Political Context of Harlem

Dutch settlers founded Harlem, a 5 1/2 square mile area north of Central Park, in 1658. Central Harlem became a Black neighborhood between 1910 and 1920 when its real estate market collapsed, leaving scores of new apartment buildings empty. To find tenants, landlords opened up the area to African Americans, who were leaving the southern states in search of a better life. By 1914, Harlem's population reached 50,000, and between 1920 and 1930, the number quadrupled.

The Harlem Renaissance was an expression of African-American social thought and culture which took a place in newly-formed Black community in neighborhood of Harlem. Instead of using direct political means, African-American artists, writers, and musicians employed culture to work for goals of civil rights and equality. In the 1920's, Harlem became a mecca for Black artists, writers, and intellectuals, who launched the artistic and literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Notable names included writer Langston Hughes, painter Aaron Douglas, and sculptor Augusta Savage.

In 1951–the year the poem “ Harlem” by Langston Hughes was written was a period of frustration for African Americans and in the poem Hughes characterized the mood of American blacks. The Civil War in the previous century had liberated them from slavery, and federal laws had granted them the right to vote, the right to own property, and so on. However, continuing prejudice against blacks, as well as laws passed since the Civil War, relegated them to second-class citizenship. By the mid-Twentieth Century, their frustration with inferior status became a powder keg, and the fuse was burning. Hughes well understood what the future held, as he indicates in the last line of his poem. Hughes believed that realistic portraits of actual people would counter negative caricatures of African Americans more effectively and so wrote about and for the common person.