The beginning of the concept of cool has been traced, particularly by Robert Farris

Thompson in An Aesthetic of the Cool, to origins in Africa. Africa, the familiar place that it is,
has been the origin for many a thing considered hip, from the word hepi (to see) or hipi (to
open ones eyes). Africas languages and cultural impact broadens the scope of what we, as
Americans, consider hip. The cool, which segues to hip, trails across 36 African languages, back
to a 15
th
century king in Benin. With this cool, the interplay of the new wave of musician and
dancers signals stability in the social order and composure in the individualthe essence of cool.
This emergence of a new brand of pop culture consisted of channels of art and commerce that
made race an entity that could be ignored. If this is the case, is it presumptuous to pose the
question of whether or not the Harlem Renaissance was a cry for attention from the white
mainstream? Was it a welcome avenue to expression of Black culture and Black life?
The origins of hip lie in the structure of slavery in America. The enslaved were worked to
the bone in the plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean, only to be replaced by others. African
cultures and languages have survived since then to this day. In North America, most farms
required little to no slaves. Poor whites got the worst of the dirty work. Since hip flourishes
during periods of technological and economic change, there are new freedoms and anxieties. The
story of Americas cool pop culture begins with Black innovators, as does much of everything
else that American culture is. Black innovators draw on their African roots to invent tap, jazz,
hip-hop, the Charleston and more; white performers hijack these concepts and make it more
appropriate or aesthetically valuable to white audiences. There was a vast change, however, at
the turn of the century, particularly for Black Americans. 90 percent of Black Americans lived in
the South, which their past lives. The first decades of the 20
th
century produced the prototypes of
modern hip when Black migrants began to flee the South, thus choosing and cementing their
meaning in the industrial nation, abundant with technological changes. Black migrants took their
roots and created a new identity; their arrival brought the juxtaposition of hip: urban and rural,
poverty and (the hopes of) high life, and more. Black Americans were bringing their sense of
culture to Detroit, New York City and Pennsylvania. Most notably, Harlem, a large
neighborhood in Manhattan, was the site of the booming Harlem Renaissance: an essentially
blossoming of African American culture in the 1920s and the 1930s. Within Manhattan, Black
Americans continued to migrate further north, ending in Harlem. Harlem was one of many
burgeoning hot spots for the Black American middle class that pushed towards racial equality in
the face of a misled, color-blind world. Many of the best advocates, artists, musicians,
intellectuals and entrepreneurs came out of this culturally rich time period. Harlem, teeming with
the figures of Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B DuBois and
Marcus Garvey, became the Black Mecca. Civil rights activists and artists and writers joined
forces to work for said rights and equality.
Creative expression during the Harlem Renaissance was one of the few avenues available
to Black Americans. This movement transformed social disillusionment to race pride. One of
the most known figures of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, arrived on the Harlem hip
scene in September 1921, as he noted, into a social swirl that was unknown to him prior. He
recalls in his autobiography that the time of the booming Harlem Renaissance was the period
when the Negro was in vogue. Hughes, Missouri-born, began writing poetry in Lincoln, Ill.,
where he moved to live with his mother and stepfather. An author of novels, short stories and
plays in addition to poetry, he colorfully portrayed Black life in American from the 1920s to the
1960s. Another luminary author of the time was Zora Neale Hurston, known for her novel Their
Eyes Were Watching God. Her work mostly teemed with colorful, vivid language with an
emphasis on nature; within that nature were tales of intra-racial conflict, particularly with the
self. Her work, as opposed to her counterpart Richard Wright, focus on the fundamentals of
Black life, veering away from the violence and constant interracial conflict that Wright spoke of,
which, in her eyes, was nothing but a reinforcement of the myth of the big, Black brute. Tracing
a legacy of self-invention was the essence of Hurstons work. Both Hurston and Hughes saw
richness in the Harlem neighborhoods idioms.
Many literary figures, both Black and white, attended what would be considered the
formal inauguration of the Harlem Renaissance: a dinner symposium organized by Charles S.
Johnson on March 21, 1924. The occasion was the publication of Jessie Fausets first novel
There Is Confusion, one of a handful of novels by Black authors that had been published at the
turn of the century. NAACP leaders, Urban League leaders and the literary figures mixed with
white plutocrats. It was contended that politics should not be the field on which African
Americans fight for equality, but art and literature. As spoken by author Countee Cullen, What
American literature decidedly needs at this moment is color, music, gusto, the free expression of
gay or desperate moods. This is the conjoining of Black artists and leaders maneuvering
lingering racial boundaries set by white benefactors, sympathizers and imitators to create
publicity for Black artists and white money. However, this idea that white supremacy could be
counteracted and eliminated through the spread of culture was mocked, even by Langston
Hughes, a pioneer himself.
In speaking of hip and the Harlem Renaissance, it is important to not forget the impact of
jazz music and its culture. Jazz, like blues, was the sound of sin; spirituals were more the norm
of the conservative African American household. However, the booming record business called
for marketable personalities, especially if color was not a barrier (even though racism was still
alive and well). Louis Armstrong became the first dominant soloist of jazz music as a gifted
cornetist and trumpeter. In this age, performers like Armstrong and even Jelly Roll Morton were
cutting paychecks larger than life, which enabled them to live as so. This golden age of jazz
reflected the exuberance of Americas new technology and money. However, this pull for white
money drew criticism to the movement of the Harlem Renaissance. Charlotte Mason, a white
patron, felt that the movement itself was running too white for her tastes. In the attempt to
banish white supremacy and claim a new racial consciousness, the most influential of figures
were assimilating in order to profit from living up to white expectations. Running too
civilized, the music industry made these demands of both blues musicians and jazz musicians,
imposing its own agenda in which race was a marketplace category: the determining factor of
buying or not buying a record and not one of historical forces, although buying or not buying a
record on the basis of race has much to do with lingering historical forces in itself. Jazz was no
longer pleasure music, but a business instead.
At the peak of the 1920s, there was hip awareness on both sides of the color spectrum.
With Black migration and the development of intellectuals, leaders, artists, musicians and writers
pulling for white money, there was a nice divide that made room for opportunities of
advancement. The criticism of this movement was not, however, without reason. The alleged
assimilation of Black work into white culture was apparent through the playing of musicians to
exclusively white audiences, just as Duke Ellington had done at Harlems Cotton Club. More
successful entertainers appealed to the mainstream and began to form to areas considered
inaccessible to African Americans, particularly downtown Harlem. In terms of literature, an
accomplishment of the Renaissance was recognition from mainstream and white publishing
houses, periodicals and magazines, especially of The Crisis and Opportunity, both literary
publications by the NAACP and the National Urban League, respectively.
In the discourse of hip, the Harlem Renaissance and assimilation, it is important to pose
the question of what exactly makes things hip. The origins, many of which trace back to
Africa, have already been discussed and established, but what characteristics enable purveyors of
culture to find it hip? As William S. Borroughs said, revolution in America begins in books
and music. White hipsters use their interest in black culture to claim high moral ground, while
giving nothing backa classical example of white (liberal) guilt. Hip permeates the mainstream
in every facet of life: language, music, literature, sex, fashion, ego and commerce. Hip is
rebellion; if it is, it should want something. It does: Americas other appetite for autonomy.
Hip is an equalizer available to outsiders and to insiders. Hip keeps its meaning limber. Hip
requires an audience, an acknowledgement, ironically enough. In this crossover between Black
assimilation and white hijacking, hip would then need a promoter, if it required an audience. A
figure of white expectation was clearly demonstrated in Carl Van Vechten. Carl Van Vechten
was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the
literary executor of Gertrude Stein. He was also a former music critic for the New York Times.
He met the century with open eyes and ears. He described his interest in African American as
almost an addiction and commissioned a caricature of himself as a black man. He was the
circuits most tireless promoter on behalf of Harlem artists. His novel Nigger Heaven, a
reference to the segregated balconies in theatres, offended many black people, leading to him
being banned from Smalls Paradise and denounced by the African American press. As a figure
of hip, he struck comparable poses of cool among chaos. The essence of the Harlem Renaissance
was racial consciousness, but with the efforts of Van Vechten and those like him, ethnicity was
no longer destiny; the figures of this age sampled what they knew and what was given to them,
black and white, and turned it around to make it as hip as possible, coming from their shared
roots.
The concept of assimilation gives introduction to W.E.B. DuBois idea of the Talented
Tenth, or a tenth of the Black population that would lead the way to equality, thus distancing
themselves from the undignified examples of the lower class or even the farm. Even Langston
Hughes had a dim perspective on the idea of dominating white supremacy by Black people
through the use of culture. In his short story collection The Ways of White Folk, he expressed that
Ma ma and pa were both artists and the white folks ran them out of town for being dressed up
in Alabama Every other artist in the worlds a Jew, and folks still hate them. A figure of
assimilation during the Harlem Renaissance is the presence of the New Negro, both a character
and term popularized during this time period by Alain LeRoy Locke, the acknowledged Dean
and philosophical architect of the Harlem Renaissance. The New Negroes of the Harlem
Renaissance were much like the DuBois talented tenth; the poets, novelists, Blues and jazz
singers that created their art from their roots and into white expectations. The Harlem
Renaissance regenerated the center of American culture, as opposed to the Beat movement which
romanticized the Black life that so many of the Renaissance spoke of at the margins, liberated.
The desire, the need to assimilate in the first place originates from the fear of marginalization; in
this case, that fear had just cause, considering slavery of centuries prior.
It is too far of a cry to say that the Harlem Renaissance is the embodiment of the hip that
requires and audience and that wants unspoken recognition, but it is not a stretch to say that
assimilation was not a part of said cultural phenomenon, which, I believe, was at its very essence
aside from racial consciousness. The act of assimilation is not the sole fault of Black leaders,
entrepreneurs and entertainers either, but the family is also the burden on the shoulders off the
white mainstream, seamlessly drawing Black people, this time not against their will, into the
vision of white money, money which allowed some of them, like Armstrong and Morton, to live
the high life. This juxtaposition of the high life dream and the reality of poverty could be
considered a driving force for the assimilation of those in the Harlem Renaissance.