The 2017 Paul Robeson Theatre Festival: Harlem To Central Avenue at The Los Angeles Theatre Center

Beginning in 1917, the Harlem Renaissance was the flowering of Black performing, literary and visual arts that signaled the birth of the New Negro Movement, an attempt by African Americans in the arts to define their own identity free of historic stereotypes. In the words of novelist and poet Langston Hughes, "We younger artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves." In the decades that followed, the New Negro Movement made its way west from Harlem to California, and Los Angeles' Central Avenue became the center of African-American culture in this city. The 2017 Paul Robeson Theatre Festival will celebrate the Harlem Renaissance and the impact that it ultimately had on Black culture and the arts in Los Angeles.