The Harlem Renaissance Ain't About Harlem: Recovering Kansas Communities in the Emergence of Black American Expressive Culture, From Slave Narratives to Bebop

Abstract

The Harlem Renaissance Ain’t About Harlem: Recovering Kansas Communities in the Emergence of Black American Expressive Culture, From Slave Narratives to Bebop, reconsiders common origins narratives of the aesthetic of the Harlem Renaissance, jazz’s blues-based swing and bebop. This work critically examines a connection between the cultural production of the Kansas communities from which several Harlem Renaissance participants and jazz musicians came, who popularized blues-based swing and bebop in Harlem during the 1920s-1950s. Placing Kansas community development at the center of my study explains that Kansas became a place of refuge for Black people following Reconstruction. Black Kansan communities became incubators that nurtured key contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, blues-based swing, and bebop before garnering national acclaim.

This study recovers early educational, economic, political, and cultural data to construct a more comprehensive cultural history of African American life in Kansas. I contend that a national network of Black institutions, envisioned by Black nationalist Lewis Woodson (1806-1878), and devised by Black abolitionists in the early 19th century, established a Black cultural and political nation within the United States. The ideals of this Black cultural nation found a home in Kansas. By the efforts of abolitionist Charles H. Langston, these ideals blossomed into an aesthetic that empowered the artists, writers, and musicians, such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Eva Jessye, Nora Holt, Etta Moten Barnett, Count Basie, Mary Lou Williams, and Charlie Parker, who later traveled to Harlem to boldly express themselves in ways that contributed to a national cultural renaissance, and American culture. The chapters focus on the ideology of Black abolitionists and the quest to end slavery centering on Kansas, the importance of the blues, Black vernacular English, and dark skin as the main aesthetics in the Black cultural identity of Kansas that would later be displayed in Harlem. Through the use of ethnography, archives, and oral history, my research challenges these cultural products as being indigenous to Harlem. It shows that the aesthetic and performance practices of their key contributors originated in the socioeconomic and intellectual progress of Black Kansan communities.