The end of teh Renaissance for us...

I believe that studying the Harlem Renaissance in the 21st century is not only worthwhile but also necessary. I have taken so much information away from this class not just about the time period, but also about the people that influenced it and why. When we were reading the Brownies book a mother wrote in asking the editors to publish stories about African American heritage because no only did text book not include African American’s but she didn’t know the history herself to pass on to her child. This is how I feel about the Harlem Renaissance. In high school we learned briefly about slavery, but even then there was not much information presented about the movement of African American’s into society. In English classes we did not read McKay, Toomer, Hurston, and Larsen; instead we learned about Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. So by making a class like the Harlem Renaissance Literature it allows for people to really understand what things were like during this Renaissance and why these authors wrote so deeply and emotionally. Not only were they getting the story across to whites and blacks of the time, but they were also laying history in black and white for people to read and remember for years and years to come.