African Americans MigrationEssay Preview: African Americans MigrationReport this essayIn the decades immediately following World War I, huge numbers of African Americans migrated to the industrial North from the economically depressed and agrarian South. In cities such as Chicago, Washington, DC, and New York City, the recently migrated sought and found (to some degree) new opportunities, both economic and artistic. African Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage and to become “The New Negro,” a term coined in 1925 by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke in his influential book of the same name.
Countee Cullen thought long and hard in his poems about his own and collective African-American identity. Some of his strongest poems question the benevolence of a Creator who has bestowed a race with such mixed blessings. Claude McKay, born and raised in Jamaica, wrote of the immigrants nostalgia and the American negros pride and rage. Jean (Eugene) Toomer remains a mystery. Light enough to “pass” and alone constituting the generations Symbolist avant-garde, he appeared briefly on the Harlem Renaissance scene, became a follower of the mystic Gurdjieff, and disappeared into the white world.
Sterling Brown, for many years a professor at Howard University, emerged in the thirties with sometimes playful, often pessimistic poems in standard English and black vernacular and in African American and European forms. In many of Browns poems strong men and women resist the oppression of racism, poverty, and fate.
The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance opened doors and deeply influenced the generations of African American writers that followed, including Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks. In the forties, fifties, and sixties, Hayden taught at Fisk University and the University of Michigan and served two terms as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Since the publication in 1945 of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks has combined a quiet life with critical success. Her second book, Annie Allen, won the 1950 Pulitzer prize, the first time a book by a black poet had won that coveted distinction, and the last time until Rita Doves Thomas and Beulah, almost forty years later. Brooks was a virtuoso of technique, her exquisite poems exploring, for the first time, the interior lives of African American individuals. Brooks perspective shifted mid-career, her later work influenced by the politically and socially radical Black Arts Movement of the sixties.
The Harlem Renaissance opened doors and deeply influenced the generations of African American writers that followed, including Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks. In the forties, fifties, and sixties, Hayden taught at Fisk University and the University of Michigan and served two terms as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Since the publication in 1945 of her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks has combined a quiet life with critical success. Her second book, Annie Allen, won the 1950 Pulitzer prize, the first time a book by a black poet had won that coveted distinction, and the last time until Rita Doves Thomas and Beulah, almost forty years later. Brooks is best known for her nonfiction works in the literary field. She was born in St. Louis, Indiana. Her mother was of white descent; her father was of Jewish background, and she was raised in Kansas, Texas. Her early work is often considered to be a formative influence on her own generation, when she is regarded as a founding member of the WNBA family, as did others she became involved with as members of the WNBA’s national basketball team. She was a member of the African American Student Senate for the past twenty‑one years, as well as President of the Student Government Association; she was the executive director of the Harlem Student Council for the 1990s and a member of the President’s Advisory Board. She earned her Bachelor of Arts at Fordham University, and earned a Master of Arts in Communication Arts at Brandeis University. Her professional interests included opera, writing, theatre, composition, and literary criticism. Prior to being a student of American art, she worked with an American Jewish organization on several commissions. After receiving her J.D. and M.A. certificate, she became a senior adviser with the Office of White Studies. She studied art history, law, and sociology at Rutgers, where she was an assistant professor of art history at the university and a professor of English at Columbia. She has composed and edited dozens of short stories, anthologies, feature films, and other works of film, television, and other media. Her work has been illustrated by the World of O. C.; her work has appeared in the U.S. magazine American Film (1963), and in the anthology American Film in Europe and America (1974); and in the history of television series about film in America (1979). She received her B.A. from Syracuse University in 1957 and a Ph.D. dissertation from Oxford University in 1967 at St. Vincent’s University. She later moved to New York City, where she had been a film critic and lecturer and continued to write, on paper, about African-American history. Before her research interests had progressed beyond the political to social issues, she had studied film, theater and literature. She completed her M.A. in theater at Northwestern University in 1972 and M.A. in film and television from the University of Virginia in 1973. She studied literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and attended the University of Massachusetts Boston. She also studied political science and psychology at Harvard University, and in 1969 completed a fellowship in theater at St. Petersburg University. Her work was produced at Film Critics Association; American Film Society, International Film Review, Film Press, and Film Culture. She also worked as a journalist in the United States Department of Archives, International Relations, and American Film Press. A.E. L. M. Lefebvre and her husband, John, have five kids. (Image credit: Michael Rieffel, National Library of America)
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