The Dinner Get together That Began the Harlem Renaissance
The After-Get together
If the Civic Membership dinner was the seed of the motion, the Alternative dinner was the place its development gained momentum. Hughes, then in his early 20s, had returned from Paris and gained first prize for what can be thought of his signature poem, “The Weary Blues.” Hurston had come to Harlem and gained second prize for her play “Colour Struck.”
Lastly, the Renaissance had the eye of the mainstream information media. The New York Herald Tribune wrote in Might 1925 that the Alternative dinner was “A novel sight, that dinner — white critics, whom ‘everyone’ is aware of, Negro writers, whom ‘no person’ knew — assembly on frequent floor.”
It was, as The Herald Tribune noticed, a second when “the American Negro is discovering his inventive voice and that we’re on the sting, if not already within the midst of, what won’t be improperly known as a Negro Renaissance.”
Veronica Chambers is the editor of Initiatives and Collaborations at The Occasions. Michelle Might-Curry, Ph.D., is a Washington-based curator and author and lecturer of engaged and public humanities at Georgetown College.
Susan C. Beachy and Sejla Rizvic contributed reporting.
Opening photos credit: Barbecue portray by Archibald J. Motley Jr.: Chicago Historical past Museum/Property of Archibald John Motley Jr. through Bridgeman Photographs. Arturo Schomburg, Gwendolyn Bennett, Regina Anderson, the workplace of The Disaster journal: Schomburg Middle for Analysis in Black Tradition, Pictures and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. Eugene O’Neill: Normal Photographic Company/Getty Photographs. James Weldon Johnson: FPG/Getty Photographs. Eva D. Bowles: photographer unknown. W.E.B. Du Bois: Underwood Archives/Getty Photographs. Mary White Ovington, Jessie Fauset: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG through Getty Photographs. Carl Van Doren: Doris Ulman. Charles S. Johnson: U.S. Farm Safety Administration/Workplace of Warfare Info Assortment, Prints and Pictures Division, Library of Congress. Countee Cullen: Carl Van Vechten through Beinecke Uncommon E book and Manuscript Library and the Van Vechten Belief. “Quicksand” by Nella Larsen, “The New Negro” by Alain LeRoy Locke, “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes, “Their Eyes Have been Watching God” by Zora Neal Hurston: Assortment of the Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition. “Black No Extra” by George S. Schuyler, Survey Graphic “Harlem Mecca of the New Negro,” “Residence to Harlem” by Claude McKay, “There may be Confusion” by Jessie Fauset, Hearth!! A Quarterly Dedicated to Youthful Negro Artists, “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” by James Weldon Johnson: Beinecke Uncommon E book and Manuscript Library/James Weldon Johnson Memorial Assortment. “Colour” by Countee Cullen: Harper and Brothers. “Cane” by Jean Toomer: Boni & Liveright. Duke Ellington Orchestra: “Black and Tan” movie by Dudley Murphy through CriticalPast. Dancers performing on the Cotton Membership circa 1930: through CriticalPast.
