River to river to river–– love and beauty and death stretching for miles the skin of my heart from high tide to low. Thinking about America and the best way to go. That morning sun, he always come up bleeding, and sweet sugar moon, she mostly go down screamin’. Between a woman and the door and the man beneath the floor I keep sweatin’ bout America and which way I should go. Whereas my skin is black my world is sho’ nuff white. Hand jivin’ just to beat the blues and waiting fast for the night. It’s true I ponder as I wander, but most times I think I know. On the road to my taste of heaven I don’t mind travelin’ slow. Love and beauty and death— river to river to river lynching these dreams swinging naked in my heart, screaming for mercy from high tide to low, I think hard about America and the best way for me to go. (graphic of Langston Hughes by Winold Reiss) © by Aberjhani co-author of ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE and author of I MADE MY BOY OUT OF POETRY

    This 1941 portrait of celebrated author James Baldwin, entitled “Dark Rapture,” is one of numerous masterworks created by the equally celebrated Harlem Renaissance artist Beauford Delaney (1902-1979). Delaney (whose brother Joseph, 1904-1991, was also an accomplished artist) enjoyed a remarkable career that spanned some five decades. That he was a visual artist whose creative aesthetics profoundly influenced the work of a major literary artist like James Baldwin is one indicator of how powerfully charged the creative energy of the Harlem Renaissance truly was. Aberjhani Co-author of ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE And the author of I MADE MY BOY OUT OF POETRY

Magazines that prominently featured the works of poets, visual artists, historians, sociologists, dramatists, and fiction writers were a principle mainstay of the original Harlem Renaissance. Those famous writers and thinkers of the movement whose names today for many are commonplace––i.e., poet Countee Cullen, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, artist Aaron Douglas––first gained widespread exposure in magazines like The Crisis , Opportunity , The Messenger , and The Negro World . In addition to providing contributors with prestige and bankable prize monies, these early twentieth century magazines also took and recorded frequent measures of the state of black culture. Many contemporary magazines in 2005 retain elements of the classic Harlem Renaissance periodicals but few embody the tradition so fully in spirit and substance as AFRICAN VOICES Magazine . Founded in 1992, African Voices entered the new century as a premier publisher of works by both emerging and established cultural worker...

The media treated itself to a field day in 2001 when former President Bill Clinton announced that he had signed a 10-year lease, at $354,000 per year, for office space in Harlem on West 125th Street. The news brought much needed hope and inspiration to those who had witnessed the United States’ most famous neighborhood struggle to survive the ravages of decayed buildings, a decreased population, dwindling employment, and the same debilitating drug traffic that crippled communities all over the country. That Clinton’s ever-so-cool Harlem shuffle lent a major boost to the community’s profile and real estate business is not to be denied. However, few things could better symbolize the in-progress twenty-first century Harlem Renaissance than the restoration of a Harlem brownstone sponsored by ESSENCE Magazine and the Abyssinian Development Corporation (ADC). As part of its year-long 35th anniversary celebration, ESSENCE Magazine entered into a partnership with the Abyssinian Development C...

(from Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black ) Through the glowing-bronze reeds of Harlem midnight and the plum-rose bloom of Spanish twilight African-griot-magus waters the garden of his neon spirals here in the valley of my jazz-consoled hunger and madness. 70 x 7,000 miles we travel the naked truth of hidden beginnings and guessed-at endings, African-griot-magus inhaling demons more easily than I exhale peace of mind or clarity of soul. African-griot-magus balancing divinity like tornadoes humming on the tips of three angels’ tongues. Inside my third mind I build a planet ruled by jasmine, violets, and the shadows of voices bubbling joy. With my seventh mind I hammer a chain of wonders that hold African-griot-magus to all of his promises. With my ninth mind I resurrect my first and dance slow to the music of my soul made new. 80 x 8,000 years we sing the naked story of blue-boned Harlem midnight and plum-rose Spanish twilight. African-griot-magus h...

Unless a person enjoys an association with someone who successfully integrated the Harlem Renaissance goals of artistic excellence, individual integrity, and spiritual vision into their creative agenda, it becomes easy to view the movement and its influence as a finite period restricted to a few decades. Such a perspective is less likely to hold, however, when meeting someone such as the Savannah-born and New York-raised artist Luther E. Vann. As an adolescent and young man in the 1950s and 1960s, Vann satisfied his hunger for creative expression with frequent visits to sources of knowledge and insight like the Art Students’ League, the Center for Art and Culture, and the Cinque Gallery, places where Harlem Renaissance artists had left their aesthetic marks and where some had established new roots. The Cinque Gallery in particular was not founded until 1969 by three major artists identified with the Harlem Renaissance: collagist Romare Bearden, figurative painter Ernest Crichlow, and a...

With the Seemingly overnight popularity of black authors during the 1990s, many speculated that African America was well on its way toward a second Harlem Renaissance. In fact, the boom in modern computer and media technology allowed writers like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Terry McMillan to enjoy a level of “crossover” appeal that far surpassed that of any Harlem Renaissance authors. Also in the 1990s, the popular author E. Lynn Harris launched his phenomenally successful career and helped pioneer the current trend in self-publishing by doing exactly that. His self-published first novel, Invisible Life , set the stage for a whole series of Harris’ novels that featured the same characters, a form known in literary geekology as a roman-fleuve. The publication of books by black authors during the Harlem Renaissance made history because until that time major publishing houses had been largely closed to black authors and African Americans were generally not encouraged t...

“Even in its weakest form—that of emotional infatuation—love was something superior to both art and culture. In the face of a world where economic hardships often ground the best of the human spirit into the worst, love provided a pathway into hidden chambers of the spirit where nobility and compassion might be salvaged, resurrected, and made stronger. Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self. Its power and its value and its terror lay in its ability to dominate with joy all other aspects of reality. It was the one thing for which all else—political conviction, art, culture, self-respect, even power—might justifiably be sacrificed because it was the one thing capable of transforming chaos into hope.” --Aberjhani, from THE WISDOM OF W.E.B. DU BOIS (Citadel Press)

Jazz Harlem Renaissance Babydoll does the music mold your face like a mask of mink desires and rainbow butterfly wings or does your face shield the heated heart of the music when your lips diddly-be-bop-sweet like Ella Fitzgerald swing-singing back-up and up-front, catching God’s Coltranic future love supreme as if making it up yourself? Jazz Harlem Renaissance Babydoll I saw your favorite saxophone strip you naked. And what was love gonna do except beg to lick those crazy solos straight off your throat. I saw you twirl A-flats like swords on the tip of the tongue of your tears until E refused to equal Mc squared and Einstein’s gorgeous silver afro crackled “Blow your soul-horn Jazz Babydoll and don’t you take jive for no answer! Said swing that horn and take not jive for thine answer!” Jazz Harlem Renaissance Babydoll you inhaled seven known planets and out of your creation came four billion heavens. Each time you exhale a star I recall a previous life and I comprehend flawlessly the ...

The PBS-TV drama ZORA IS MY NAME made its debut in 1989 and was released for sale to the general public on VHS in 2003. The televised play stands as a prime example of how the Harlem Renaissance’s potent creative energies both defined its own era and still transcends it to inform the art and culture of modern times. ZORA IS MY NAME was written by and stars Ruby Dee, a veteran actress of stage, screen, and decades of social activism. The teleplay captures in all its blazing wit, humor, and genius, the extraordinary personality of Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). By tracing the growth and development of that singular personality from its early days in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, to its maturation in Washington, D.C., and New York City, the film presents a glittering collage of folklore, history, music, dance, fashion, and high literary culture. With friends like the poet Langston Hughes, artist Aaron Douglas, novelist Jessie Redmon Fauset, writer and artist Richard Bru...

In September 2003, Facts On File of New York City published the worlds first ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE by authors Aberjhani and Sandra L. West. This momentous event did more than help to insure the ongoing celebrations focused on that early twentieth century explosion of cultural creativity known as the Harlem Renaissance. It also helped to place the movement within its rightful context as one of the greater triumphs of both African-American creative genius and American spiritual democratic vision. Taking place as it did from the 1920s to the 1940s (though some stop at the 1930s) the Harlem Renaissance marked a period in African-American history when the rhymes of poets, the images created by painters, and those worlds constructed inside novels and upon the stage could not afford to limit themselves to pleasurable fantasies or uncaring indulgence. Government-sanctioned racism, the social and political oppression of women, war ripping across the planet, and daily adjustmen...

WELCOME to The Creative Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. This blog is presented to recognize, honor, preserve, and extend this twentieth century movement’s great cultural and philosophical vision, which was the promotion of creative expression as an effective tool for helping to bring greater racial harmony, social justice, and political equality to the world. Creative Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance will feature reflections on the Harlem Renaissance in general and favorite figures of the Renaissance in particular, such as the dazzling performance artist Josephine Baker, the brilliant painter Jacob Armstead Lawrence, the poet Countee Cullen, blues singer Bessie Smith, jazz-master Duke Ellington, historian W. E. B. Du Bois, novelist Rudolph Fisher, playwright Eloise Thompson, composer Eubie Blake, or any one of numerous others. Occasional poems, book reviews, video reviews, and other writings inspired by the period are also likely to appear from time to time. The idea is to p...