5.6 Other Voices of the Harlem Renaissance

Notes

Many writers contributed to the movement.

• Claude McKay's sonnet "If We Must Die" (1919) responds to racial violence with a call to fight back with dignity and courage rather than die "like hogs."
• Countee Cullen blended traditional forms such as sonnets with themes of race and identity.
• Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist and folklorist. In her 1937 novel a Black woman in the South searches for her own voice and independence across three marriages; the book celebrates dialect, storytelling and folk wisdom.
• Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) mixed poetry and prose about Black life in the South and North.
• Worked example: McKay used a traditional European form (the sonnet) to express a modern, defiant message, showing how writers reshaped older forms.