Harlem Renaissance Quotes

Whose little boy are you?

The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.

You have a color of your own- Dark chocolate, You have a culture your own- Hip pop, You have a revival of your own- Harlem Renaissance, You are the spot on a ladybug that adds its beauty, You are the pupil of an eye, You are the vastness of space, You are the richness of soil, You are the sweetness of dark chocolate, You are the mystery in nature, Blessed Black chocolate, God has made You to rule the Land, that made You a slave.

History, too, has a penchant for giving birth to itself over and over again, and those whom it appoints agents of change and progress do not always accept their destinies willingly.

Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.

The leaders and followers of the Harlem Renaissance were every bit as intent on using Black culture to help make the United States a more functional democracy as they were on employing Black culture to 'vindicate' Black people.

When you read the words of Langston Hughes you are reading the words of a Black Gay man. When you read the words of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimké, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, you are reading the words of Black Lesbians. When you listen to the life-affirming voices of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, you are hearing Black Lesbian women. When you see the plays and read the words of Lorraine Hansberry, you are reading the words of a women who loved women deeply.

It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.

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 person unaware of history is like a rudderless boat just floating out in the middle of the ocean, hostages to the waves and currents.

She was so tired of him thinking he knew better than her because he had been gifted with a penis. She was so tired of him thinking he knew better than her because he was white.

The heart of man is an ever empty abyss into which the whole world shall fall and be swallowed up.

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.

In order to have a happy ending, in order to be triumphant, in order to be heroic, you have to tell your own story. The women's movement knows that; black people know that; brown people know that; yellow people know that. You have to be able to tell your own story in order to show that you are worthy--that you belong.

I am striving desperately for a toe-hold on the world.

We Negroes in Eatonville know a number of things that the hustling, bustling white man never dreams of. He is a materialist with little care for overtones.

We are drawn to the Renaissance because of the hope for black uplift and interracial empathy that it embodied and because there is a certain element of romanticism associated with the era’s creativity, its seemingly larger than life heroes and heroines, and its most brilliantly lit terrain, Harlem, USA.

This was even harder to accept for 200,000 Black soldiers who had returned from military service in France and felt entitled to be full citizens. “The great war in Europe, its recoil on America, the ferment in the United States, all conspired to break up the stereotyped conception of the Negro’s place,” wrote James Weldon Johnson, the literary polymath, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Cities erupted in violent attacks on Black property and life. And as vigilante executions by a hangman’s noose continued without sanction in the South, Congress could not muster enough votes to pass an anti-lynching law.

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.

Louise realized that she should want more. That she should strive to get more out of life than the women who came before her, that she should want real freedom and to follow her dreams. In a world where women got so little and Black women got even less, she had to be better.

Son, don't mind what's missing. Count allthat's free: friendship, laughter, all thelove your heart can carry, and time -- count time.

A woman robbed of her love is more terrible than an army with banners.

You don’t have to save everyone. You’re working yourself to the bone. You need to eat and rest.

It is silly—this waiting for love In a parlor, When love is singing up and down the alley Without a collar.

The New Negro anthology by Locke in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was officially launched for the white educated elite to see. Negro writers would liberate the race, at long last, from the demons of Redemption through art and culture, as Victoria Matthews had suggested some thirty years before. There was only one small problem with this: No people, in all of human history, has ever been liberated by the creation of art. None.

I always thought that would be really neat if black people ever got control of the United States we would, of course, tear down some of the statues because we just don't like them...like all of Richmond would probably not have a statue standing.

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.

I think that, in reality, there is something wrong with human beings, and unless we are willing to face the fact that something is really wrong with human beings, unless we are willing to face the fact that somewhere in our imaginations we are evil, vicious people, it is not going to work.

Spring time in Florida is not a matter of peeping violets or bursting buds merely. It is a riot of color, in nature—glistening green leaves, pink, blue, purple, yellow blossoms that fairly stagger the visitor from the north. The miles of hyacinths are like an undulating carpet on the surface of the river and divide reluctantly when the slow-moving alligators push their way log-like across. The nights are white nights as the moon shines with dazzling splendor, or in the absence of that goddess, the soft darkness creeps down laden with innumerable scents. The heavy fragrance of magnolias mingled with the delicate sweetness of jasmine and wild roses.

Once, when they used to set their mouths in what they thought was the Boston Crimp, and ask me about the differences between the ordinary Negro and “the better-thinking Negro”, I used to show my irritation by saying I did not know who the better-thinking Negro was. I knew who the think-they-are-better Negroes were, but who were the better thinkers was another matter.

The implications of Bonhoeffer’s pairing of Jesus and culture were significant; Christians were virtually invisible in German society, absorbed into the German culture of Protestantism, with its liberal Christian language of human achievement and of nationalism. A good Christian looked no different than a patriotic German, tethered firmly to Volkish, or German-centered, loyalties.

This country is a land mass that could be called anything, and for people to act like this is some kind of sacred territory is an insanity. It's just a bunch of people trying to live together, and if we're not going to be part of a dream of equality--a part of a dream of that which is the best of us, the idea that people help one another--if we're not going to do that, then this land mass doesn't any more deserve to be revered than anything else.

Spring time in Florida is not a matter of peeping violets or bursting buds merely. It is a riot of color, in nature--glistening green leaves, pink, blue, purple, yellow blossoms that fairly stagger the visitor from the north. The miles of hyacinths are like an undulating carpet on the surface of the river and divide reluctantly when the slow-moving alligators push their way log-like across. The nights are white nights as the moon shines with dazzling splendor, or in the absence of that goddess, the soft darkness creeps down laden with innumerable scents. The heavy fragrance of magnolias mingled with the delicate sweetness of jasmine and wild roses.

It is interesting that a guy like W.E.B. Du Bois, who actually did very little, I should imagine, with his hands, wrote about "I am the smoke king." Without the labor, both free and slave, of African Americans this country would still be a wilderness.

I do wonder sometimes, I do wonder what it is about the human mind that goes to pain and degradation. I do wonder what it is. We talk about original sin. We talk about ignorance. We talk about people not having had a chance. We talk about poverty--a bunch of things--but there is something not quite right about the human species, because, given half a chance, we'd be eating one another.

Mississippi recently, and recently being 1994, finally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment and agreed that the Civil War was over and black people are free. I'm talking 1994. So you know it is kind of time that people got caught up. It's a shame that we are still looking at a world that can use those kinds of concepts, that can think some people have no right to be free. Everybody owns themselves. It's all we've got. We have every right to be us. We have every right to satisfy our own needs with the life that we were given. I have no idea, no concept, of why people could ever thing that they could own other people.

Ntozake Shange tells us it's not so good to be born a girl. She does not object to being born a girl. She objects to what it means when you are born a girl. She objects to the way that girls are treated. She objects to the way that our dreams are stifled. She objects to the way that we are not taken seriously, we are there as some sort of plaything,

The person who has some awareness of the past knows how to fashion a rudder and which direction land is.

The 1920s to 1930s saw the result of decades of broken promises following the Civil War – a single united voice of pain, suffering, and a new hope. It was a time of new and original art rising from the depths of the African American soul – the Harlem Renaissance.

Still, there’s something to be envied about them. They’re carefree; the world is at their feet. And they have no idea.

New York City nightlife is different, louder. The entire culture is meant to be a secret, but the noise from various clubs is deafening.

It felt like Harlem was choking her, suffocating her, squeezing the life from her one day at a time.

Rafael loved the occult, fancied himself a seer. Of course he thought he could hypnotize them.

It was so hard to forget that everyone was replaceable. That there were hundreds of people lining up, waiting for someone to fall so they could take their place.

Just because I wanted something other than to be tied to one man for the rest of my life, because I wanted to see the world, I’m the one who made all the mistakes?

Louise stared at the drawer for a moment. She had a sinking feeling that Nora had been knee-deep in things Louise had no idea how to handle.

Minna’s having a new baby. You live here. Everyone is pretending Celia never even existed. It’s not hard on anyone. It’s hard on me.

She closed her eyes but didn’t try to fight them. She was tired of being strong all the time. She was tired of being the one everyone could lean on. Not that she was ungrateful. Just tired of it all. She wondered what it was like to have a normal life. She wondered what it was like not to be constantly needed.

Louise hadn’t yet been helped, but she knew that she wouldn’t take precedence over the four white women currently milling around the store.

had no reason to kill the Eye in the Sky, Lovie. I made a tidy profit with her. She was rather helpful.” He was grinning. This was a joke to him. Louise turned and he moved to grab her arm.

Louise got a particular sense of foreboding, something settling deep in the pit of her stomach. She had to look at her options, look at everything she had. And she didn’t want to doubt herself. But she had nothing else. If Rosa Maria hadn’t killed Nora, then who had?

Harriet had tasted like candy, and in the moments they were entwined, Louise had felt desire rush over her skin.

The things Louise would remember were the hurt and anger in Rosa Maria’s tone. Her eyes started to well with tears and she shut them before any could leak out.

Maybe I don’t need protection. I’m not some helpless little girl. You don’t have to save me.

Why don’t you try being normal for once? Normal girls don’t go around solving murders. They leave that to the police. You’re just a child playing a game.

What was she supposed to say to the sister who had just tried to kill herself in front of her?

What type of woman wouldn’t want to fulfill the duty she was put on this earth for? What woman would frequent those dens of sin, live with other women, wasting the best years you could have as a wife and a mother?

You are a mistake, Louise. I want you to know that. When I got the phone call telling me where you were? What people are saying about you? I am ashamed you are my daughter.

Mr. Schoonmaker is concerned for your safety, and I have to say, Miss Lloyd, I am too.” He was so serious, he seemed older than she’d thought he was.

Right. Because why would she talk to me when she has you, the fun sister? The sister who indulges every one of her whims. She doesn’t need structure or anything when she has Louise!

Louise had always known that Minna didn’t exactly agree with her choice of a lifestyle. Like their father, Minna believed there was one real way to live a life.

You ruined my life with those photos. You ruined everything.” She couldn’t stop her voice from quaking as she spoke. “How much did you make?

I’d watch how you speak to me,” Martin said. “You know I could make your life complete hell. I could ruin you.

You know how easy it was to get your little girlfriend to kiss me? I didn’t even like her. Louise was just so starved for affection, she’d do anything for anyone.

Black innovators were the force behind a burst of cultural creativity, from the poetry of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance to the crossover dance craze of the Charleston to jazz, the soundtrack of the age—“the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile,” as Hughes called it.

I have yet to see an intelligent or middle class American Negro laugh and sing and dance spontaneously.

Many of the people I write about were deliberately left out of the history books that we were forced to read in school. For me, that history was "written wrong" and needed to be corrected. My intention was to make them visible so they could be role models for others. To show how each, in his or her own way, dribbled gracefully around that obstacle in the narrow corridor.

The intellects of the Harlem Renaissance realized that before whites would see blacks as equals, first blacks had to see themselves that way- and not try to pretend to be white or adopt white ideals of beauty.

...Generations of black men had been frequenting Mt. Morris since the Harlem Renaissance. Rumor had it that Countee Cullen ditched his wife after he and Harold Jackman made Mt. Morris their regular rendezvous in the late 1920s. In the time since, thousands upon thousands of Black men used their bodies to create this delicate, invisible web connecting the queers of old to newcomers like me.

But who are doctors that I should heed them?

Thurman believed, however, that racial bigotry would continue in its various manifestations as long as color functioned as a social marker, with the devices for the border patrolling of racialized identities powerfully in place.

A man's complexion has little to do with his talent. He either has it or has it not, and despite the dictates of spiritually starved white sophisticates genius does not automatically descend upon one because one's grandmother happened to be sold down the river "befo' de wah.

You are a civilized man; the racist is not; do not fight with him to grant you your humanity, but laugh at the loss of his; do not admit inferiority in any sense, but claim, directly or indirectly, that you are superior

It is almost incomprehensible to them that the American Negro should share the American white man's prejudice against foreigners, and that he should vigorously resent their intrusion into his community. Another aspect of Harlem little

Educated dark-skinned males often married light-skinned women and had successful professional careers.

He had discovered too that the majority of those Negroes who spent the greater part of their time professing a love of race in one breath, and denouncing whites in another, was, for the most part, insincere and ignorant demagogues, no matter how many Phi Beta Kappa keys they strung across their vests, or how many academic degrees they initialed behind their names. They

They, themselves, adore Negro women, but tolerate Negro men only for appearances' sake.

Bonhoeffer’s experience in Harlem demonstrates that a Christian interpretation of the way of Jesus must be connected to justice for a Christian to see beyond primary loyalties to self and kind, to recognize the needs for justice in another’s context, and to “love neighbor as self.

Heah! You moufy wimmen! Shet up. Aint Ah done said cote was set? Lum Boger, do yo' duty, Make them wimmen dry up or put 'em outta heah." Marshall Boger who wore his star for the occasion was full of the importance of his office for nineteen is a prideful age; he hurried over to Mrs. Taylor. She rose to meet him. "You better gwan 'way from me, Lum Boger. Ah jes' wish you would lay de weight of yo' han' on me! Ahd kick yo' close up round yo' neck lak a horse-collar. You impident limb you." Lum retreated before the awful prospect of wearing his suit about his neck like a horse-collar.

7. Then did Oscar the brother of Hiram speak and answer him saying, "Yea, verily my soul cleaveth to that city upon the Hudson and my feet yearneth to journey thither, but lo, thou knowest that I be married unto a woman called Cal'line. 8. Yea, likewise thou knowest that she beeth an oppressive female that lifteth her voice in all things and prevaileth against me. 9. Behold how she crieth not like unto other women when I strive against her with mine fists. Nay, she weepeth not, but verily taketh stove-wood in the left hand and weighteth the right hand with iron and smiteth me hip and thigh.

People value monuments above men, and signs above works.

Whereupon Jim flopped into a chair and held forth at great length on the necessity of keeping wives in their places; to wit: speechless and expressionless in the presence of their lords and masters and cited several instances where men had met their downfall and utter ruin by ill advisedly permitting their wives to air their ignorance by talking. His audience, composed entirely of males, agreed with him. Wife-beaters are numberous in Poplar Street.

Aw, he don’t look no better in his clothes than you do in yourn. He got a puzzlegut on ’im and he so chuckle-headed, he got a pone behind his neck.” Joe looked down at his own abdomen and said wistfully: “Wisht Ah had a build on me lak he got. He ain’t puzzle-gutted, honey. He jes’ got a corperation. Dat make ’m look lak a rich white man. All rich mens is got some belly on ’em.” “Ah seen de pitchers of Henry Ford and he’s a spare-built man and Rockefeller look lak he ain’t got but one gut. But Ford and Rockefeller and dis Slemmons and all de rest kin be as many-gutted as dey please, Ah’m satisfied wid you jes’ lak you is, baby.

Anyhow he'll learn dat folks is human all ovah de world. Dats worth a lot to know, an' it's worth going a long way tuh fin out.

She wasn’t drunk anymore. The feeling had dissipated and now she was left with worry. Worry was an old friend. Louise pictured them walking side by side, hand in hand. Worry comforted her. Louise would never be able to get rid of the worry.

While these characters split along the lines of gender in their thinking about masculinity, “Spunk” presents conflicting views held by the men within the Eatonville community.

I was right there in the middle of all of this action. I didn’t have to think up gags…The cartoons drew themselves…I was more surprised than anyone when Brother Bootsie became a Harlem household celebrity, not only among the colored proletariat be among the literati as well.

To really dig Brother Bootsie, his trials and tribulations, you’d have to see Harlem from the sidewalk. Everyone in Harlem had trials and tribulations because everyone was colored. Or almost everyone…But being colored, even in an enlightened northern burg like New York, could be a drag.

About the time I was 17 and graduated from high school, I went to Harlem, and that was a most beautiful place where, fortunately for me, I came into, or rather, ran into, the hands of some wonderful people, people who formed an important part of the so-called Black Renaissance. They were people like Langston Hughes, Wally Thurmond, Bud Fisher, all really wonderful writers. I lived in the YMCA where you could rent a room for $2 a week and they put all the regular inhabitants up on the 11th floor. Among them were people like Charlie Drew, who became the developer of blood plasma, distinguished physicians, physics people, and biologists.

Why look to writers of the Harlem Renaissance for wisdom and strength in difficult times? Because these writers, so recently removed from slavery and a Jim Crow South, survived much. They still have much to teach us regarding toughness, survival, and a positive attitude.

God knew how hard and well he’d fought, The noble deeds his hands had wrought; God heard the deep sighs of his breast, He heard—and gave the warrior rest. And shall we weep and say ’tis night, When he has found eternal light?

The evening news never spares us. Tune in and we hear: if you’re a boy and you’re black, you live with a target on your back. We each take it in and shiver, one sharp-bladed question hanging overhead: how long do I get to walk this earth? The smell of death is too intense, and so we bury the thought, because the future is ours, right? We get to choose? Well, we choose life.

Hard to explain tidals to one who’s never gotten her feet wet,

I was reminded of the words of Harlem renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston: “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company

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.

The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the Northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance—in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.

Within the emerging African American literary tradition, the exploration of blues forms and themes was begun by Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Zora Neal Hurston, and other writers in the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement. Blues as criticism arose during and after the Great Depression from authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray, and during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s important contributions were made by Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal and others. In the present period, many African American scholars working in the disciplines and fields of music, history, folklore, drama, poetry, art, literary criticism, cultural studies, theology, anthropology, etcetera have acknowledged the blues as a hearth of African American consciousness. As stated earlier, the social sciences remain a barrier not breached.

Spring time in Florida is not a matter of peeping violets or bursting buds merely. It is a riot of color, in nature—glistening green leaves, pink, blue, purple, yellow blossoms that fairly stagger the visitor from the north.

STORM ENDING by Jean Toomer Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads, Great, hollow, bell-like flowers, Rumbling in the wind, Stretching clappers to strike our ears . . . Full-lipped flowers Bitten by the sun Bleeding rain Dripping rain like golden honey— And the sweet earth flying from the thunder.