The Harlem Renaissance Births a Black Culture
Sandra Friday
Your feedback is important to us!
After viewing our curriculum units, please take a few minutes to help us understand how the units, which were created by public school teachers, may be useful to others.
Give FeedbackThe Great Migration
While a few groups of students are reproducing the cosmogram, and another group is reproducing the poem to mount on the cosmogram, yet another group can research on the internet (see suggested web sites in bibliography) and in the book, Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series, the documentation by the Renaissance artist Jacob Lawrence of the great migration of African Americans from the South to the North in the early decades of the 19th Century. Disillusioned with life in the South, African Americans opted for the harrowing gamble of uprooting their families and migrating to the North, in the struggle for survival. This migration of several hundred thousand black people to cities in the North, New York City among them, created a milieu that spawned the Harlem Renaissance. Jacob Lawrence, himself a child of the migration, poignantly documented this migration with some sixty paintings that have been reproduced in the book mentioned in this paragraph.