Celebrating the Women of the Harlem Renaissance

Women's History Month

Celebrating the Women of the Harlem Renaissance

Mattel has created a  series of dolls, Claudette  and Madame  L   that pays tribute to the Harlem Renaissance Era.

The "Harlem Renaissance, of the New Negro Movement as it was called, was on of the richest and most complex artistic eras in American History.  Characterized by an explosive energy, the artistic, literary, and philosophical movements taking place among African Americans during the 1920"s took Harlem as a center.  The neighbor hood, consisting of some two square miles in Manhattan, was both a literal and metaphoric African American national capital, the hub of political, social, creative and intellectual activities.  The unprecedented numbers of men and women who migrated to Harlem from all over the country in the first decades of the twentieth century included artists and writers, musicians and dancers, intellectuals and activists."*

"Talent began to overflow within this newfound culture of the black community in Harlem, as prominent figures such as Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, Zora Neil Hurston, Ella Fitzgerald, and Bessie Smith pushed art to its limit as a form of expression and representation."**

*http://brbl-archive.library.yale.edu/exhibitions/awia/eshar.html
**http://www.biography.com/people/groups/movement-harlem-renaissance