Harlem Struggle Full Video: The History and Culture Behind the Meme

By 1905, Harlem's boom turned into a bust. Desperate white developers began to sell or rent to African Americans, often at greatly discounted prices, while black real estate firms provided the customers. At this time, approximately sixty thousand blacks lived in New York, scattered through the five boroughs, including a small community in Harlem. The largest concentration inhabited the overcrowded and congested Tenderloin and San Juan Hill sections of the west side of Manhattan. When New York's black population swelled in the twentieth century as newcomers from the South moved north and as redevelopment destroyed existing black neighborhoods, pressure for additional and hopefully better housing pushed blacks northward up the west side of Manhattan into Harlem.

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For Hughes, too, the desire to just "live in Harlem" was as much myth as reality. After dropping out of Columbia and moving to Harlem he actually spent little time there. Until the late 1930s, he was much more of a visitor or transient in Harlem than a resident. While Hughes spent many weekends and vacations in Harlem during his years at Lincoln University, during the height of the Renaissance, between 1923 and 1938 he was away from the city more than he was there, more a visitor than a full-time resident.

Among the visual artists, Lawrence's historical series emphasized the racial struggle that dominated African American history, while Romare Bearden's early illustrative work often focused on racial politics. The struggle against lynching in the mid-1920s stimulated anti-lynching poetry, as well as Walter White's carefully researched study of the subject, Rope and Faggot. In the early 1930s, the Scottsboro incident stimulated considerable protest writing, as well as a 1934 anthology, Negro, which addressed race in an international context. Most of the literary efforts of the Harlem Renaissance avoided overt protest or propaganda, focusing instead on the psychological and social impact of race. Among the best of these studies were Nella Larsen's two novels, Quicksand in 1928 and, a year later, Passing. Both explored characters of mixed racial heritage who struggled to define their racial identity in a world of prejudice and racism. Langston Hughes addressed similar themes in his poem "Cross," and in his 1931 play, Mulatto, as did Jessie Fauset in her 1929 novel, Plum Bun. That same year Wallace Thurman made color discrimination within the urban black community the focus of his novel, The Blacker the Berry.

While at its core it was primarily a literary movement, the Harlem Renaissance touched all of the African American creative arts. While its participants were determined to truthfully represent the African American experience and believed in racial pride and equality, they shared no common political philosophy, social belief, artistic style, or aesthetic principle. This was a movement of individuals free of any overriding manifesto. While central to African American artistic and intellectual life, by no means did it enjoy the full support of the black or white intelligentsia; it generated as much hostility and criticism as it did support and praise. From the moment of its birth, its legitimacy was debated. Nevertheless, by at least one measure, its success was clear: the Harlem Renaissance was the first time that a considerable number of mainstream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously, and it was the first time that African American literature and the arts attracted significant attention from the nation at large.

According to the NYPD, the three suspects entered the building near Park Avenue and East 124th Street in Manhattan at 9:30 a.m. on January 7. They headed to the victim's door, where they knocked, saying they were FedEx. When the victim opened the door, the suspects forced their way in and struggled with the resident. One suspect fired a gun, which hit the victim in his left shoulder. The victim was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

IGT: Our videos make use of academic knowledge, and try to translate that into short, easily understandable messages. By using personal stories, we bring the issues which are sometimes abstract, closer to the viewer. Traditional advocacy tools like protests, reports, scientific research can be complemented with videos to make them more successful. The voice of activists and academics is amplified by these videos. Journalists use our videos as background material or illustrations to their own work. Overall, in the age of internet videos and low-cost video production, self-made video production can be very successfully integrated into the work of activists, academics and journalists.

Kidding aside, regardless of whether digital tools trigger your personal faculties of enthusiasm or ennui, they powerfully shape the way scholars work and the way that work enters both the scholarly and public conversation. And while I have preferred reading little poems composed when poetry was still meant to be sung, I too, have fallen charmed by the potential of tools to shape not just the way we communicate, but the way we think. 2ff7e9595c