Above, top: Charles S. Johnson and Gwendolyn Bennett Below, Jessie Redmon Fauset, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke
March 21, 1924 is often cited as the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, although writers and artists had been producing work for a while before that.
On that evening, a dinner was held at the Civic Club in Murray Hill. It was the only site available because, as David Levering Lewis would later write, "It was the only upper-crust New York club without a color bar, where Afro-American intellectuals and distinguished white liberals foregathered, more often than not around a table haloed by Benson and Hedges cigarette smoke exhaled by [W.E.B.] Du Bois."
It was organized by, among others, sociologist Charles S. Johnson (who was also the founding editor of Opportunity magazine, whose covers have been posted here) and Harvard Professor Alain Locke (the first Black Rhodes Scholar). Their original purpose had been to celebrate the publication of the novel There is Confusion by Jessie Fauset, but that soon morphed into a gathering of more than 100 New York writers and intellectuals, both Black and White.
The White guests were primarily publishers, editors, and others responsible for disseminating culture, including Carl van Doren, a literary critic and professor of English at Columbia University. Black guests included Du Bois, Fauset, poet and artist Gwendolyn Bennett, librarian Regina Anderson (later Andrews), and Countee Cullen, then a 20 year old NYU undergraduate.
Interest in African-American culture among Whites was then at an all-time high, due to the importance of jazz as the signature music of the Roaring Twenties. There had also been all-Black musicals on The Great White Way (aka Broadway).
Success was, of course, slow. Locke, Du Bois, and Johnson spent the next year writing letters, raising money and convincing young artists like the painter Aaron Douglas to come to Harlem. Zora Neale Hurston enrolled at Barnard College the following year. Cullen became the first Black winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to spend a year in Europe.
A year later, on May 1, 1925, Johnson hosted the first Opportunity [magazine] Literary Awards dinner at the Fifth Avenue Restaurant. More than 300 people attended, including some who would later come to define the Harlem Renaissance, such as Paul Robeson, Carl van Vechten (who was White, but a major champion of Black writers), and Langston Hughes, who just a month later signed his first publishing contract with Alfred M. Knopf.
In 1996, poets Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte founded their own fellowship, Cave Canem, which holds weeklong annual retreats, prizes, and fellowships to help foster the growth of Black poets. In the 30 years since then, Cave Canem fellows or faculty members have included (as of 2023) two U.S. poet laureates (Tracy K. Smith and Natasha Trethewey), six Pulitzer Prize winners (Smith, Trethewey, Carl Phillips, Jericho Brown, Tyehimba Jess, and Gregory Pardlo), five National Book Award winners, three MacArthur “genius” grant winners, six American Book Award winners, and 24 Guggenheim fellows.
Credit: much of the information here was taken from two articles from the New York Times.
