The Harlem Renaissance of African Americans

This concentration of African Americans, some another(prenominal) from a growing black middle- and upper-class, led to unprecedented exquisite output kn avow as the Harlem Renaissance. Robinson argues African Americans were "ready to develop an example of what black people could really achieve" (14). This accomplishment occurred in all fields but was especially marked in the arts, from practice of medicine to painting.

Singers uniform Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and others helped usher in the hit the sack and vapours age, a period of "flappers" and ostentatious displays of wealth and debauchery often chronicled by F. Scott Fitzgerald in works manage The Great Gatsby (Shaw 3). Musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and Dizzie Gillespie helped define jazz and the blues, making the euphonyal form closely associated with black creativeness and artistic talent. As Harlem Renaissance historian Maureen Ryan argues, " hunch over and blues composers like Jelly Roll Martin and Duke Ellington created lyrics and beats that reflected the excitement of the time. Jazz greats performed at the famous Apollo Theatre" (14). This energy in melody and jazz had a profound effect on many artists that followed those of the Harlem Renaissance.

Showing the enormous influence of jazz and blues euphony during the Harlem Renaissance on today

In Jazz, Toni Morrison also demonstrates the significant connection between jazz music and ideas, concepts and expressions by African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance. In this novel, Morrison illustrates the love, violence and racism that were opus and parcel of the Jazz Age in Harlem. Joe and Violet repugn to deal with racism, but they also struggle to communicate with distributively other. In the novel Morrison uses jazz to capture the dualism inherent in the Jazz Age, both a dark kind of presentiment and a reckless profligacy. In the novel she uses jazz music as a symbol of both liberation like many artists of the Harlem Renaissance but also as a symbol of the impulses that can destroy one.

We see this in the moving-picture show of Violet's bird: "So if neither food nor company nor its own shelter was important to it...nothing was left to love or aim but music. They took the cage to the roof...where the wind blew and so did the musicians...From then on the bird was a pleasure to itself and to them" (224). This is akin to the dualism within fellow in Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues." Morrison's novel captures the spirit and dualism of this new kind of music that burst onto the scene in the 1920s. In many slipway it was a liberating force but also a proctor that reckless and wild abandon could exact a minatory price.

In literature, Langston Hughes' poems often express a jazz-like rhythm in their short, staccato like rhyming couplets. Reciting them aloud is like apprisal the words to a song. However, these works also convey profound feelings about oppression and the struggle of African Americans to achieve their dreams in a prejudiced and racist mainstream culture. We see both the musicalness and deep feeling in one of Hughes' most historied poems, "A Dream Deferred":

After a drive pull down Fifth Avenue in the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald cried because he recognized "I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again" (Shaw 3). It is this c
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