I Too Sing America

Summary

Wil Haygood’s I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100 arrives as both a centennial celebration and a serious cultural reckoning. Published in 2018 by Andrews McMeel Publishing, the book surveys the full arc of the Harlem Renaissance, from its earliest stirrings in the 1910s through its peak vitality in the 1920s and into its long cultural afterlife. Haygood, a seasoned journalist and biographer known for his work on figures like Sammy Davis Jr. and Thurgood Marshall, brings a storyteller’s instinct to what could easily become a dry academic survey. The result is a visually rich, narratively propulsive history that makes the case, convincingly, that the Harlem Renaissance was not a discrete cultural episode but a seismic transformation that altered American identity at its foundation.

The book covers writers, visual artists, musicians, political thinkers, and social architects. It moves between intimate portraits and sweeping cultural analysis without losing coherence. Haygood writes for a general audience without condescending to it, and the book earns its place as both an accessible entry point for newcomers and a substantive contribution for readers already familiar with the period.

The Central Story

Haygood organizes the book around a core argument: that the Harlem Renaissance was an act of collective self-definition conducted in public, against resistance, and with deliberate artistic ambition. This was not simply a flowering of talent that happened to occur in one neighborhood. It was a coordinated cultural insurgency. Black writers, painters, sculptors, jazz musicians, and political essayists recognized that they were building something unprecedented, and they built it with full awareness of the stakes.

The figures Haygood profiles read like a roster of the 20th century’s most consequential voices: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Jacob Lawrence, Duke Ellington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and dozens of others. What distinguishes Haygood’s treatment is his attention to the tensions among these figures. The Harlem Renaissance was not a unified movement with a single program. It contained sharp disagreements about assimilation, about the relationship between art and politics, about who spoke for Black America and on what authority. Du Bois and Garvey represented irreconcilable visions. Hughes and Hurston admired each other deeply and then had a catastrophic falling out. These conflicts give the book its dramatic texture and its intellectual honesty.

Haygood also places the Renaissance in its full historical context. The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of Black Americans north, transforming cities and creating the conditions for a new kind of cultural institution: the Harlem nightclub, the Black-owned publishing house, the literary salon. The book traces how geography and migration created the critical mass that made the Renaissance possible, and how the same forces that enabled it, including white patronage and commercial interest, also constrained and complicated it.

Archival Method

Haygood works with a deep archive. The book draws on letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, magazine profiles, and published interviews to reconstruct the interior lives of its subjects. He has a particular gift for the telling detail: a letter Hughes wrote in frustration, a photograph that captures a specific social dynamic, a review that reveals how white critics misread Black art. These micro-historical moments accumulate into something larger than any single anecdote.

The book’s visual component deserves special attention. Andrews McMeel produced a handsomely illustrated volume, and Haygood’s engagement with the visual art of the period is not decorative. He treats paintings and photographs as primary documents, reading them for what they reveal about aspiration, self-representation, and the politics of image-making. Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series receives extended analysis. Aaron Douglas’s murals get serious attention. This integration of visual and textual evidence makes the book’s argument more persuasive and more complete.

Haygood does not treat his sources uncritically. He acknowledges the limitations of the archive, the voices that got recorded and the ones that did not, the figures who became famous and those who remained obscure despite comparable talent. This archival humility elevates the book above simple celebration.

Historical Significance

The centennial frame gives Haygood license to assess the Renaissance’s long-term impact, and he uses it well. The book argues that the Harlem Renaissance created the template for how Black cultural production would function in America for the rest of the 20th century. The strategies developed in Harlem in the 1920s, building alternative institutions, cultivating white allies while maintaining artistic autonomy, using culture as a form of political argument, would be adapted and refined by every subsequent generation of Black artists and intellectuals.

Haygood also examines the Renaissance’s complicated legacy within the Black community itself. The movement had its critics at the time, writers and thinkers who felt it was too focused on elite aesthetics, too dependent on white patronage, insufficiently attentive to the material conditions of working-class Black Americans. These critiques did not disappear. They resurfaced in the debates of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and continue in contemporary discussions about representation and authenticity in Black cultural production. Haygood does not resolve these debates, but he maps them clearly.

The book’s centennial timing also allows Haygood to note the ways in which the Renaissance’s concerns remain urgently contemporary. Questions about who controls the representation of Black life, about the relationship between Black art and white commercial institutions, about the tension between assimilation and separatism, have not been settled. They have only taken new forms. This continuity gives the book a resonance that extends well beyond historical interest.

Style and Voice

Haygood writes with a journalist’s respect for concrete detail and a biographer’s sensitivity to character. His prose is clean and direct. He avoids academic jargon without sacrificing analytical precision. When he writes about Hughes’s poetry or Ellington’s compositions, he does so with the authority of someone who has spent real time with the work, not just its reception history.

The book’s pacing is strong. Haygood knows when to slow down for close analysis and when to accelerate through transitional material. The chapters devoted to individual figures have a biographical intimacy that makes even familiar names feel newly vivid. The chapters that pull back for broader cultural argument sustain the narrative momentum rather than interrupting it.

One of the book’s most distinctive qualities is its emotional register. Haygood writes with evident admiration for his subjects, but the admiration never tips into hagiography. He is willing to note failures, compromises, and self-contradictions. This honesty makes the book’s celebratory passages more credible. When Haygood calls the Harlem Renaissance one of the great cultural achievements in American history, the claim lands with the weight of demonstrated evidence behind it.

Verdict

I Too Sing America is an outstanding centennial history that does full justice to its subject. Haygood synthesizes an enormous body of material with clarity and grace, producing a book that is at once historically rigorous and compulsively readable. It belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in American culture, African American history, or the relationship between art and political life. This is essential reading, and it earns its five stars without qualification.

Rating: 5.0 / 5.0

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Harlem Renaissance?
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City roughly between 1910 and 1940. It produced a flowering of Black literature, visual art, music, and political thought that transformed American culture and established new foundations for Black self-representation.

Who is Wil Haygood?
Wil Haygood is an American journalist and biographer best known for his biographies of Sammy Davis Jr. (In Black and White) and Thurgood Marshall (Showdown). His Washington Post article about White House butler Eugene Allen became the basis for the film Lee Daniels’ The Butler.

Is this book suitable for readers new to the subject?
Yes. Haygood writes for a general audience and provides enough historical context that readers without prior knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance can follow the argument fully. Specialists will also find substantive material here, but accessibility is a genuine strength of the book.

How does the book handle the tensions within the Harlem Renaissance?
Haygood gives serious attention to the movement’s internal disagreements, including the famous rift between Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and the political conflict between W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. He presents these tensions as evidence of the movement’s vitality rather than failures to be minimized.

What role does visual art play in the book?
Visual art is central to Haygood’s analysis. The book is illustrated and treats paintings, photographs, and prints as primary historical documents. Haygood gives extended attention to figures like Jacob Lawrence and Aaron Douglas, reading their work as political and cultural argument.

Does the book connect the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary issues?
Yes. The centennial frame allows Haygood to trace the Renaissance’s influence forward through the Black Arts Movement and into contemporary debates about representation, institutional access, and cultural autonomy. The book makes a strong case for the movement’s ongoing relevance.

How does Haygood treat white patronage of the Renaissance?
Haygood addresses the complicated role of white patrons, publishers, and audiences honestly. He acknowledges both the material support these relationships provided and the constraints and compromises they imposed on Black artists. He does not sentimentalize or simply condemn these dynamics.

What other books complement this one?
Readers interested in going deeper might explore David Levering Lewis’s two-volume biography W.E.B. Du Bois, Valerie Boyd’s biography of Zora Neale Hurston Wrapped in Rainbows, or Arnold Rampersad’s two-volume biography of Langston Hughes. For visual art, Sharon Patton’s African-American Art provides useful context.