OFFICIAL58 What is the lecture mainly about?

[00:00.00]NARRATOR: Listen to part of a lecture in an African American history class. The professor has been discussing the early part of the twentieth century.
[00:09.88]FEMALE PROFESSOR: Harlem Renaissance, unprecedented in United States culture and history, introduced a significant period that emphasized self-identity as well as group consciousness among Black people both in United States and abroad. [00:27.61]Now, to sharpen my definition a bit, it was a literary awakening that occurred among African Americans that was characterized by an assertiveness on on their part and an outburst of creativity, never seen before. [00:45.60]There were several major figures or writers who produced, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and so forth during the period, writers such as Langston Hughes, and, and Zora Neale Hurston.
[00:58.56]Langston Hughes fashioned innovative literary forms. [01:03.95]What, what Hughes really wanted to do was was to somehow capture the folk traditions of his people and incorporate them into new forms he wanted to create and, and to improve upon conventional forms. [01:20.83]It’s not that he was against using conventional forms, it’s just that he wanted to improve upon them or create ones more reflective of, of the heritage of his people. [01:33.30]So in doing that what he did was incorporate blues, jazz, spirituals, and many of the forms of the African American musical idiom into his poetry. [01:45.68]He was the first for example to write a gospel play.
[01:51.17]And then there was Zora Neale Hurston who published her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937. [01:59.77]She was one who celebrated—like Hughes—she celebrated the folk traditions of African Americans and, infused dialect, folklore, she was an anthropologist and a folklorist so she worked within those mediums to produce work, um, celebratory of, of, of her heritage.
[02:23.60]Most of the cultural activity was centered in Harlem in New York City, which was at that time one of the largest cosmopolitan communities in the world, but the kinds of changes that were occurring among African Americans in Harlem were also taking place across the country in various cities especially in the urban north like, like Washington, D.C.; Chicago, Illinois; even Cleveland, Ohio. [02:51.71]So a more general term is sometimes used to describe the kinds of changes that took place, and that’s the New Negro Renaissance.
[03:02.06]MALE STUDENT: And what about DuBois? Wasn’t he responsible for the start of this renaissance?
[03:06.67]FEMALE PROFESSOR: And DuBois... Well, historians have traditionally dated the Harlem Renaissance or the beginnings of the Renaissance to the 1920s, but, uh, thos-these dates are, are debatable. [03:21.07]Some feel that the sudden flourishing of literature you see in the twenties was a result of movements that started much earlier. [03:29.25]For instance, in 1903, DuBois’ publication The Souls of Black Folks.
[03:35.99]DuBois’ book was one of the first works that began to explore Black identity and personality, um, with-with this emphasis on “double consciousness” of Blacks—or, or, or, as DuBois put it, this “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” [03:56.25]In 1906, DuBois led a meeting in the town of Niagara Falls of various leaders from the African American communities, and they advocated racial, social, and economic equality for African Americans, and-and this was the beginning of the so-called Niagara Movement, which spawned a number of civil rights organizations that were formed during the time.
[04:24.49]Another factor was the Great Migration that began at the turn of the century and lasted well into the 1930s. [04:33.93]It was a movement of more than 1 million Blacks who left the rural communities in the Southern U.S. and and moved to, to, the cities, many of them in the North, like Chicago, Cleveland, or New York City.
[04:49.74]And why did they leave? There were many reasons, but, for the most part, they left because they were in search of the economic dream. [04:58.55]There was a shortage of labor in the cities and African Americans from the South were seeking paid labor. [05:04.82]They were also trying to escape the inherent inequities and institutional racism of the South.
[05:12.40]MALE STUDENT: When you say they were seeking to get away from unfair treatment in the South, was living in the North really that much different from living in the South back then?
[05:20.82]FEMALE PROFESSOR: You might think it was… But those discriminatory practices existed everywhere in the U.S., they were in the South, but in the North as well. [05:30.61]This was also a problem Black World War I veterans faced when they returned from fighting in the war in 1918. [05:38.20]They had risked their lives for the country, so when they got home, they were no longer willing to accept second-class citizenship, and they began to advocate equality and to become more defiant and assertive and, and so this was a mood of course that was characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance.