Harlem Renaissance

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The Color of Words

- real - can 't help themselves . They are driven to put words down on in a manner that is not dissimilar to breathing : for the writer , writing is an involuntary act . This is not to say that the act of writing is easy : like the labor of breathing during rigorous exercise , writing is often a taxing and painful event , but for the writer , it simply must be done to survive . Driven though all may

be , the force that guides each is different : if it were not , the shelves of libraries and bookstores would not need exist . Expression is the common denominator - that unseen force - but just what to express is the question each writer faces in the private recesses of his or her mind . The complication faced by of the Harlem Renaissance was how to express the what they had chosen , for these had to grapple with a difficult decision : in what color should the words they chose to write be written

Early twentieth century America - the time of the Harlem Renaissance - was not a time during which an African-American woman would have been invited to read one of her poems at a President 's inauguration . It was a time during which publishing houses were only beginning to recognize and produce works penned by blacks , when minstrels still portrayed blacks on stage , and when it was dangerous for blacks to claim their blackness (Gates , Henry Louis , Jr , and Nellie Y . McKay . Harlem Renaissance : 1919-1940 ' 929-931 . The Harlem Renaissance was a time during which the echoes of W . E . B . Du Bois ' The Souls of Black Folks and his notion of two-ness ' was felt with a great fervor by Langston Hughes , Sterling Brown , and Jean Toomer , each of whom answered the call to write (qtd . in Reuben

Simply put , Du Bois ' notion ' is that each black American manages a double-consciousness ' that stems from his ever feel[ing] his two-ness - an American , a Negro two souls , two thoughts , two unreconciled stirrings : two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder (Du Bois 615 . Thus the need for expression that drove many of the of the Harlem Renaissance threatened to drown those not strong enough to survive a rebirth - a renaissance - and the color of one 's skin guaranteed no protection ( Renaissance

Some poets of the Harlem Renaissance began to want to be recognized not as Negro poet[s] , but as poets , but given Du Bois ' notion of two-ness ' this struck Langston Hughes as meaning subconsciously `I would like to be a white poet meaning behind that , `I would like to be white (Hughes . Hughes describes this struggle as akin to climbing the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America__this urge within the race toward whiteness , the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization , and...