FOLDERS MAGAZINE - Harlem Renaissance

Perceived as one of three best clubs in Harlem featuring artists such as Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Ellington and many others. The cotton club has a jazzy ambience as described by performance and club customers whom were surprisingly; mostly White. The performers dressed very snappily, with fancy suits and Zoots; while they performed. If you are interested in seeing, an orchestra of jazz bands mixed with poetry, then Cotton Club is the place for you.

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington is an American composer, pianist, and bandleader of a jazz orchestra, and one of the most important performer for the Cotton Club.

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne is an African American singer, dancer, actress, and civil rights activist. Horne's has appeared in film, television, theater, and is currently one of the Cotton clubs most famous performer.

Men, women, and children fashion styles vary differently in Harlem. The men typically wear suits tailored to fit the individual, formal suits, suits with tails on the back of the suit jacket, reminiscent of those seen on tuxedos, and the most popular style of them all the Zoot suits. Zoot suits are known by their long suit jackets and baggy-fitting pants. These suits were often complemented by a matching hat with a feather. Women typically wear ball gowns, cocktail dresses with added sparkling rhinestones and other decorations, complemented with silk gloves and high-heeled shoes. Women fashion is design to express elegance, gracefulness, and flamboyancy. The children typically wear a smaller version of what there parents wear based on what gender they're and what gender the parent is in comparison to them.

Harlem city conceived in 1658 in the northern section of the New York City borough of Manhattan became a major African American residential, cultural and business center. A regular has become a intellectual and artistically driven city for African Americans who have been wrongfully oppressed their entire life. Following the Civil War, poor Jews and poor Italians were the predominant demographic in Harlem. African-American residents began to arrive in large numbers in 1905 as part of the Great Migration. In the 1920s and 1930s, Central and West Harlem were the focus of the Harlem Renaissance, an outpouring of artistic work without control in the American black community.

Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay was a Jamaican writer and poet, and a seminal figure for the Harlem Renaissance. In If we must die There are themes of honor and courage in warfare. The speaker of the poem (Claude McKay) is letting those fighting know that their deaths in this battle will be ones of honor. They must not be afraid, but stand strong to die with dignity. Finally, there is the theme of violence in society. Overall the poem is a great uplifter.

James Mercer Langston Hughes is an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the then new literary art form called jazz poetry.
Hughes wrote "I, Too" from the perspective of an African American man, either a slave, a free man in the Jim Crow South, or even a domestic servant. The lack of a concrete identity or historical context does not change the poem’s message; in fact, it makes it more universal. Hughes describes in the poem reflects a common experience for many African Americans during his time.