Harlem Renaissance
During the Harlem Renaissance a new feeling of racial pride emerged in the Black Intelligencia. The Black Intelligencia consisted of African-American writers, poets, philosophers, historians, and artists whose expertise conveyed five central themes according to Sterling Brown, a writer of that time: "1) Africa as a source of race pride, 2) Black American heroes 3) racial political propaganda, 4) the "Black folk" tradition, and 5) candid self-revelation." Two of the main people responsible for this new consciousness were W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Du Bois laid a foundation for this dawn of racial pride in his essays. Locke took Du Bois' initial idea one step further with his writings and aiding younger writers and artists that appeared during the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes was one of the writers that Locke mentored. Hughes was a devote believer of exhibiting pride in the Black race; this theme was often exhibited in his writing. These three men have each contributed and advanced the sentiment of racial pride in their own unique way during the Harlem Renaissance.In order to fully understand the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes it is imperative to know their backgrounds. W
Locke, like Du Bois, wanted African-Americans to believe in themselves and realize how beautiful and intelligent they were. Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes spent his childhood years with his grandmother living in Lawrence, Kansas. Locke introduced Hughes to Charlotte Mason, a rich white patron of African-American artists during that time. " Du Bois wanted The Crisis to be a magazine of great substance that published issues related to the Caucasian and African-American public, but he had a special interest in African-American racial problems and their solutions. A great artist cannot be afraid of who they are or from where they came. He received his undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Harvard in 1907 and became the first African-American Rhodes Scholar. They turned their noses up to anything distinctly African and loved everything distinctly white. After Harvard, Du Bois traveled to Europe and studied in Berlin for a year. Hughes then went on a four-year trip around the world working as a seaman. "Therefore the Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not.
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Acceptance Essays
