Women’s Resistance during the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement
When we think of the Harlem Renaissance we think of the roaring 20s and the phenomenal Black artists and intellects that forever transformed our community and made their mark in history.
When we think of the Black Arts Movement, a similar idea inhabits our minds. But how often do we think about, talk about, and read about the powerful women figures of these movements?
The Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement were two monumental forces in Black history, especially within the world of Black art and poetry. The concept of resistance is a concept that is a dominant force among the Black community and one that gained prevalence during both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. During both the Renaissance and the Movement, dozens of Black poets acquired notoriety not only within the Black community, but among mass media, also referred to as “white media”. Artists from these movements were able to cross boundaries and break barriers that previous Black artists had never been able to.
But with this newfound notoriety in the arts community, came the constant execution of resistance.
Georgia Douglas Johnson of the Harlem Renaissance and Sonia Sanchez of the Black Arts Movement were two powerful female forces and poets of their time that carried an everlasting influence, not only through their poetic words, but their diffusion of resistance during their separate eras of Black cultivation.
Dictionary.com states the definition of resistance as follows:
Resistance (rəˈzistəns)- noun
1. the refusal to accept or comply with something; the attempt to prevent something by action or argument.
2. the ability not to be affected by something, especially adversely.
Black resistance, is the refusal to accept or comply with the expectations that society and the white community have envisioned for us—or attempted to force us to abide by; the attempt to prevent white domination by peaceful and radical actions (Art, protest, words, outreach) or argument. Black resistance is also, the ability to not be affected by the stigmas that the white community binds to Black populationsD
The work of Georgia Douglas Johnson and Sonia Sanchez embodies this form of resistance.
“The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art. ”
During the Harlem renaissance, an era representative of a new Black aesthetic and the uplifting of the Black community through art, resistance was increasingly prevalent in art. In this era through the concept of resistance, Black artists cultivated a new generation of profound Black art that reached unprecedented levels of influence and recognition. The Harlem Renaissance, like any renaissance, was monumental in not only the Black community, but the entire world. Literature, being the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, and the most influential form of art at its time, was the driving force of resistance behind the Renaissance. The authors and poets of this era were able to explicate their resistance through the beauty of word. The Renaissance allowed black people to discover their intellectual and artistic aesthetic. This was the case for author and poet, Georgia Douglas Johnson.
Georgia Douglas Johnson was an author of the Harlem Renaissance, who wrote plays and collections of poetry.
Johnson was of African American, Native American, and English descent, and was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1880. Johnson went on to receive three degrees, studying music at the Atlanta University Normal College, the Oberlin Conservatory and the Cleveland College of Music. Post-Graduation, Johnson, contrast to her college studies, worked as an assistant principal, soon after making the decision with her husband to move to Washington, DC in 1910, the birthplace of the Harlem Renaissance. Fifteen years later in 1925, Johnson’s husband passed away, and to support herself and her children, she worked dozens of low paying jobs and barely made ends meet. Eventually, she was offered a prestigious, well-paying job at the Department of Labor.
Georgia Douglas Johnson’s house in Washington, DC was situated on 1461 S Street NW, and became one of the most predominant sites of the Harlem Renaissance. Later known as “The S Street Salon”, Johnson’s house became the meeting place for many of the established and establishing Harlem renaissance writers. In 1916, Johnson published her first poems in the well-established magazine, the NAACP’s magazine entitled “Crisis”. Ten years later, Johnson devised a weekly column called “Homely Philosophy” in the “Crisis”, that ran from 1926 to 1932. In this period she wrote numerous plays, including Blue Blood (performed 1926) and Plumes (performed 1927).
Johnson voyaged broadly during the 1920s to give verse readings all across the country, gaining experience and notoriety. Unfortunately, though, in 1934 she lost her job at the Department of Labor and was forced to come back to DC and support herself and her family with impermanent administrative work. She took shelter with her lawyer son, and never lost her enthusiasm and drive for writing and the arts. She opened up her S-Street house as a halfway house for renowned artists of the Harlem Renaissance who could not afford to live other places, housing famous authors like Zora Neal Hurston. The rose-secured stroll at 1461 S Street, made by Johnson fifty years prior, still stands in declaration to the numerous African American craftsmen she invited and to the affection verse for which she is best known. Battling without the material help that would have exposed a greater amount of her work and combating bigot generalizations that encouraged lynch swarms and race revolts in the developmental years of her life, Georgia Douglas Johnson left a heritage of unstoppable pride and innovative fearlessness that continues to guide modern resistance.
Georgia Douglas Johnson was, of course, a woman author who was able to prevail against the gender stigma that was bonded to women during this time period. She often wrote about the struggles women faced and their resistance against stigma and systemic oppression. One of her most famous poems is entitled “The Heart of a Woman”, and reads as follows:
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.
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.
This poem explores themes and sentiments that were prevalent among the women during the Harlem Renaissance. These sentiments include pain, loneliness and isolation resulting from the fight against both racial and gender oppressions.We see here that Georgia Douglas Johnson explicates her idea of resistance through her own experience with pain and prevail. She emphasizes the hard-work of the woman, the Black woman, and her resistance against the societal anchors.
Johnson also writes of struggles between the white and Black communities. Like in her poem entitled “The Measure”:
Fierce is the conflict—the battle of eyes,
Sure and unerring, the wordless replies,
Challenges flash from their ambushing caves—
Men, by their glances, are masters or slaves.
This poem represents conflict, but unlike the first, this conflict is among the Black community and the struggle with slavery. Again, she exemplifies resistance through emotion, which was a common stylistic choice during the Harlem Renaissance.
The Black Arts movement on the other hand, was another revolutionary era of black arts, that can be described as a spin-off of the Harlem Renaissance.
The movement took place between 1965-1975, the mid-end to the civil rights movement. It included some elements of the Harlem Renaissance which enabled it to be successful but was approached in a manner that was more applicable to its time. As opposed to using particular aesthetics as resistance, the Black Arts Movement was grounded in ethics. Because the time period of the Black Art Movement was adjacent to that of the civil rights movement, it embodied a great deal of political elements that the Harlem Renaissance did not.
The Black people of this era provided a new ethical standpoint on art that in turn had an international influence.
Fathered by poet Imamu Amiri Baraka, and following the death of Malcolm X, this movement, and its use of both politics and art, was monumental for the Black community through its means to awaken the black community consciousness through arts and politics, to achieve liberation. The movement, like the Harlem Renaissance was rooted in New York, at the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem, opened by Amiri Baraka. Also similar to the Harlem Renaissance, was its influence on black poetry and theater. And out of the many poets of this era, rose Sonia Sanchez, one of the poets in the infamous “Black Fire”, and arguably one of the most renowned female poets of the Black Arts Movement.
Sonia Sanchez graced the world with her presence on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama. Born Wilsonia Benita Driver, later changing her name to Sonia Sanchez, due to one of the ideals of the Black Arts Movement, the prompted many artists to change their “American” names to more “African” or “Nubian” names. At a young age, Sonia Sanchez’s mother passed away, and she was raised by her Grandmother until she too passed away when Sanchez was only six. In 1943, Sanchez moved to Harlem to live with her schoolteacher father, in 1943. This could easily be said to be the foundation moment in Sanchez’s artistic enlightenment. Later, after receiving a BA from Hunter College in 1955, she matriculated to the prestigious New York University, where she studied alongside famous poet Louise Bogan. With NYU being in the Greenwich neighborhood—another hub of the Black Arts Movement— Sanchez had the pristine opportunity to experience the Black Arts Movement right outside her home. In Greenwich, she met, and attended the poetry readings of she met poets such as Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Etheridge Knight, who she later married. Amid the mid 1960s, supporting the thoughts of the Congress of Racial Equality, Sanchez was an integrationist. In any case, subsequent to her tuning in to the thoughts of Malcolm X, her work and thoughts experienced a separationist incline.
This resulted in her deciding to teach at Downtown Community School in New York and later at San Francisco State College. At these schools, she was the pioneer of both the African American and Women’s communities, building the foundation in African American and Women’s literature, which included a class in including a class in African American women’s literature. Soon after, Sanchez’s began to write poetry geared towards adults, which consisted of many radical political and visionary imagery perspectives. Over time she wrote a total of sixteen poetry books, and was the editor of dozens more.
One of her most famous poems: “Present”, reads as follows:
This woman vomiting her
hunger over the world
this melancholy woman forgotten
before memory came
this yellow movement bursting forth like
coltrane's melodies all mouth
buttocks moving like palm tress,
this honeycoatedalabamianwoman
raining rhythm to blue/black/smiles
this yellow woman carrying beneath her breasts
pleasures without tongues
this woman whose body waves
desert patterns,
this woman wet with wandering,
reviving the beauty of forests and winds
is telling you secrets
gather up your odors and listen
as she sings the mold from memory.
there is no place
for a soft / black / woman.
there is no smile green enough or
summertime words warm enough to allow my growth.
and in my head
i see my history
standing like a shy child
and i chant lullabies
as i ride my past on horseback
tasting the thirst of yesterday tribes
hearing the ancient/black/woman
me, singing hay-hay-hay-hay-ya-ya-ya.
hay-hay-hay-hay-ya-y a-ya.
like a slow scent
beneath the sun
and i dance my
creation and my grandmothers gathering
from my bones like great wooden birds
spread their wings
while their long/legged/laughter
stretched the night.
and i taste the
seasons of my birth. mangoes. papayas.
drink my woman/coconut/milks
stalk the ancient grandfathers
sipping on proud afternoons
walk like a song round my waist
tremble like a new/born/child troubles
with new breaths
and my singing
becomes the only sound of a
blue/black/magical/woman. walking.
womb ripe. walking. loud with mornings. walking.
making pilgrimage to herself. walking.
In this poem, contrast to Georgia Johnson’s poem, Sanchez describes a woman who is fierce, and takes action. Exemplifying resistance through action. This poem can easily be perceived as a depiction of Sanchez herself, as she describes “this yellow woman”, who we know is black, light skinned woman because of lines in the second stanza like “blue/black/magical/woman”. Sanchez portrays her ethic background in several ways here, depicting several parts of self, and how they each contribute to her resistance.
In much of Sanchez’ literature, she emphasizes her light skin tone, and how that does not invalidate her blackness or her resistance, but in some cases, furthers that resistance. Colorism, a theme among the Black community and other minority communities, is often times perceived as a depiction of class, wealth, and beauty standards. In addition to Sanchez, many Black feminist writers of the Black arts Movement era wrote on colorism, also as a form of resistance. Because light-skinned women were considered historically to be more beautiful, Sanchez set out to resist and reverse the stigma through her art. She promotes the beauty of all shades of black women, which resists the whole idea of colorism. “this yellow woman carrying beneath her breasts/pleasures without tongues/this woman whose body waves”. The lines of the first stanza portray Sanchez’s sexual liberation, a concept that amongst women, was completely absent during the Harlem Renaissance. Sanchez makes it clear here that she is claiming the right to her body and her own sexual endeavors. She states the objectification of her body by society when she states “this woman whose body waves”, but completely resists against this objectification in the “pleasure without tongues”. Whatever that destiny is to entail, Sanchez believes that the Black woman must remain strong and resistant, and she will then succeed.
Georgia Douglas Johnson of the Harlem Renaissance and Sonia Sanchez of the Black Arts Movement were two effective female powers and writers of their era. Johnson implied resistance through her emotion, while Sanchez through resilience and action. Both successfully conveying a successful resistance, leaving an everlasting impact on the Black Community.
