like Howard University philosophy professor Alain Locke, sociologist Charles S. Johnson, and Crisis editor Jessie Fauset "midwifed" (to borrow a term from Langston Hughes) the Harlem Renaissance into existence. They encouraged, promoted and supported young artists such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen and Jean Toomer in the hopes that their work could effect real social change. At every turn the architects of the movement insisted that the New Negro would wed their new sense of racial consciousness to traditional American ideals. Alain Locke wrote that the "Negro mind reaches out as yet to nothing but American wants, American ideas. But this forced attempt to build his Americanism on race values is a unique social experiment, and its ultimate success is impossible except through the fullest sharing of American culture and institutions." The "midwives" truly believed that DuBois's "two warring ideals" could come together through the power of New Negro poetry. The New Negroes, the poets, novelists, dramatists and essayists of the Harlem Renaissance, were not necessarily in agreement. Many of them wanted to create art free from any kind of social program and resisted the kind of molding offered by the "midwives." Langston Hughes's essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" is often cited as the manifesto for this position. Still others, like writer George Schuyler, resisted the idea of a racial consciousness, arguing that difference equals peculiarity and that African Americans should focus on their similarities to other Americans in their fight for social justice. Rather than sweeping social change, the Harlem Renaissance ended with questions about the nature of art, the efficacy of racial identity, and the revolutionary possibilities of literature. In many ways, these questions continue to be central in African American culture. Selected Bibliography
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