American History Hit - The Harlem Renaissance

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

What was it like in Harlem during the decades of the Harlem Renaissance? Who were the key figures? What makes it so important? Don Wildman is joined once again by Professor Mark Anthony Neal, author of many acclaimed books and host of Left of Black.Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Hannah Feodorov and Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer is Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. We're in New York City at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. It is midnight and the dance floor twirls and shimmies.

It's laughter, sweat, perfume, and cigarettes. All to the hot swing of Chick-Web's orchestra. Prohibition may still be the law in America, but in here it's not hard to get a drink as this party pushes towards dawn. This is the Harlem Renaissance in full bloom. A young Billy Holiday is rising in the clubs. Duke Ellington and Fats Waller are inventing new sounds,

while tapers carve out rhythms all their own. Writers, artists, and intellectuals debate race and politics, laying a new foundation for black American culture. But down here, at the Savoy, it's just movement and joy. The dance floor is even integrated, rare in Jim Crow's America. Tonight, here in Harlem, it feels as if the music will never stop. But within a month, a short matter of weeks, The stock market will crash and the American economy along with it.

One day, decades later, the poet Langston Hughes would look back and write his most famous line of verse about being black in America. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet? Welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of Black American Studies at Duke University. He is an author of numerous works, including most recently Black Ephemera, the Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive. He is the host of the Left of Black podcast and has joined me previously on episode 289 discussing the history of Juneteenth.

But today we discuss the Harlem Renaissance. Dr. Neil, thank you for joining us again. I'm happy to be back. We call it the Harlem Renaissance. It is legend, a golden age. Why the word renaissance exactly? What was being reborn at this time in Harlem? It was a flowering of culture.

It was a flowering of identity. For many black Americans who were in Harlem at the time, it was a restart or a reboot. After having migrated from the deep south, the North represented opportunities, new living arrangements, new spaces, new racial politics to some extent. And with all this influx of energies coming from different places, I mean, just the demographic diversity of black folks who made it in Harlem and folks who were already in Harlem that point of time, it created this flowering, this explosion, if you will, of black culture. It has become such a popular cultural, you know, icon. Some people take it for granted at this point. When you dip back into it, as we are going to do today, it is amazing how the explosion and

multifaceted nature of this era from every angle this community was experimenting and pushing out and expanding and leaving a legacy that we are still living with today. As you mentioned just now connected to the great migration of black Americans from the Jim Crow South to northern urban eras, which we've also done an episode about an extraordinary migration, one of the biggest in human history, really, at least in American history, certainly. That led to huge immigrant populations and in Harlem, especially, of Southern African Americans, but also immigrants from the Caribbean. How much were people utilizing that new neighborhood in this way? Or I want to get to the very basics of how this sort of came to pass. I mean, there are a few

things. There was a labor shortage in the U.S. in American cities. World War I created a context where many European immigrants returned to their home countries to fight in World War I, which created a labor shortage. So there was a need for labor and black folks from the South served that need, you know, whether they were coming to New York, or Detroit, Chicago, Midwest, and all these kinds of places. You know, there's also a secondary migration that's happening in New York City. You know, at the time, most Black Americans are living below Central Park, what becomes Central Park, in areas like the Tenderloin and the Lower East Side. And there was a housing boom in Harlem, but the subway train did not travel all the way to

Harlem yet. You know, you would have to get off the train at like 110th Street and walk. So you had all this housing that wasn't being, it was being underutilized. And so you also have this migration to black folks leaving the Lower East Side, the lower parts of Manhattan, to move into Harlem. There obviously are tensions because we're not just talking about Southern and migrants. We are talking about Caribbean immigrants also. So there was, you know, a kind of of feeling out period that I think ultimately creates the context for what we now understand is as African-American culture is really this combination of all these different forces and energies, you know, to take place in this time. Yeah. And it was happening across the country because

these migrations were happening in other cities as well. L.A., Chicago, Cleveland, all these places, D.C. But why Harlem specifically, why is it most famously Harlem? You know, because it was was the place up north, which really had so many black migrants come in. It is, you know, the cultural capital of the U.S. You know, some people would even argue at this point in time, it's still the political capital of the U.S. It just was an ideal place to foment, for lack of a better way to describe it, a cultural movement. You know, when you think about just the number of daily newspapers that were in New York City in that period of time, right? It's pretty astounding, right? You know, dozens and dozens of these newspapers. It created opportunities for black Americans to be

politically active, to offering commentary on what was happening in the world, and also to build their own smaller cultural movements. Yeah. And we should specify, and I didn't at the top of this conversation. We're talking about the 1920s up to 1930s. It's that 10-year period of the 1920s, which is going side-by-side with the jazz age and roaring 20s in New York. Tremendous profits are being made by corporations. I mean, there's a tide that floats all boats in some ways in New York, just business-wise. But this is unique. This is completely unique to this cultural moment. 175,000 black Americans in Harlem in about three square miles. Obviously, no such concentration ever existed in America before like this, north or south. 1930 census, 70% of Harlem residents

are black. What informs this time so much of it is the jazz scene. the Harlem clubs, that spirit of jazz, which again we take for granted these days, was so new and exciting and dynamic for every good reason that it infused everything, didn't it? Oh, absolutely. I mean, the thing you consider about the Harlem Renaissance, you know, beyond the sheer numbers of black folks who are there, are who the black folks are. So you're talking about Duke Ellington trafficking back and forth from Washington, D.C. to New York City, early stages of his career. You're talking about the great band leader and arranger Fletcher Henderson. It's there. You're talking about James Rees Europe, right, of who, of course, fights in World War

One and comes back and creates this kind of musical moment that's coming out of the James Reese Europe band, you know, the great work that Jason Moran has done to sonically capture what that moment was. And so you also had this experimental culture. You know, Armstrong for the most part, you know, leaves New Orleans and goes to Chicago. But there obviously other forces that are taking folks in New York, the opportunity to be able to have these free spaces in Harlem where they could perform for black audiences. I think what's so critical about development of jazz in this period of time is that these are black musicians playing largely for black audiences.

And it's an exchange back and forth in terms of the energies that they're getting from the audience that helps to, you know, inspire, you know, cultural innovation, musical innovation, right? It's never lost to me when you think about someone like Duke Gallantin. You know, D. Gallatin was essentially on the road performing 300 days out of the year, right? You know, it was so important to him to always be in contact with the people that he didn't want to have to deal with the laws around segregation. So, of course, he had his own Pullman car, you know, that was attached on the back of a train so that, you know, they could travel in the way that they should, you know, as an independent and, you know, black band that didn't have to deal with some of the dynamics of. of racial segregation. Yeah, exactly.

My biggest takeaway today, perhaps, will be what you said about the train. The fact that it did not reach up there allowed that neighborhood to develop in a kind of, in its own organic fashion, didn't it? I never thought about that. Absolutely. I mean, trains are actually such a critical part

of thinking about this period of time, not just because of the subway system in New York City and the limits of where it went. You know, it's still not even going up to the Bronx. But the way that the train was so important for the migration process. And it's not just a matter of black folks who are going to traveling by train up north, but it's also the role of the Pullman porters, you know, this group of men who are working the trains,

largely working, you know, for whites and serving them. The great A. Philip Randolph, who of course was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car porters, really important critical figure there. But the Pullman porters were important because they were traveling from all these different cities. They would bring black newspapers from New York. to Chicago, Chicago newspapers to Detroit. It created, you know, what we understand now in terms of a viral movement in terms of digital culture and social media.

But the way that the Pullman Porter's use information and shared information because they were traveling all around the country became an important component of making sure that there was a feed of information coming out of New York, going into New York, and et cetera. You know, there was this saying that if you were a black man in the 1920s, if you couldn't be a doctor, if you couldn't be a lawyer, the next best thing would have been to be a Pullman Porter, because the traveling allowed you some level of freedom. My wife's grandfather was just that and other family members as well. Very important.

So Harlem becomes this cultural crucible of Black America. And it's fair to think about in those terms just as sort of studying it, but seating it in this nice middle class world that was growing and operating quite normally is an important aspect of this. Describe what a street scene in Harlem would have been. in this time, 1922, say. Well, you just start with the cacophony of the streetcars and the traffic and the horns. And, you know, for many of these new migrants, you know, part of the initial challenge for them

when they come to New York is just dealing with the noise and the traffic. You know, when we think about the sleepy south, right, particularly folks who weren't in big cities in the south, it, you know, just the sound of it created a different culture that they had to figure out a way to accommodate these really different circumstances. You know, there are a few black police officers in this period of time, but there is this class division. That's very, very real. There were established black middle class folks who were in Harlem, who were in New York

City, who belonged to mainline churches. And, you know, as many of the writers have captured at the time, they did what they thought was important work in terms of preparing southern migrants for these transitions. So what kind of clothes they wear, you know, making sure their hair was cold. I mean, they had to present the best face of the Negro when they're out in public. And so very often they police these migrants in this way, you know, in terms of how you should come out the house, how you should carry yourself. And it did create some tensions in that regard.

How much was the wider nation, and even New York City, aware of what was happening in this regard as something unique and special to that time? You know, scale is always a question when we think about the. movements. It is historically significant and we have done so much research on the period of time. It seems much more impactful than it actually was. I think Tony Morrison makes a point in her great novel jazz that the majority of everyday black folks in Harlem had no idea there was a Harlem Renaissance going on. They were not necessarily reading new essays from Du Bois or Lane Locke or were not, you know, necessarily queued into the debates that were going back and forth

between the boys and Marcus Garvey. They were just living their lives and trying to survive. And so to the extent that the average black American knew what was happening in Harlem, let alone white America or the rest of the country, I'm not sure there was a keen sense of what was happening there. Interesting. And how much was segregation a part of this as well, and even in New York? You know, there's still segregated spaces, even in Harlem. Some of the clubs in Harlem, Cotton Club being a good example, were segregated, you know, where blacks and whites didn't necessarily sit together in some instances. And for many black Americans, it is still a challenge to leave Harlem to go to other parts of New York because it's segregated, right? So, you know,

New York has its own version of segregation. It's not the Deep South, right? It's a very different kind of experience. But that doesn't mean there weren't clear color lines, you know, for where people could go and how they could act and what time there should be in certain neighborhoods. All that stuff was still in effect to the most extent, even in someplace like New York. Let's take a break. When Mark and I come back, we'll talk about the ideas and politics associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It happens on all facets, as I explained, and we'll move through it piece by piece. Welcome back. I'm speaking with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal of Duke University about the Harlem Renaissance. Mark, we've discussed the era as a flourishing of the arts, jazz,

of course, but it's also flourishing in ideas and political thinking and confronting the challenges of segregated America. How so? How did political ideas weave into this cultural and artistic reality? It's the error of Du Bois. We have to, you know, talk about how important the figure he was as an intellectual, you know, beginning with his study of the Philadelphia Negro in the late 1890s. He, of course, publishes the souls of black folks, which began as a collection of essays that appeared in the Atlantic, this idea that with the new century post-Plesi versus Ferguson, the black folks would begin to not only use their physical and artistic tools, but the intellectual tools to think about a way out of the conditions that they were in.

So Du Bois, the creation of the Niagara Movement, which then creates the creation of the NRACP. You also have the creation of the Urban League. So you have these civic and political organizations that are committed to change. And then you also have this flowering of intellectual thought. I mentioned the boys that the black folks. One of the figures who I think is really so critical to this period that we don't spend enough time talking about is James Weldon Johnson, who's most well-known, you know, these days as the co-author, co-liarist of Lift Every Voice and Sing, which he wrote with his brother,

the black, quote-unquote, black national anthem. But, you know, he publishes his first novel, they are autobiography the ex-colored man in 1912. And it really is, I think, the text that really stimulates this cross-pollination between what was happening artistically and what was happening in intellectual circles. You know, his book, Black Manhattan, which is published in 1930, is really one of the best, you know, books that captures what was happening across Harlem and this dynamic in this period of time. You know, so everyone has to come in, you know, the crisis, which is the magazine that comes

the NAACP opportunity, which is coming out of the Urban League. They all have offices in New York. You have all these great talents who are coming through. You know, famous in Lanks and Hughes, of course, is in Harlem in this period of time. There's so many different interesting figures and forces. Jesse Fawcett, the novelist is there. You know, Zornail Hurston, you know, is taking classes in Columbia. I mean, it's just amazing to think about, right.

It's about letters. It's about music. but it's also about visual art. So when you think about Aaron Douglas, right, who illustrates so many of the early books from artists who are coming out this period of time, you know, I personally, as someone who looks back at the history of this period of time,

you know, I can't imagine another moment where... I think there are other moments where you've had these cultural forces. No, not like this. But because it was so new, it was impactful, right? it creates the possibility for these other moments. Well, it's so traceable, too.

I mean, you're starting with Du Bois, and I want to explain to folks who might not be familiar with, that book is printed in 1903. So that's 20 good years before the time we're talking about it. Exactly, right. And that's what's interesting is that there's already been this intellectual, thanks to Du Bois, this intellectual groundwork framework put down in the Northeast. He's a Harvard guy and it comes down to New York. There's, of course, Booker Wals.

Washington has been doing this as well in his own way. And there's this schism of thinking about how, you know, this new time is going to happen for Black America. There's a whole kind of already this conversation is happening, is my point. And out of Du Bois, that was so interesting as I was reading about this, I just wrote down a quote, double consciousness, blacks would need to sharpen. Yes. So this double consciousness that W.B. Du Bois talks about is a really fascinating thing. Can you explain that term? Am I talking about something? something you're familiar with? You know, what he later describes at the same book, a gift of second sight. Yes, that's what you. This ability to think about who you are in the world, but at the same time, you have to consider how the world views you. On many levels, I would describe it as cultural schizophrenia, but it is something that is so hardwired into the experience, which is why Du Bois wrote about it and the reason why it continues to resonate so powerfully. In the same book, he talks about this idea of a talented 10%, you know, which in many ways he borrows from Anna Julia Cooper, you know, who a decade before the souls of black folks

makes the argument of lifting as we climb as you talked about the experiences of black women in the South. But it was this idea that we now have created this educated and financial class, a few economic class, that had an absolute responsibility, right, to serve or teach, depending on how you read, how you interpret what Du Bois is talking about, this connection to the other folks. The debate between Du Bois and Booker T. was fascinating on many levels because, you know, Booker T is building a empire, right, at Tuskegee with this idea that you just keep your head down, you do work, you generate economic income from serving white folks in the skills that you have, and you don't need to deal with the political realities

because you're building these separate institutions. I don't think it was ever even or. I think most black folks, you know, to the extent that they look at the boys in Booker T, they borrow from both of their ideas. Booker T., of course, dies in 1915, so he doesn't even see a Harlem Renaissance. But his contribution to that a period of time was the invitation that he made to Marcus Garvey to come from Jamaica to New York, you know, to the U.S., to Harlem. And what's important about Garby is that he really is the figure who creates a mass, grassroots, working class, working poor movement in Harlem that in some ways is a counter to Du Bois.

And what Du Bois has talked about with the intellectual elites, right? And I think to some extent that chasm still exist, definitely the 1960s when you see intellectuals and then you're seeing folks who are coming up from like a Malcolm X, right? You see it again in the 1980s, 90s when you start to have this generation of black intellectuals who are coming through all of these schools, black public intellectuals, and hip-hop serves as a counterpoint as another intellectual tradition to that. So it's an ongoing process, right, that begins really deferment the way that it does, you know, in the Harlem Renaissance period.

It's such an exciting idea of how this whole, really the 12th, 20th century of black America was built very deliberately and brilliantly. And most people today do not recognize this, many of my own peers, because we're so used to things that have happened as a result of all of this. But at the time, such careful things were being done. But it's, it's that seed that Du Bois especially plants that I want to account for because it talks about the autonomy of black people within the reality of segregation. And within that autonomy, you can be yourself, you know, or you can create. And that's really the story of the Renaissance and that particular moment in Harlem.

Beyond that, I want to just circle back to a few things you've already mentioned, but again, people might not be aware of this. NWACP is founded in 1909, National Urban League founded in 1911, led to boycotts of businesses that wouldn't hire black workers, the beginnings of really organized resistance. Buchanan v. Worley, 1917, that legal cases settled no longer legal to restrict where African Americans could live. There's, there's, there's, the whole thing is budging forward a little bit. A lot of this involves World War I and, and that time period just before and a lot of, you know, the Harlem hellfighters go

off. It's, there's big stories about this going on in the news for people. And I'm just sort of running through a few of these things to just sort of refresh people's memories about what was going on at the time just before as we're moving into this. Newspaper pamphlets like the messenger founded 1917, examples of black news and networks that publish works of black writers and thinkers reporting on news outside mainstream media, black newspapers, a huge deal. And of course, the crisis, which actually starts in 1910. All of this is happening at the same time as the stuff we're going to talk about in a moment, but it's an extraordinary explosion of media. I mean, honestly, the same sorts of things were

happening downtown in New York with the bursting off of radio and all the rest of it. But it's an extraordinary time all over the place. This is the back. for this whole situation. I'm going to take another break, Mark, and we'll come back and talk about a few of these individuals we've already mentioned in a little more detail. Okay, we're back and we're talking about the Harlem Renaissance and specific individuals, particularly one we've already mentioned,

James Weldon Johnson. This man, if you don't know about him, 1871 to 1938, an absolute genius. Mark, can you tell me about how this man made the impact he did? He was someone who understood how to build relationships. He saw himself as a right. and not just of fiction in the case or nonfiction with Black Manhattan. You know, I mentioned before, you know,

that lift every voice and sing the Negro National Anthem. He's a member, one of the early members of an organization called Five Beta Sigma, one of the divine nine organizations, which aren't nine yet, you know, when he joins it. The best way to describe James Weldon Johnson, and I think this actually fits even more than the boys, is that he was a race man, right? he was someone who was committed to doing anything that was going to better the race. He took on positions within the NAACP that allowed him to do that. He wrote books that allowed him to do that.

And, you know, he wasn't someone who was out front. I think that's one of the reasons why, you know, we don't pay as much attention to him. You know, Du Bois, for the great intellectual he was, he was also a fascinating self-promoter. Marcus Garvey was a fascinating self-promoter. I don't think that's necessarily was something that was part of James Weldon Johnson's personality at the time. Yeah. Social activist, writer, poet, executive secretary of NAAP,

Tin Pan Alley songwriter. Right. A Renaissance man, never mind the Harlem Renaissance. He's his own Renaissance. Wrote the book, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, published in 1912. Of course, the song we've talked about, Lift Every Voice and Sing, 1900, which becomes a mainstay for the N. CPM remains the Black National Anthem.

Every Super Bowl you hear it sung, about five minutes before the national anthem, it's amazing. And I have to say about, you know, the R. V.R. V.o de X colored man, which I still teach fairly regularly. You know, it's about someone who's able to cross the color line, who's someone who's able to pass, but also has these great cultural gifts that are connected to Black America. And he's caught between this idea whether or not to pass into white culture or to continue to connect to the great of this flowering of black art, he makes his choice to live within white America because of the violence that's associated with being black.

But it's this great line at the very end of the book where, you know, I feel as though I've given up my heritage for a mess of pottage. And, you know, potage at the time was, you know, this idea of canned meat, which made you an elite, you know, that period of time. And that's always resonated with me. And I think it is such a great metaphor

for how black folks think about black art. Right. you know, what is the price of crossing over and fame, you know, if you actually have to give up this cultural heritage that was so important to the art that you create in the first place? It's, it really gets me excited. You know, it's the autonomy. It's the creation of this. It's turning away from assimilation towards autonomy and creating this within itself. And that becomes actually the story of America in its bigger sense. And that's what's really exciting about it to the general population is we've all benefited from all of this. Langston Hughes, anecdotally, I will just say, you know, typical white kid in America from a white town. I go to school. I land at Cheney State University on an average afternoon doing some research down the road from the school I was going to. And I run into this book by a guy named Langston Hughes.

I had never heard of him because why would I? I mean, I wasn't exposed to it in my town to him. And I am so moved by these poems. And it suddenly speaks to me of all people. Like, why? Why am I moved by this? It has nothing to do with me. But that's the beauty of this man.

Langston and Hughes, let's talk about him for a bit. I, too, sing of America. I mean, you know, Hughes is such a large cultural figure, largely because of his poetry, you know, which if you were fortunate enough, depending on where you went to school, you got introduced to it in school. I was introduced to Lanks and Hughes's poetry. Growing up in New York City, it seemed as though New York, you know, Lanks and Hughes was all over the place. And I still remember picking up my copy of the Black Poets,

which is a book that was edited by Dudley Randall. And when I bought that book, I was about 15 years old. The first thing I went to was to look for the Lakeson Hughes poem. But he was so much more than that, you know, the group of artists that he works with, you know, because this is a younger generation. And they look at the boys and they look at some of these other figures and they want to culturally push the envelope a little bit in ways that the mainstream of a black life wasn't necessarily comfortable with. Lexi Hughes, of course, as a queer man.

You know, nobody really knows that. You know, that's not attached to his legacy at the time. And he's working with other queer artists. You know, they create this incredible magazine called Fire, which just has a one print run before the place burns down, right? ironically. But it was really them pushing the envelope. And he would continue to push that envelope throughout his career. He dies in 1967, right when we're in this midst of the Black Power Movement. And he was one of the artists that many of the Black Arts Movement people, when you think about Baraka and those kind of folks, they still had a great respect for Langston Hughes in the 1960s.

And they didn't necessarily respect some of the other artists because he was always about pushing the culture forward politically as he pushed it forward artistically. Yeah. Poet, writer, cultural critic wrote extensively in every regard. Poetry in general in those days was a much bigger thing that is, you know, commonly today. Coming out of Walt Whitman, very popularly among white people, Lankson Hughes takes up that mantle and some compare him to him in some ways because of the use of language in a very particular

way. He was sometimes criticized by intellectuals that he was showing black Americans in an unflattering light to white readers. Makes no sense to me. I mean, because, you know, many of the leading intellectuals, I mean, they were conflicted about jazz music. Yeah, yeah. You know, they really wanted to see a flowering of black art in a kind of Western music tradition, which existed. You know, they saw jazz as profane, right? It was a place where sex or drugs happened.

I mean, kind of the same things we would hear about. rock and roll, you know, 50 years later. And Lexington Hughes wrote jazz poetry, right? He embraced that cultural movement and he pushed against this kind of conservative notions, right? When we talk about black respectability, right, you know, which is an important framing of how we think about the talented tenth in this period of time. You know, Lexington Hughes had no interest in black respectability, right? He wanted to tell the stories of the every man. His character, Jesse B. Simple, was a character that would be serialized in the black press, you know, just be simple. This basic working class guy who provided these incredible insights to what was happening in the world,

even though, quote, unquote, he wasn't alerted intellectual. He wasn't interested in portraying the ordeal. That's kind of the thing. He had an essay called The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain. And Hughes writes in that, if white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. and ugly too. In so many ways, this will pass down as James Brown, right? Black is beautiful. It kind of gets past

in that regard. And what's important about this moment, we do tend to celebrate this moment because it was this great flowering. You know, but Rachel Vonless was still real, and there was still the need for economic support. It's not surprising that the Harlem Renaissance essentially dies on the Vine with the financial crash of 1929. You know, one of the reasons why the Harlem Renaissance happens, at least artistically, is because there's also this influx of white money that's coming into Harlem to support the arts, to support this course pollination in terms of black folks and white folks listening to the same music, you know, the beginning of the race music industry occurs in the 1920s because they are record companies that are

willing to spend money to record black artists, right? You know, all of this is happening in this moment. And there is a certain amount of retrenchment that occurs with the financial collapse, right? And if not for the WPA, the where we're fall to create this mechanism that allowed the arts to be supported on some level, right? We don't necessarily get that transition period between the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts movement, you know, without important institutions like WPA. Right. And that is the dream deferred when it happens that that ends. And we end up in the 20th century, tough fears come to follow. I like this phrase that I read somewhere prepping this conversation. Du Bois lays the foundation. James Weldon Johnson builds the house. Langston Hughes

fills it with music. You think that's fair? I think that it's important, though, you know, because we tend to gender these intellectual and artistic movements, right? We tend to only talk about the men. You know, we've talked about Zora near Hurston. You know, but one of the most important novels that's written in that period of time is Nella Larson's passing. You know, Jesse Fousset, who works with Du Bois at the crisis, is a financial benefactor to Du Bois, right? There's so many ways in which there are so many important women who are critical to this

moment that often get obscured in our celebratory remembrance of Du Bois and Well, Johnson, and Lexington Hughes and others. And we're going to finish up just to reassure you with a story of a woman. Everybody knows. But before that, I just want these last two subjects, I want to talk about Duke Ellington. As you mentioned before, how much he takes this outside of Harlem. I mean, the man's a brilliant businessman besides musician. And again, he lasts on.

I watched him when Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson as a kid, you know. He came from D.C. to New York where he started playing piano with different bands and orchestras, eventually becoming a mainstay at the con. Cotton Club. He comes famous for his jazz compositions for breaking these racial barriers and performing in white spaces. But he was a synthesizer, wasn't he? He was the guy that took a lot of ideas and brought them together. There's no question about that. You think about all the stuff that he's hearing that he incorporates in his music. When you hear things like the black and tan fantasy is one example of this, you know, he creates a kind of lushness around the idea of Harlem,

but it is still accessible to everyday black folks, which is why when he records the album he does with Coltrane, when 63, I mean, it's so important because Coltrane is representing this whole kind of cutting-edge thing that seems to be moving away from the people. But Duke Ellington was so invested in the people that he knew that it was important to be in conversation with someone like Coltrane.

But again, the great songs that he writes in the 40s and the 50s, with Billy Strayhorn, like Take the A Train, you know, lush life and things of that nature. You know, he was a collaborator in the best sense of the world. He had this huge band. He gave folks opportunities to shine their light within their bands. He was someone who I think who understood that the success of black arts,

the success of black music was not Duke Ellington's success. It was a success of everybody, right? So his band reflected that sensibility, even as he is a leader, even that he's the face of it, right? When you think about the Johnny Hodges and all these kinds of folks, he gave them all a platform, right, to be able to express what they were within this idea of the group. Yeah, Billy Strayharinger gets so little credit.

I mean, he gets so little attention, I should say. And he was an openly gay man back of then, which took a lot. Which speaks also a great deal to Duke Ellington's politics at the time. Exactly, yeah. Lastly, I want to talk about Billy Holiday. And I want to do that because I want to end with talking about her most famous song. Billy Holiday, I was introduced her through Diana Ross. That was my picture of her, you know, playing the character in the big movie.

Then you begin to understand how complex her story really is, as you understand it better. She's originally from Philadelphia, comes to Harlem, part of this whole migration world going along, began singing in the Harlem nightclubs as a teenager, eventually signs a record deal, becoming a household name. She worked interestingly with John Hammond on recording sessions. I mean, Hammond works with everybody. That's a whole episode unto itself. Including Aretha 30 years later.

I know, right. And Dylan and Springsteen along the way. Anyway, Billy Holiday is a genius for her voice and improvisational skills. She's picked up by Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw. She shares a bill with Louis Armstrong. She tours and tours and works in records for decades. But it was strange fruit that defines her to this day, tragically, in some ways. It was recorded and sung by Billy Holiday in 1939, so we're after the first.

fact, but it's still sort of considered part of this whole story. Talk to me about strange fruit and why it was her song. How did she land with that song? Well, you start with the composition. Even though it tells the story of violence in the South, it's a New York song, the lyrics written by a Jewish New York City school teacher who wanted to give language to the violence that he was seeing. And, you know, first, you know, part of it is the timing of the song for Billy Holliday. There's something, there's a certain quality to her voice. You know, Billy Holliday was not someone that you would think about as a singer was technically

skilled, right? You know, she wasn't a great singer in that way. She was an amazing instrumentalist. And she used her voice like an instrument, right? So if you were looking for, you know, I think about someone like Ella Fitzgerald, right, if you're looking for this kind of pristine, clear singing voice, that was never Billy Holiday, right? She used her voice as an instrument, and an instrument brought in all of these conflicting emotions about what she was singing about, whether that was love, loss, or the violence of the South.

So I think there's something unique about her voice that makes the song, it's song, right? Why? even her ability to sing different versions of it before her death. But when folks think about this song, they think about her. It's also a song that's occurring in a moment, that's released in a moment where there are so many things happening globally. This is the moment of Nazi Germany. World War II has begun, though the U.S. is not necessarily drawn into it yet.

I think there was a real concern about the escalation of violence. And I think with strange fruit, she took that. escalation of global violence and made it personal, right, made it something that was so much more intimate. And we really had not seen, you know, we're conceptual to say someone like Ida B. Wells. We had never artistically seen that kind of pushback to what anti-black violence looked like in the United States. And of course, she's penalized for it, right? You know, she's pumped, not penalized, she's punished for it, right? You know, the loss of her cabaret card, you know, you know, and a lot of that, of course, had to deal with her addictions,

but also the fact that she essentially was surveilled by the FBI for a remaining 20 years of her life. I always remind my youngest students, you know, that when you hear Mississippi goddamn in the mid-60s, when you hear public enemies saying fight the power in 1989, they could do so with a level of freedom that in many ways Billy Holliday wasn't allowed when she's saying strange fruit. Yeah, exactly. I mentioned 1939 when this came out. And then, of course, Lankson Hughes, that poem wasn't necessarily written about the end of the Harlem Renaissance. But how much melancholy was there as far as a look back so soon after, do you think?

Were people aware of it ending just as were they aware of it ever being in many cases, I suppose? You know, my colleague, I Augustus Dorm, would argue that melancholy is hardwired into the Black experience. I think they were always achingly looking back at lost possibilities in the art. Because the idea had been, we can fix this. If we just think it through and operate together and express, this can be fixed. This whole Jim Crow reality is going to go away. And then it didn't for decades. And then, you know, Du Bois is a great, you know, measure of this, right?

the boys becomes increasingly radicalized in terms of socialist thinking and what is happening globally because he's recognizing what's happening here in the U.S. is not moving the needle. When we talk about A. Philip Randolph, we talked about in the context of the Pullman point earlier, right? But when he organizes what was going to be the first march on Washington in 1941, right? It was in response to the fact that, you know, America was not delivering on this idea of democracy, at least as it represented racial politics, and to a certain extent, economic freedoms for many folks, that they were going to march on Washington until FDR stepped in

to kind of close that down until, of course, it reemerges in 1963 with the march of Washington that we know about. You know, the fact that Du Bois is brought up in front of the House on American Committee, right, in the early 1950s, because he's willing to say that this is not working and was willing to be in conversations. Again, Paul Robson, who's someone who we don't talk about necessarily, in terms of the Harlem Renaissance, is a figure that's there, right? He begins his career there. And his through line in terms of

his relationship with the Communist Party and all those kinds of things spoke to a general disaffection that many black Americans had with the pace of, quote, quote, liberation and freedom as it related to race politics in the U.S. Right. You can basically draw a line from the fading of the Renaissance straight through to the civil rights movement, of course, and all that, which happens in the 60s. And then it still goes on, really. I mean, we're talking about specific periods, but it really is still a part of an organic passage that we're still within. Our guest today has been Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, professor of black popular culture in the Department of Black American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of numerous works, including most recently Black Ephemera, The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive.

What's that book about? I haven't read that. Yeah, it's a book that looks at the ways that, you know, the difficulty of archiving black music and how it's both a challenge. right, you know, in terms of recognizing all these kinds of moments where black culture and black music kind of moved us forward and how we're losing access to that archive. You know, so it's a bit of a crisis, but it's also a challenge to do the kind of work that allows us to recapture, you know, all the things that have kind of gone out into the world. Sounds like a gift for my wife. Thank you so much, Mark. Nice to see you. I hope we do again. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes.

two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, please share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman.

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