The Harlem Renaissance: Arna W. Bontemps, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer

Abstract

Charles Hamlin Good’s article “The First American Negro Literary Movement” (Opportunity, March 1932) tells of the literary activities of the cordons bleus, a community of wealthy mulattoes in New Orleans during the nineteenth century. Led by Arthur Lanusse, this group began publishing a magazine in 1843 that featured the works of the city’s Negro literati. The publication, which was written entirely in French and called L’Album Litteraire, Journal des Jeunes Gens, Amateurs de Litterature, included poems, short stories, and essays. The editors also offered advice to the magazine’s young readers, encouraging them to assert their rights as individuals, as well as the rights of their race in general. Encouraged by a favorable response to this effort, Lanusse later collected eighty-seven poems in French by seventeen different “men of color,” all natives of New Orleans. The anthology was called Les Cenelles (the holly berries) and appeared in 1845.