Poetry and Music of the Harlem Renaissance and Today

This curriculum unit, intended for a ninth- or tenth-grade English class, will focus on the poetry and music of the Harlem Renaissance. In this unit, my students and I will look at poetry by Harlem Renaissance writers (e.g., Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Gwendolyn Bennett), and some younger poets (e.g., Margaret Walker), as expressions of a cultural movement whose goals are articulated in documents like Alain Locke’s “The New Negro” (1925). We will also look at poetry by contemporary African-American activist writers such as June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde and Essex Hemphill, comparing these writers’ goals and themes to those of the Harlem Renaissance-era poets. Similarly, my students and I will look at the common (and sometimes different) goals and topics of Harlem Renaissance-era blues and current rap music, both of which assertively “tell it like it is” and sometimes articulate social protest.