Primary Source Analysis Activity

1. DO NOW:
• In your source books write down an author, musician
or artist that you feel changed how you viewed
something.

2. BANKSY

3. The Harlem Renaissance

4. Where is Harlem?
Why there?

5. WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?
• Pride in African American culture
• Hope in the future
• Speaking out against / acknowledging racism

6. PRACTICE SOURCE
Aspects of Negro Life: An Idyll of Deep South (1934) – Aaron Douglas

7. SOURCE 1
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I too am America.
“I, Too”- (1926) Langston Hughes
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong
Tomorrow,
Ill be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

8. SOURCE 2
The Sport of the Gods
(film 1921)
- 1st Biracial Film
- Billboard Magazine
published the opening of
it
- ( 1st most prominently
recognized race film)

9. SOURCE 3
“The Lynching” – Claude McKay (1922)
His Spirit is smoke ascended to high heaven.
His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
Had bidden him to is bosom once again,
The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
All night a bright and solitary star
(Perchance the one that ever guided him,
Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)
Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun;
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers what were to be,
Danced round the dreadful think in fiendish glee.

10. SOURCE 4

11. SOURCE 5
“How it feels to be Colored” (1928) – Zora Hurston
But I am not tragically colored. There is no great
sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind
my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the
sobbing school of the Negrohood who hold that
nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty
deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even
in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have
seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a
little pigmentation more or less. No I do not weep
at the world– I am too busy sharpening my oyster
knife.

12. SOURCE 6
“The Big Sea” by Langston Huges
“White people began to come to Harlem in droves. For several years they packed the
expensive Cotton Club on Lenox Avenue. But I was never there, because the Cotton
Club was a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites. They were not cordial to
negro patronage, unless you were a celebrity like Bojangles. So Harlem Negroes did not
like the Cotton Club and never appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of
their dark community. Nor did ordinary Negros like the growing influx of whites
towards Harlem after sundown, flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly
only colored people laughed and sand and where now the strangers were given the best
ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers – like amusing animals in a zoo.”

13. You are now a Harlem Renaissance Artist!
YOUR POSTER NEEDS TO DEPICT ONE Or MORE of the following
• Pride in your culture
• Hope in the future
• Acknowledge / fight against racism.
• Aesthetically pleasing! Meaning – Looks nice enough to put on the wall.