When celebrating the Harlem Renaissance, it’s important to acknowledge how it was influenced by Jamaican political activist, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur and orator Marcus Garvey.
According to Garvey scholar Tony Martin, Claude McKay — a major player in the Harlem Renaissance — had a “love-hate relationship with the Garvey Movement.”
Despite this, Martin quotes a reluctant McKay as saying that Garvey’s annual International Convention of People of the Negro World “assembled an exhibition of Negro accomplishments in all the skilled crafts and artwork produced by exhibitors from all over the Americas and Africa, which were revelations to Harlem of what the Negro people were capable of achieving. The vivid albeit crude paintings of the Black Christ and the Black Virgin of the Garvey inspired and allied (which the African Orthodox Church displayed in August 1924) were startling omens of the Negro Renaissance Movement of the nineteen-twenties which whipped up the appetite of literary and artistic America for a season. The flowering of Harlem’s creative life came in the Garvey era. ….”
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