Harlem Renaissance Artists Quotes

Whether we consider hip-hop as an evolved manifestation of the Harlem Renaissance or something completely new under the sun, it clearly has moved beyond the stage of just entertaining lives to that of informing and empowering lives.

The city of Paris, France, became a place of refuge for biracial Americans during slavery and at the time of the Harlem Renaissance for black musicians, fine artists, writers and others seeking opportunities to practice their craft free from American racism.

Notwithstanding the memories of slavery, and in the face poverty, ignorance, terrorism, and subjugation still deeply woven into their lives, the embittered past of blacks was taken onto a much higher plane of intellectual and artistic consideration during the Renaissance.

It is difficult to be an artist, because what you can see needs to be done and what you can achieve are generally two very opposite things. The two are like yin and yang, north and south, positive and negative. What you see is just totally opposite of what the reality can be, and that's unfortunate. But there are things we can do. Writers can either repave--we fill in some of the cracks in the road that are already there--or we start to knock down some of the weeds to make a clearing in the wilderness.

Sandra L. West and Aberjhani have compiled an encyclopedia that makes an important contribution to our need to know more about one of modern America’s truly significant artistic and cultural movements. It helps us to acknowledge the complexity of African American life at a time when the nation’s culture was taking on a recognizable shape, when race was becoming less of a crushing burden and more of a challenge to progressive people and their ideals, and when cities and their inhabitants symbolized the end of the past and the seductiveness of the new.

Profound as its intellectual and artistic interactions had been, the Chicago Black Renaissance never dented the city’s consciousness the way the Harlem Renaissance created a mythic Black New York.