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"The Wild Party" was adapted into a film version in 1975, and two stage musicals, both produced in New York City in the same 1999–2000 theater season. Michael John LaChiusa's version, directed by George C. Wolfe was mounted on Broadway and the other version, by Andrew Lippa, performed off-Broadway. "The Wild Party" has been translated into French, German and Spanish.
An altered quote from the first two lines of "Part II, ch. 9" was used in the 1959 Ian Fleming novel "Goldfinger", although Fleming did not credit March. He also changed the word "fiercest" to "finest".
Album des pavillons, short for the "Album des pavillons nationaux et des marques distinctives", is a flag book published by the French Service hydrographique et océanographique de la marine. The latest edition was published in 2000 by Armand du Payrat. The contents of the book contain flags, ensigns and standards of countries, including construction sheets and Pantone colors used to reproduce the flags.
The Banderia Prutenorum is a manuscript of 48 parchment sheets, 18.6 by 29.3 cm (7.3 by 11.5 inches), composed by Jan Długosz and illuminated by Stanisław Durink, listing 56 , or banners, of the Order of the Teutonic Knights. The title means "Blazons of the Prussians". "Prutenorum" is the genitive plural of "Pruteni", Prussians.
In Polish the name is "Chorągwie Pruskie". "Chorągwie" can mean "banner", "standard", or "regiment". The heraldic term blazon in English is probably the exact meaning.
The work describes the gonfalons, or battle flags, collected from the field after the Battle of Grunwald in 1410 AD. This battle was a major confrontation between the Teutonic Order and the allied forces of Poles and Lithuanians, whom the Order was trying to conquer. At that time, the Order had succeeded in subjecting or eliminating the western Balts, including the Prussians; however, the Teutonic Knights were decisively defeated by the joint forces of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under the command of the Polish King Władysław II Jagiełło.
At the end of the battle, the major officers of the Order lay dead on the field beside the standards under which they had fought. Some units escaped with their standards. The Banderia does not describe all the Order's flags. The flags were collected and stored at Wawel Cathedral in Kraków. They are known to have been there in 1603, after which they disappeared. They have been recreated, starting in 1900. In October 2009, as part of the preparations for the battle's anniversary, Polish scholars and artists in Kraków have finished reconstructing all known standards.
It was probably the Polish historian, Jan Długosz, who commissioned the painter, Stanisław Durink of Kraków, to illustrate the flags in 1448. Długosz then wrote the Latin descriptions. The work thus has the format of a catalog, with an illumination and Latin entry for each flag.
The flag is decorated with a heraldic blazon identifying the "", or district, from which the soldiers of that unit came. The blazon might appear in any circumstances, such as in a coat of arms or on a shield, or in any conspicuous place. Its function was that of identification. The rules of heraldry were undoubtedly followed.
The title raises a few questions of language and society. In it a Polish scholar and historian is calling the conquerors of the Prussians by that very name, even though at the beginning of their conquest they found the name odious to them. Old Prussian speakers still lived in substantial numbers in east Prussia. As they were not excluded from military service, some must have fought for the order, and yet they are not distinguished from the Germans in any way.
"Banderium" is in origin neither Latin nor Polish, but comes from the Germanic. The place names also are in their Germanic forms rather than their Polish ones. Why Długosz, a Polish historian, chose to use the Germanicized Prussian Latin is not clear.
By some miracle, the manuscript survived World War II, even though it was given to Malbork Castle by the Nazis for political purposes. After the war it showed up at a London auction house and was brought to its current location in the library of Jagiellonian University.
In the scholarly Latin of manuscript terminology, a "recto" page is "on the right side". The "verso" or "turned side" (the other side of the page) is therefore a left-hand page. This terminology has nothing to do with Długosz.
Durink states the width ("latitudo") and length ("longitudo") of each flag in units he calls "ulne" (classical "ulnae"). These must be cubits rather than ells; i.e., one "ulna" is 18 inches by today's standard ell. The flags are generally longer than they are wide.
Page 1 recto bears the following introduction:
Pro libraria universitatis studii Cracouiensis datum per dominum Johannem Dlugosch. Descriptio Prutenicae cladis seu crucigerorum sub Jagellone per Joannem Dlugosz canonicum Cracoviensem. Banderia Prutenorum anno domini millesimo quadringentesimo decimo in festo Divisionis Apostolorum erecta contra Polonie regem Wladislaum Jagyelno et per eundem regem prostrata et Cracouiam adducta ac in ecclesia catedrali suspensa, que, ut sequitur, in hune modum fuerunt depicta.
A translation directly from the Latin is:
Given to the library of the university of study of Cracow by the master John Długosz. Description of the Prussian ruin or (the ruin) of the cross-bearers through Jagiello by John Dlugosz, canon of Cracow. The blazons of the Prussians in the year of the Lord 1410 in the holiday of the Divisio Apostolorum (Dispersal of the Apostles), which were erected against the king of Poland, Wladislaw Jagiello, and were cast down by the same king and brought to Cracow and hung in the church cathedral, were depicted in this manner, as follows.
The description to which Długosz refers is contained in the Latin notes with the flags.
Culm, Pomesania, Graudenz, Balga, Schonsze, Stargard, Sambia, Tuchel, Stuhm, Nessau, Westphalia, Rogasen, Elbing, Engelsburg, Strasburg, Chełm, Brettchen and Neumark, Braunsberg.
American City Flags is a special double volume issue of "", a peer-reviewed journal published by the North American Vexillological Association. It is the first comprehensive work on the subject, documenting the municipal flags of the largest 100 U.S. cities, all 50 state capitals, and at least two cities in each state. Each article describes in detail the flag’s design, adoption date, proportions, symbolism, selection, designer, and predecessors.
Earl Wilbert Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is a Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: "Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures." As Bernardine Evaristo notes, "Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken."
Lovelace's first novel, "While Gods Are Falling", published in 1965, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum, and he is the author of five subsequent well received novels, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize-winning "Salt" (1996) and, most recently, "Is Just a Movie", winner of the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. He has also written drama, essays, short stories and children's books. The artist Che Lovelace is his son.
Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940–47), Nelson Street Boys' R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948–53, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate).
He worked at the "Trinidad Guardian" as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954–56) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956–66). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia, in north-eastern Trinidad, as a forest ranger. He also had a posting as Agricultural Officer in Rio Claro in the south-east of the island. As Kenneth Ramchand has noted, "In the rural context [Lovelace] attended stick fights, wakes, village festivals and dances. He played cricket and football, and gambled in the rum shop with the villagers. He joined up to take part in the Best Village Competitions. He was living among ordinary people as one of them, and as an artist observing."
In 1962 his first novel, "While Gods Are Falling", won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by BP, after which he spent two years in Tobago, marrying in April 1964. "While Gods Are Falling" would be published in Britain by Collins in 1965.
From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist.
He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971–73), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995–96), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996–97), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999–2004).
Lovelace was Trinidad and Tobago's artistic director for Carifesta, the Caribbean Festival of Arts, which was held in the country in 1992, 1995 and 2006.
He is a columnist for the "Trinidad Express", and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including "Voices", "South", and "Wasafiri". Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. He is the president of the Association of Caribbean Writers.
Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled "A Writer In His Place".
In July 2015, to mark his 80th birthday, Lovelace was honoured by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest with celebrations in Tobago, including film screenings.
He is the subject of a 2017 biography by Funso Aiyejina.
At the same time as his writing has brought him international prestige and awards, "Lovelace has been valued by readers in his own country for his story-telling, for the vividness of his characters, for the ease and energy of his language, for his celebration of the creole or island-born culture, and for the way his writing makes people feel good about the selves they see in the mirror of his art."
When Lovelace's first novel, "While Gods Are Falling", was published in 1965, C. L. R. James hailed "a new type of writer, a new type of prose, a different type of work".
In 1968, Lovelace published his second novel, "The Schoolmaster", for which "he invented a language to represent the people of Kumaca, a remote Spanish Creole village of timbered hills, fertile valleys and clear cool rivers that comes breathtakingly alive in Lovelace’s descriptive prose. ... The Schoolmaster can be read as a celebration of the natural world and the attuned people in it; as a parable about the perils of transition from small island to modern nation; and most obviously as a satire about education in a colonial context."
Lovelace's 1979 novel, "The Dragon Can't Dance", has been described as "a defining and luminously sensitive portrait of postcolonial island life. ...A poignant, beautifully crafted tale about a man and his country on the cusp of change." Considered his best known work, "The Dragon Can't Dance" is "a wildly exuberant paean to Trinidad’s carnival traditions and the calypsonians who challenged British rule in the wake of the second world war."
In 1982, Lovelace published the novel "The Wine of Astonishment", which deals with the struggle of a Spiritual Baptist community, from the passing of the prohibition ordinance until the ban, the story "animated by a Creole narrative voice" as in other work by Lovelace.
Summing up his 1996 novel, "Salt", "Publishers Weekly" said: "Using language that's as lush as the foliage of Trinidad and dialogue as vivid as the Caribbean, Lovelace creates a parable that applies to any nation struggling with unresolved racial issues and to any people struggling to free themselves from their past." "Salt" won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was shortlisted for the 1998 International Dublin Literary Award.
Lovelace has also written plays (some collected in "Jestina's Calypso and Other Plays", 1984), short stories (collected in "A Brief Conversion and Other Stories", 1988), essays, and a children's book, as well as journalism.
The Alma Jordan Library at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, holds the Earl Lovelace manuscripts. The papers mainly consists of typed and handwritten notes, drafts and manuscripts of Lovelace's published output — novels, plays and short stories. Manuscripts of the following novels are included: "The Schoolmaster"; "The Dragon Can't Dance";"While Gods are Falling"; "The Wine of Astonishment"; "Salt". The collection also includes some unpublished work including poetry.
His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel "Salt". Earl Lovelace has collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on projects including writing the 2004 feature film "Joebell and America", based on his short story of the same title, on which his son Walt Lovelace was the director of photography and editor, and Che was the art director.
Joseph Robert Love, known as Dr. Robert Love (2 October 1839 – 21 November 1914), was a 19th-century Bahamian-born medical doctor, clergyman, teacher, journalist, politician and Pan-Africanist. He lived, studied, and worked successively in the Bahamas, the United States of America, Haiti, and Jamaica. Love spent the last decades of his life in Jamaica, where he held political office, published a newspaper, and advocated for the island's black majority.
Love was born in the Bahamas on 2 October 1839. He got primary education and was influence by the Anglican Church during this period. Later he became a teacher in Bahamas.
In the late 1860s, He went to United States. In June 1871, he became clergy in Trinity Church, New York and transferred to the Church of St. Stephen, Savannah in December. In 1872, claiming about the discrimination to people of darker color there, he left Church of St. Stephen, Savannah and established St. Augustine's mission that mainly consist of black people; during this period he also managed schools for black children. In 1876 he left the mission and left for Buffalo.
In Buffalo, he was Rector of St. Philip's until 1878. From 1877 he started to study at the University of Buffalo and in 1880 he obtained a medical degree.
In 1881, Love moved to Haiti, where he served as the rector of an Anglican church in Port-au-Prince. He was forced to end his career in church due to a quarrel, and he became a doctor in the Haitian army that engaged with the revolt in Haiti. During his time in Haiti he experienced grave difficulty in politics. In 1889, he was eventually expelled. He went to Kingston, Jamaica and failed in his attempts to return to Haiti.
In Jamaica, he started the "Jamaica Advocate" newspaper in December 1894, which became an influential newspaper on the island. Love used the paper as a forum to express his concern for the living conditions of Jamaica's black population. He was a staunch advocate of access to education for the majority of the population. He believed that girls, like boys, should receive secondary school education.
Love piloted a voter registration drive, as a means of empowering the black majority, and challenging white minority rule. The white elite in the Colony of Jamaica worried that Love was filling the heads of black people with dangerous ideas of racial equality. John Vassall Calder claimed that black people lacked the mental capacities to thrive, and stated: “Dr. Love must remember that his ancestors were my ancestors’ slaves...He could never be my equal. He is aggrieved because my forefathers rescued him from the bonds of thraldom and deprived him the privilege of being King of the Congo, enjoying the epicurean and conjugal orgies and the sacrificial pleasures of his ancestral home in Africa.”
The white establishment viewed Love with as much suspicion as they did the pan-African Native Baptish preacher, Alexander Bedward. However, Love always thought Bedward to be nothing more than a skilled showman whom a hysterical establishment had managed to turn into a martyr.
Love helped black candidates to get elected to the Council, which advised the government. In 1906, Love himself won the Saint Andrew Parish seat of the Legislative Council in general elections. He also served as chairman of the Saint Andrew Parochial Board, as well as a justice of the peace in Kingston, the Kingston General Commissions and as a trustee of Wolmer's schools. Love published two works, "Romanism is Not Christianity" (1892), and "St. Peter's True Position in the Church, Clearly Traced in the Bible" (1897).
Love's health began to deteriorate, and by 1910 he had been forced to end his political career. He died on 21 November 1914, and was buried in the parish church yard at Half Way Tree, near the city of Kingston. Love's activism in favour of Jamaica's economically depressed black majority influenced later Jamaican and Caribbean activists, including Marcus Garvey.
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness is a 1993 history book about a distinct black Atlantic culture that incorporated elements from African, American, British, and Caribbean cultures. It was written by Paul Gilroy and was published by Harvard University Press and Verso Books.
"Bars Fight" is a ballad poem written by Lucy Terry about an attack upon two white families by Native Americans on August 25, 1746. The incident occurred in an area of Deerfield called "The Bars", which was a colonial term for a meadow. The poem was preserved orally and not published until 1855, in Josiah Gilbert Holland's "History of Western Massachusetts".
It is believed to be the oldest known work of literature by an African American and is the only known work by Lucy Terry.
The text of the ballad from Holland's "History of Western Massachusetts", 1855:
The names of whom I'll not leave out.
And though he was so brave and bold,
His face no more shall we behold.
Which caused his friends much grief and pain.
Not many rods distant from his head.
Did lose his life which was so dear.
And hopes to save herself by running,
And had not her petticoats stopped her,
The awful creatures had not catched her,
Nor tommy hawked her on her head,
And left her on the ground for dead.
After its 1855 publication the poem was undiscovered until 1942, when it was published in Lorenzo Greene's "The Negro in Colonial New England 1620–1776". Unfortunately, this youthful occasional poem is the only surviving work by Terry, who was said to have been a prolific poet. Recent scholarship has instead drawn attention to how Terry evokes her participation in the local community by recounting the names of the men and women who fought alongside her, and how the town responded by preserving the poem and her name in their oral histories.
The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism is 2003 book on literary history, criticism and theory by Brent Hayes Edwards.
Edwards published "The Practice of Diaspora" with Harvard University Press in 2003.
In addition to the DuBois reference, Edwards also draws on Stuart Hall and the concept of articulation to develop a theoretical use of the French word décalage, "referring to a shift in space or time or the gap that results from it, and applies the term to describe the way in which members of the black diaspora share similar conditions of oppression yet often find ourselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum—for example, black writers seeking solace from Jim Crow in Paris, while simultaneously Africans were struggling against French colonialism. These countering political locations create tensions within our diaspora, but Edwards does not see these sites of difference as global movement killer...[instead] that these disparate locations are, like joints, sites of potential forward motion."
For "The Practice of Diaspora", Edwards won the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and an honorable mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association.
Until the end of the Civil War, the majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived in the South. During the Reconstruction Era, the emancipated African Americans, freedmen, began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural self-determination. Soon after the end of the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 gave rise to speeches by African-American Congressmen addressing this Bill. By 1875, sixteen African Americans had been elected and served in Congress and gave numerous speeches with their newfound civil empowerment.
The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 was denounced by black Congressmen and resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, part of Reconstruction legislation by Republicans. During the mid-to-late 1870s, racist whites organized in the Democratic Party launched a murderous campaign of racist terrorism to regain political power throughout the South. From 1890 to 1908, they proceeded to pass legislation that disenfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites, trapping them without representation. They established white supremacist regimes of Jim Crow segregation in the South and one-party block voting behind southern Democrats.
Most of the future leading lights of what was to become known as the "Harlem Renaissance" movement arose from a generation that had memories of the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Sometimes their parents, grandparents - or they themselves - had been slaves. Their ancestors had sometimes benefited by paternal investment in cultural capital, including better-than-average education.
Many in the Harlem Renaissance were part of the early 20th century Great Migration out of the South into the African-American neighborhoods of the Northeast and Midwest. African Americans sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the South. Others were people of African descent from racially stratified communities in the Caribbean who came to the United States hoping for a better life. Uniting most of them was their convergence in Harlem.
Harlem became an African-American neighborhood in the early 1900s. In 1910, a large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various African-American realtors and a church group. Many more African Americans arrived during the First World War. Due to the war, the migration of laborers from Europe virtually ceased, while the war effort resulted in a massive demand for unskilled industrial labor. The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and New York.
Despite the increasing popularity of Negro culture, virulent white racism, often by more recent ethnic immigrants, continued to affect African-American communities, even in the North. After the end of World War I, many African-American soldiers—who fought in segregated units such as the Harlem Hellfighters—came home to a nation whose citizens often did not respect their accomplishments. Race riots and other civil uprisings occurred throughout the US during the Red Summer of 1919, reflecting economic competition over jobs and housing in many cities, as well as tensions over social territories.
The first stage of the Harlem Renaissance started in the late 1910s. In 1917, the premiere of "Granny Maumee, The Rider of Dreams, Simon the Cyrenian: Plays for a Negro Theater" took place. These plays, written by white playwright Ridgely Torrence, featured African-American actors conveying complex human emotions and yearnings. They rejected the stereotypes of the blackface and minstrel show traditions. James Weldon Johnson in 1917 called the premieres of these plays "the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American Theater".
Another landmark came in 1919, when the communist poet Claude McKay published his militant sonnet "If We Must Die", which introduced a dramatically political dimension to the themes of African cultural inheritance and modern urban experience featured in his 1917 poems "Invocation" and "Harlem Dancer". Published under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, these were his first appearance in print in the United States after immigrating from Jamaica. Although "If We Must Die" never alluded to race, African-American readers heard its note of defiance in the face of racism and the nationwide race riots and lynchings then taking place. By the end of the First World War, the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and the poetry of Claude McKay were describing the reality of contemporary African-American life in America.
The Harlem Renaissance grew out of the changes that had taken place in the African-American community since the abolition of slavery, as the expansion of communities in the North. These accelerated as a consequence of World War I and the great social and cultural changes in early 20th-century United States. Industrialization was attracting people to cities from rural areas and gave rise to a new mass culture. Contributing factors leading to the Harlem Renaissance were the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities, which concentrated ambitious people in places where they could encourage each other, and the First World War, which had created new industrial work opportunities for tens of thousands of people. Factors leading to the decline of this era include the Great Depression.
In 1917 Hubert Harrison, "The Father of Harlem Radicalism", founded the Liberty League and "The Voice", the first organization and the first newspaper, respectively, of the "New Negro Movement." Harrison's organization and newspaper were political, but also emphasized the arts (his newspaper had "Poetry for the People" and book review sections). In 1927, in the "Pittsburgh Courier", Harrison challenged the notion of the renaissance. He argued that the "Negro Literary Renaissance" notion overlooked "the stream of literary and artistic products which had flowed uninterruptedly from Negro writers from 1850 to the present," and said the so-called "renaissance" was largely a white invention.
Nevertheless, with the Harlem Renaissance came a sense of acceptance for African-American writers; as Langston Hughes put it, with Harlem came the courage "to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame." Alain Locke's anthology "The New Negro" was considered the cornerstone of this cultural revolution. The anthology featured several African-American writers and poets, from the well-known, such as Zora Neale Hurston and communists Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, to the lesser-known, like the poet Anne Spencer.
Many poets of the Harlem Renaissance were inspired to tie in threads of African-American culture into their poems; as a result, jazz poetry was heavily developed during this time. "The Weary Blues" was a notable jazz poem written by Langston Hughes. Through their works of literature, black authors were able to give a voice to the African-American identity, as well as strive for a community of support and acceptance.
Christianity played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance. Many of the writers and social critics discussed the role of
Christianity in African-American lives. For example, a famous poem by Langston Hughes, "Madam and the Minister", reflects the temperature and mood towards religion in the Harlem Renaissance.
The cover story for "The Crisis" magazine′s publication in May 1936 explains how important Christianity was regarding the proposed union of the three largest Methodist churches of 1936. This article shows the controversial question of unification for these churches.
The article "The Catholic Church and the Negro Priest", also published in "The Crisis", January 1920, demonstrates the obstacles African-American priests faced in the Catholic Church. The article confronts what it saw as policies based on race that excluded African Americans from higher positions in the church.
Various forms of religious worship existed during this time of African-American intellectual reawakening.
Although there were racist attitudes within the current Abrahamic religious arenas many African Americans continued to push towards the practice of a more inclusive doctrine. For example, George Joseph MacWilliam presents various experiences, during his pursuit towards priesthood, of rejection on the basis of his color and race yet he shares his frustration in attempts to incite action on the part of "The Crisis" magazine community.
There were other forms of spiritualism practiced among African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance. Some of these religions and philosophies were inherited from African ancestry. For example, the religion of Islam was present in Africa as early as the 8th century through the Trans-Saharan trade. Islam came to Harlem likely through the migration of members of the Moorish Science Temple of America, which was established in 1913 in New Jersey. Various forms of Judaism were practiced, including Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism, but it was Black Hebrew Israelites that founded their religious belief system during the early 20th century in the Harlem Renaissance. Traditional forms of religion acquired from various parts of Africa were inherited and practiced during this era. Some common examples were Voodoo and Santeria.
Religious critique during this era was found in music, literature, art, theater and poetry. The Harlem Renaissance encouraged analytic dialogue that included the open critique and the adjustment of current religious ideas.
One of the major contributors to the discussion of African-American renaissance culture was Aaron Douglas who, with his artwork, also reflected the revisions African Americans were making to the Christian dogma. Douglas uses biblical imagery as inspiration to various pieces of art work but with the rebellious twist of an African influence.
Countee Cullen's poem "Heritage" expresses the inner struggle of an African American between his past African heritage and the new Christian culture. A more severe criticism of the Christian religion can be found in Langston Hughes' poem "Merry Christmas", where he exposes the irony of religion as a symbol for good and yet a force for oppression and injustice.
A new way of playing the piano called the Harlem Stride style was created during the Harlem Renaissance, and helped blur the lines between the poor African Americans and socially elite African Americans. The traditional jazz band was composed primarily of brass instruments and was considered a symbol of the south, but the piano was considered an instrument of the wealthy. With this instrumental modification to the existing genre, the wealthy African Americans now had more access to jazz music. Its popularity soon spread throughout the country and was consequently at an all-time high.
Innovation and liveliness were important characteristics of performers in the beginnings of jazz. Jazz performers and composers at the time such as Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Jelly Roll Morton, Luckey Roberts, James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Andy Razaf, Fats Waller, Ethel Waters, Adelaide Hall, Florence Mills and bandleaders Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson were extremely talented, skillful, competitive and inspirational. They are still considered as having laid great parts of the foundations for future musicians of their genre.
Duke Ellington gained popularity during the Harlem Renaissance. According to Charles Garrett, "The resulting portrait of Ellington reveals him to be not only the gifted composer, bandleader, and musician we have come to know, but also an earthly person with basic desires, weaknesses, and eccentricities." Ellington did not let his popularity get to him. He remained calm and focused on his music.
During the Harlem Renaissance, the black clothing scene took a dramatic turn from the prim and proper. Many young women preferred- from short skirts and silk stockings to drop-waisted dresses and cloche hats. Woman wore loose-fitted garments and accessorized with long strand pearl bead necklaces, feather boas, and cigarette holders. The fashion of the Harlem Renaissance was used to convey elegance and flamboyancy and needed to be created with the vibrant dance style of the 1920s in mind. Popular by the 1930s was a trendy, egret-trimmed beret.
Men wore loose suits that led to the later style known as the "Zoot," which consisted of wide-legged, high-waisted, peg-top trousers, and a long coat with padded shoulders and wide lapels. Men also wore wide-brimmed hats, colored socks, white gloves, and velvet-collared Chesterfield coats. During this period, African Americans expressed respect for their heritage through a fad for leopard-skin coats, indicating the power of the African animal.

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