Harlem Renaissance

Hania Alim

Period 6

Harlem Renaissance: 

The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s. During this period Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars. W.E.B. Du Bois encouraged talented artists to leave the South. THE CRISIS published the poems, stories, and visual works of many artists of the period. It involved racial pride, fueled in part by the militancy of the "New Negro" demanding civil and political rights. The Renaissance incorporated jazz and the blues, attracting whites to Harlem speakeasies, where interracial couples danced. While it may have contributed to a certain relaxation of racial attitudes among young whites, perhaps its greatest impact was to reinforce race pride among blacks.

People

Madam C.J Walker:

Born Sarah Breedlove on a Louisiana cotton plantation, Madam C.J. became the first ebony American woman self-made millionaire. Orphaned at age seven, married at age fourteen, and widowed at twenty with a two-year-old daughter, she moved to St. Louis. She decided to commence her own line of hair-care products. In 1906, with a few dollars in savings, she established a mail-order business in Denver, Colorado with the avail of her new husband, Charles Walker. Even though they later divorced, she kept his name. The company became a huge success. It included a beauty school in Pittsburgh, and opened offices in Indianapolis and Harlem. By 1916 the Walker Company included 20,000 male and female agents, several schools and manufacturing plants, and operated in several places. Madam Walker was a philanthropist. In 1918 she gave the keynote verbalization at several NAACP fund-raisers for the anti-lynching effort. Madam Walker was a vigorous advocate of black women's economic independence, which she encouraged at a time when few jobs were available for women.

Ned Cobb:

Ned Cobb was a tenant farmer living in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, who joined the Sharecroppers Union in 1931 to fight for justice for black people and against exploitation by white landowners. In a series of interviews in 1969 conducted by Theodore Rosengarten, a Harvard scholar, Cobb told the remarkable story of his life. When he was old enough, Cobb started to farm on his own. A hard worker with a deep knowledge of crops and animals, Cobb managed to escape the financial traps set for him by local whites. Cobb stayed out of their debt, as he managed to avoid being destroyed by natural disasters such as the boll weevil epidemic and the collapse of cotton prices. Cobb was profoundly impressed by the arrival of the Communist Party in the cotton fields of Alabama. Cobb saw the Communists as the heirs to the abolitionists who came South during the Civil War and Reconstruction to finish the job their predecessors had started. He joined the party's union, the Sharecroppers Union, and distributed leaflets and literature and recruited new members. In 1952, when a sheriff tried to foreclose on a friend's home and livestock, Cobb defended his friend and became involved in a shootout. Offered the opportunity of a lighter sentence if he cooperated with the court and named fellow union members, Cobb refused and was sent to jail for 13 years.