Remembering the Harlem Renaissance and Its People in the Time of #Black Lives Matter

Abstract

This article offers a brief overview of the Harlem Renaissance and its people in the light of a renewed interest in the African American literature produced in the 1920s that the Black Lives Matter Movement generated in recent years. Since its inception, the Black Life Matter grassroots organization rekindled a strong, collective desire for social justice as a result of the continuous police brutality against black people. The systemic episodes of racially motivated violence experienced in the last decade or so in America are not that different from the racial tensions that inspired the production of the Harlem Renaissance. This literary enterprise, also known as the New Negro Movement, became a cultural phenomenon capable of attracting the attention of domestic and international followers who supported the idea of reassessing, by means of cultural renovation, mainstream representations of black people. Like the #Black Lives Matter Movement today, the Harlem Renaissance asserted the unlimited value that black individuals had in the fabrics of American society and its history. While this essay discusses the main production and ideas of the New Negro Movement, it also aims at showing that the complexity and the legacy the Harlem Renaissance left calls for further investigations especially in consideration of the racial divide still taking place today in the United States.