The Harlem Renaissance encompassed poetry and prose, painting and sculpture, jazz and swing, opera and dance. What united these diverse art forms was their realistic presentation of what it meant to be black in America, what writer Langston Hughes called an “expression of our individual dark-skinned selves,” as well as a new militancy in asserting their civil and political rights.

 Among the Renaissance’s most significant contributors were intellectuals W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Cyril Briggs, and Walter Francis White; electrifying performers Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson; writers and poets Zora Neale Hurston, Effie Lee Newsome, Countee Cullen; visual artists Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage; and an extraordinary list of legendary musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ivie Anderson, Josephine Baker, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and countless others.

 At the height of the movement, Harlem was the epicenter of American culture. The neighborhood bustled with African American-owned and run publishing houses and newspapers, music companies, playhouses, nightclubs, and cabarets. The literature, music, and fashion they created defined culture and “cool” for blacks and white alike, in America and around the world.*

*A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/new-african-american-identity-harlem-renaissance

The Schomburg Center: Celebrating 100 Years of James Baldwin “Jimmy! God’s Black Revolutionary Mouth – Thru Feb. 28th | Free

From the Schomburg website:

 Novelist, essayist, intellectual, and activist James Baldwin (1924–1987) is renowned as one of the world’s most influential and prophetic voices of our time. His death in 1987 sent waves of grief around the world. Amiri Baraka’s eulogy, titled “Jimmy!”, spoke of James "Jimmy" Baldwin as “not only a writer, international literary figure” but as a “man, spirit, voice”. Baraka called Baldwin “God’s black revolutionary mouth,” which speaks to Baldwin’s enduring legacy of radical truth-telling. 

 The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is home to Baldwin’s archive of personal papers. In celebration of his 100th birthday, on public display for the first time, we proudly present selections from the James Baldwin Papers that highlight his literary career and legacy from childhood to death, along with items from other research collections that illuminate the passion, brilliance, and courageous spirit of James “Jimmy” Baldwin.

 https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/jimmy-gods-black-revolutionary-mouth

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Upcoming HNBA events

The next 25th precinct community meeting
Date: Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Time: 6pm - 8pm
Location: 25th Precinct, 120 E 119th St, between Park & Lexington Avenues.

Harlems’s 4th Annual Self Love Fair
Date: Wednesday, February 22, 2025
Time: 12pm - 4pm
Location: 250 West 127th Street, Gymnasium