Reclaiming Identity
The Harlem Renaissance, spanning from 1900 to 1940, was the creative progression of African Americans into the rich literary world. Contributors like Booker T. Washington, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes propelled the renascence of self-discovery. Using literature to define a distinct identity, the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke, had distinguished itself among its literary counterparts. Within the creative domain of the Harlem Renaissance, newly discovered cultural, social, and artistic concepts infused with black aesthetics. This new 'signifying' in literature, often illustrating the stark realities of being black in America, had ultimately shaped social history through the rebirth of a new image for the African American poet.



1901 – “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington

“I was born a slave … My life had its beginning in the midst
of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging
surroundings …  till after the Civil War, when we were all
declared free … Of my ancestry I know almost nothing …
I heard whispered conversations among the
coloured people of the tortures.”



1917 – “Violets” by Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson

“So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,
I had forgot wide fields, and clear brown streams …
And now—unwittingly, you’ve made me dream
Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam.”


1918 – “The Heart of a Woman” by Georgia Douglas Johnson

“The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars,
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.”



1919 – “To the White Fiends” by Claude McKay

“Think you I am not fiend and savage too?
Think you I could not arm me with a gun
And shoot down ten of you for every one
Of my black brothers murdered, burnt by you?
Be not deceived, for every deed you do
I could match – out-match: am I not Afric’s son,
Black of that black land where black deeds are done?”



1922 – “The Scarlet Woman” by Fenton Johnson

“One I was good like the Virgin Mary and the Minister’s wife.
My father … died two days after his insurance expired.
I had nothing, so I had to go to work.
All the stock I had was a white girl’s education and a face that
enchanted the men of both races.
So … [with] the sale of my virtue I bowed my head to Vice.
Now I can drink more gin than any man for miles around.
Gin is better than all the water in Lethe .”


1925 – “I, Too” by Langston Hughes

“I , too, sing America.
I am the darker brother
They send me to eat in the kitchen …
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes …
I, too, am America.”



1925 – “Tableau” by Countee Cullen

“Locked arm in arm they cross the way,
The black boy and the white …
From lowered blinds the dark folk stare,
And here the fair folk talk,
Indignant that these two should dare
In unison to walk.”



1926 – “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston
“I remember the very day that I became colored …
But I am not tragically colored …
At certain times I have no race, I am me …
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? It’s beyond me.”