Harlem Renaissance/The New Negro Movement and Education

     Education during the Harlem Renaissance was influenced by numerous factors, among them the migration of thousands of African Americans from the south and the West Indies. Migrants from the south were seeking better economic opportunities, escape from oppressive social conditions that threatened life and limb, and opportunities that were far superior to the limited schooling available in the south. New York had special appeal because education in New York, unlike other northern states had prohibited separate schools for African Americans. States such as Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey had separate schools as well as some integrated schools. Some cities such as Gary and Indianapolis, Indiana, both of which received a large influx of African Americans after World War I, built separate secondary schools to accommodate the large influx of African Americans.

Another influence on education during the Harlem Renaissance was a greater militancy and awareness among African Americans throughout the nation that the freedoms promised following America's participation in World War I had eluded them. Discriminatory practices of racism by citizens and supported by government had not changed for the returning soldier at the onset of the 1920's.

Education in Harlem was also influenced by an influx of black immigration from the West Indies during the 1920's. This was a new and unusual phenonmenon since most blacks in the United States were descendents of involuntary immigrants. At the beginning of the 1920's, the U.S. had imposed a new quota system, drastically reducing the influx of people from Southern and Eastern Europe. Many from the West Indies saw New York as a land of greater prosperity and economic opportunity than in the Caribbean. These West Indians were accustomed to being part of a majority in their homeland and had experienced discrimination, but their awareness of American racism was an abstraction and not fully understood. Nevertheless, coming to the United States meant increase in affluence even though a loss of status for some. By 1930, the population of foreign born African Americans in New York had grown to seventeen percent.

The immigrants from the West Indies appeared different from the rank and file of migrants from the rural south in that there was almost no illiteracy among them. James Weldon Johnson, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote "they were sober-minded, had a genius for business enterprise, and that one-third of the city's Negro professionals, physicians, dentists, and lawyers were foreign born."

These two populations of African Americans moving into Harlem during the 1920's influenced education in the kind of leadership that emerged. Unaccustomed to the intensity of racial hostility and harassment in America, the West Indian ethos that emphasized education, hard work, and saving led many into professional employment and made others political radicals, i.e. Cyril Vaklentine Briggs (Microsoft Encarta Africana 1999).

The above audio clip is National Public Radio's All Things Considered program interview with Adero Malaika, editor of Up South, a collection of documents and stories by and about African-American migrants.