Short description:

The Harlem Renaissance, an exciting period in the social and cultural history of the US, has over the past few decades re-established itself as a watershed moment in African American history. However, many of the African American communities outside the urban center of Harlem that participated in the Harlem Renaissance between 1914 and 1940, have been overlooked and neglected as locations of scholarship and research.

Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negro's Western Experience will change the way students and scholars of the Harlem Renaissance view the efforts of artists, musicians, playwrights, club owners, and various other players in African American communities all over the American West to participate fully in the cultural renaissance that took hold during that time.

Long description:

The Harlem Renaissance, an exciting period in the social and cultural history of the US, has over the past few decades re-established itself as a watershed moment in African American history. However, many of the African American communities outside the urban center of Harlem that participated in the Harlem Renaissance between 1914 and 1940, have been overlooked and neglected as locations of scholarship and research.

Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negro's Western Experience will change the way students and scholars of the Harlem Renaissance view the efforts of artists, musicians, playwrights, club owners, and various other players in African American communities all over the American West to participate fully in the cultural renaissance that took hold during that time.

"While most treatments of the renaissance period focus on the Eastern Seaboard, the impact of the renaissance on the West and Southwest have been neglected. Editors Glasrud and Wintz and the contributors to this collection do a superb job of filling in this gap...Summing Up: Essential." - C. H. Allen, Shenandoah University, CHOICE

"This is an amazing collection of essays that fundamentally reshapes our understanding of an era of creativity and change that is usually seen through the lens of New York by recasting our scholarly sights westward. Not only does this work enhance our understanding of the Renaissance?s impact on urban centers like Los Angeles, Denver and Kansas City but it deftly broadens our gaze to include the impact and contributions of communities as diverse as Seattle, Laramie and Minneapolis. This landmark publication marks a profound shift in the interpretation of what will never again be seen as a simply a Harlem Renaissance." - Lonnie Bunch, Director of the Smithsonian?s National Museum of African American History and Culture, is the author of Black Angelenos: The African American in Los Angeles, 1850-1950

"Cary Wintz and Bruce Glasrud have assembled a long overdue and yet remarkably revealing anthology on the Harlem Renaissance in the West.? The authors convincingly establish the Renaissance as part of a national literary and artistic movement with roots in places as disparate as Lawrence, Kansas, Silver City, New Mexico, and Boise, Idaho." - Quintard Taylor, Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History, University of Washington

Table of Contents:

CONTENTS

?

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Harlem Renaissance in the West

Cary D. Wintz and Bruce A. Glasrud

Chapters

1. Harlem in Houston

Charles Orson Cook

2. North Texas? Black Art and Literature During the 1920s and 1930s: "The

Current Is Much Stronger"

Michael Phillips

3. The Western Black Renaissance in the Kansas City Region

Marc Rice

4. The New Negro Renaissance in Los Angeles, 1920-1940

Douglas Flamming

5. "All God?s Children Got Swing": The Black Renaissance in the San Francisco

Bay Area, 1906-1941

Douglas Henry Daniels

6. Harlem Renaissance in Oklahoma

Jean Van Delinder

7. The New Negro Renaissance in Omaha and Lincoln, 1910-1940

Richard M. Breaux

8. Harlem Renaissance West: Minneapolis and St. Paul, the Twin Cities of

Minnesota

Carolyn Wedin

9. The San Antonio/Austin Renaissance: Where "the Daddies of Jazz"

Remembered the Alamo

Jeanette N. Passty

10. The Black Renaissance in the Desert Southwest

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz

11. Harlem Renaissance in Denver

George H. Junne, Jr.

12. Black Renaissance in Helena and Laramie: Hatched on Top of the Rocky

Mountains

Charlotte Hinger

13. A Renaissance in Seattle and Portland

Kimberley Mangun

14. Harlem Renaissance in San Diego: New Negroes and Community

Charles P. Toombs

Harlem Renaissance in the West: A Selected Bibliography

Contributors

Index