The Black voice is a powerful tool. Depending on the tone & word choice, a person will either feel empowered and inspired, or feel there is some animosity and hostility. During slavery, the black voice came from slave narratives from writers, such as Olaudah Equiano & Frances Harper. In "Bury Me in a Free Land", Harper wants her burial in the continent of Africa “in a lowly plain or a lofty hill….but not in a land where men are slaves." Harper repeatedly evokes slavery's terrors and abuses, using images of blood, shrieking, moans, and d**h. This example of many expresses how the Black voice creates a tool of importance, and it carries over to the Harlem Renaissance, which is a period of rebuilding Black culture through art, music, and even writing. These ways voice the Black thought.
1917 – The Harlem Renaissance begins & the magazine The Messenger is published.
Marcus Garvey – “The Future as I See It” (1923)
“It comes to the individual, the race, the nation, once in a life-time to decide upon the course to be pursued as a career. The hour has now struck for the individual Negro as well as the entire race to decide the course that will be pursued in the interest of our own liberty.”
1919 – Claude McKay's If We Must Die is published in The Liberator.
“O kinsmen! we meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one d**hblow!”
1921- Representative L.C. Dyer of Missouri sponsors an anti-lynching bill in Congress, making it a federal crime
Sterling A. Brown – Strong Men
“They broke you in like oxen,
They scourged you,
They branded you”
1922 - Publication of The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson and Claude McKay
Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay (1922)
“Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way
Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace,
Has pushed the timid little feet of clay.
The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!”
1927 - In 1927, in the Pittsburgh Courier, Hubert Harrison challenged the notion of the Harlem renaissance by arguing that the so-called "renaissance" was largely a white invention.
“You are disdainful and magnificent –…
Small wonder that your are incompetent
To imitate those whom you so despise-"
Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem - Helene Johnson
1929 - The stock market crashes on October 29 – economic crisis known as the Great Depression begins, and brings an end to the ‘Jazz Age'
“I, Too” by Langston Hughes
“I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.”
1931 - The Scottsboro Trial, April through July
“The town of Scottsboro” by Langston Hughes
“Scottsboro's just a little place:
No shame is writ across its face —
Its court, too weak to stand against a mob,
Its people's heart, too small to hold a sob.
1935 – The Harlem Race Riot sparked by anger over discrimination by white-owned businesses
“For My People” by Margaret Walker (1937)
“For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;”