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Georgia Douglas Johnson was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1880. She went to college and became an assistant principle in Atlanta up until she moved to Washington, D.C. in 1910. She lived there with her husband up until his death in 1925. Johnson's house became a place for authors to join together and do their work. Her first poems started being published in 1916 in The Crisis. Georgia had a weekly column that she would write titled "Homely Philosophy" from 1916 up until 1932. In this time Georgia had also written multiple plays including Blue Blood and Plumes. During the 1920's she often traveled and gave poetry readings of her work.
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Jean Toomer was born in 1894 in Washington, D.C. When Jean was younger he refused to be classified by his race which translated into his work in literature. Jean often wrote about how African Americans have been portrayed in America. In 1922, Toomer moved to Sparta, Georgia where he was a school principle. Here is where he would start writing about African American experience. Here he also published his most infamous work, "Cane" which was a book involving a variety of short stories and poems. He has been known as one of the most influential writes of the Harlem Renaissance from his work in Cane. However, after writing Cane, Toomer was not really published all that much and his career ended dying. He continued to write up until 1950 but nothing being as well known as Cane.
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Angelina Weld Grimke was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1880. Angelina has a white mother and black father. Her mother's family was well known in Boston and her father was born into a family of slaves. Grimke was originally a teacher and moved to Washington D.C. After moving her writing career involving poetry, drama and short stories started to become popular. In 1916 she wrote a play titled "Rachel" that was produced by the NAACP. In the 1920's during the Harlem Renaissance is where she got most of her fame from through her poems. Her poems were published in The New Negro, Negro Poets and their Poems, and Caroling Dust. At the end of the 1920's she retired from teaching and took care of her father who was sick. Once her father had fallen ill she stopped writing poetry.
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Known as one of the most representative voices of the Harlem Renaissance, Countee was born in 1903 in Louisville, Kentucky. He started writing poetry at the age of fourteen. Cullen went to New York University and began being published in The Crisis magazine, a magazine in which we have focused heavily on in class. In 1925 he graduated college and published some of his most notable work such as the poem "Ballad of the Brown Girl" and the collection of poems book title "Color". In Cullen's book it features a variety of over seventy poems.
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Born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri. He moved around for a while when he was younger. One of his destinations, Lincoln, Illinois is where his writing and love for poetry was born. In 1926 his first book of Poems was published starting off his career. Hughes said he took influence from poets such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. Langston became one of the biggest if not the biggest poet and writer of the Harlem Renaissance. He continued to produce work up until his complications with cancer that ultimately was the end for him in 1967. The poem I chose, Mother to son tells a story of a mother talking to her son about her life, and how she has been trying to be successful and combat racism at the same time. Langston Hughes describes people who are white as climbing up a crystal stair, the path to success is a lot easier for them. However, the mother in Hughes' poem, her road to success has had splinters, darkness, tacks in it, and the boards are torn up. To which compares its self with the nice and beautiful crystal stair, showing a common goal of getting up the stairs but the stairs on the way there are very different.
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One of Ma Rainey's very popular songs during the 1920's.
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Langston Hughes was a very popular poet during the Harlem Renaissance. This exact poem describes "The Blues" and the emotions regarding what was around it.
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