ARCHIVE: Celebrate Black History and 100 Years of the Harlem Renaissance This Friday, February 21st

*This event has now passed*

Calling all members of the Brooklyn Friends School community: the school’s celebration of Black History Month, this year commemorating the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance, is this Friday, February 21st, and all are warmly welcome.

Presented by Brooklyn Friends and Families, this culminating event of a month of Black History Month programming will kick off with workshops for students from 3:30pm to 5:30pm

Sign Up for Workshops Now

Make sure to stop in the Pearl Street lobby for Black History Month 2020 commemorative t-shirts and the cafeteria for a bake sale. Both of these sales benefit the Brooklyn Friends Fund, the school’s annual giving campaign. We need sweet treats for the bake sale.

Sign up to donate to the bake sale here.

Following the enriching and fun workshops, the celebration continues with a community dinner in the cafeteria (5:30pm), followed by a celebratory Meeting House program (6:30pm). The evening will conclude with a beloved BFS tradition, a Pearl Street Lobby dance party. All programming and events are complimentary for the BFS community. We will see you on Friday!

About the Harlem Renaissance

The roaring 20s! The Great Migration drew to Harlem some of the greatest minds and brightest talents of the day, an astonishing array of African American artists and scholars. Between the end of World War I in 1918 and the mid-1930s, they produced one of the most significant eras of cultural expression in the nation’s history—the Harlem Renaissance. This cultural explosion also occurred in Cleveland, Los Angeles and many cities shaped by the great migration. The Harlem Renaissance encompassed activism and scholarship,  poetry and prose, painting and sculpture, jazz and swing, opera and dance.

Among the Renaissance’s most significant contributors were intellectuals W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Cyril Briggs, and Walter Francis White; electrifying performers Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson; writers and poets Zora Neale Hurston, Effie Lee Newsome, Countee Cullen; visual artists Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage; and an extraordinary list of legendary musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ivie Anderson, Josephine Baker, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and countless others.

*Please note that the Harlem Renaissance Multimedia Walking Tour is moved to Saturday, February 22nd. The Black History Month Celebration Committee has determined that Presidents Day weekend is a conflict for many families, and we would like to encourage more families to register and attend. Therefore, please join us next Saturday, February 22nd. Details and registration here.