Jazz, Social Commentary, and the Harlem Renaissance
Locke’s condescension of the spiritual’s inherent worth reaches its apogee when he claims the musical genre received its “highest possible recognition” when employed as thematic material for Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony…
Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays (1990), edited by Floyd, places music at the epicenter of this period of cultural change. He argues that while the Harlem…
Alain LeRoy Locke has been proclaimed as the “Dean of the Harlem Renaissance” for his conviction to cultivating cultural change in America. In 1925, he published the epoch-making anthology, The New Negro.…
“How does it feel to be a problem?” African American intellectual, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, hereafter W.E.B. Du Bois, posited this query in his seminal text, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903.…
On February 17, 1919, a mass of nearly two thousand black soldiers triumphantly and stoically marched up Fifth Avenue in New York City in a tight formation reminiscent of the…
The luster of twentieth-century America was seductive. The age of modernity was ushered in by the automobile, motion picture, radio, and transatlantic flight. The mores of the Victorian era were…
Hearing Harlem 