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• 1 2023-09-04T23:59:55+00:00 The end of the Harlem Renaissance (1980s) 25 plain 2024-01-26T23:46:26+00:00 In the 1980s, the disorder in 1935 was given a place in the scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance. The conditions that produced the violence loomed larger in how the disorder was understood in those accounts than its framing as protest or the nature of the violence. Alain Locke had presented the disorder as the movement's end in his article "Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane" published in the Survey Graphic in 1936. Black leaders, as well as white leaders, shifted the focus of their energy to remedying social conditions in response to the violence. However, Nathan Irvin Huggins did not adopt that framing in his Harlem Renaissance, the foundational study published in 1971. The study that succeeded Huggins as the most widely read analysis of the artistic movement, When Harlem Was In Vogue by David Levering Lewis, did employ Locke's framing.
  
  Alain Locke had nurtured the Harlem Renaissance, in the pages of the very same publication in which he wrote in 1936, so it was almost inevitable that he would frame the disorder in 1935 in terms of that movement. "Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane" presented the disorder as the "curtain raiser" to the "first scene of the next act—the prosy ordeal of the reformation with its stubborn tasks of economic reconstruction and social and civic reform." Its effect was "like a revealing flash of lightning it etched on the public mind another Harlem than the bright surface Harlem of the night clubs, cabaret tours and arty magazines." It "brought the first vivid realization of the actual predicament of the mass life of Harlem." To address this "dark Harlem of semi-starvation, mass exploitation and seething unrest" it was necessary for the neighborhood's elite to turn away from poetry and art, Locke argued. They had to end the Harlem Renaissance.
  
  Although Nathan Irvin Huggins cited Locke’s article in the very first note in his book, he made no mention of the racial disorder in 1935. The Depression ended the Harlem Renaissance by his account: "When the decade of the 1930s opened, the innocent Harlem Renaissance ended." Economic depression soured the optimism of the renaissance generation. Huggins read Locke's 1936 article as showing that "even the most enthusiastic champion of the renaissance was sobered by the depression.”
  
  David Levering Lewis too saw the depression as bringing an end to the Harlem Renaissance but positioned the disorder in 1935 as the end point in When Harlem Was In Vogue. He did so by dramatically ending his study with the disorder: "On the evening of March 19, 1935, the riot awaiting its immediate cause swept down Lenox Avenue with ten thousand angry Harlemites destroying two million dollars in white-owned commercial property," began the book's final paragraph. Relying on Claude McKay's article in the Nation and an article in Opportunity, two pillars of the Harlem Renaissance, he reported that "By the following morning, three Afro-Americans were dead, thirty people were hospitalized and more than one hundred in jail." Lewis offered few details of the disorder; he was not concerned to analyze the events. He wanted only to produce the "lightning-flash" that Locke had described. In the Preface to Penguin Books edition published in 1997, Lewis would less dramatically reiterate the place of the disorder. He demarcated three periods in the Harlem Renaissance, the last from "mid-1926 to the Harlem Riot of 1935.”
  
  The riot as an end date would also later make its way into Huggins' book, albeit obliquely and outside his text. In Arnold Rampersad's foreword to a reissue of Harlem Renaissance published in 2007, he described 1935 as ”the outermost plausible mark” for the end of the movement without explanation. If the details of the disorder were still widely misunderstood, its role as a marker was established.