Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of African-American literature, music, theatre, art and political thought centred on the Harlem district of New York in the 1920s and 1930s. Contemporaries called it the "New Negro Movement", after a 1925 anthology edited by the philosopher Alain Locke. It changed how Black Americans saw themselves and how the wider United States saw them, and it fed directly into later struggles for civil rights.

Harlem had been built in the 19th century as a prosperous white suburb, but by the early 1900s it was becoming a Black neighbourhood; in 1910 African-American estate agents and a church group bought up a large block around 135th Street. The Great Migration then brought hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners to Northern cities, escaping Jim Crow segregation and drawn by industrial jobs created during World War I, when European immigration had all but stopped. Harlem received more of them than anywhere else, along with many migrants from the Caribbean. Black veterans returned from the war to a hostile country, and the race riots of the "Red Summer" of 1919 sharpened a new mood of defiance.

The movement's first stirrings came in the late 1910s. In 1917 Hubert Harrison founded the Liberty League and its newspaper, The Voice, and plays by Ridgely Torrence put Black actors on stage in serious roles, free of minstrel stereotypes. In 1919 the Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay published "If We Must Die", a sonnet read as a call to resist racist violence. In 1921 the musical Shuffle Along, written, produced and performed by African Americans, brought jazz to Broadway and ran for 504 performances.

The period's high point is usually dated from 1924, when the journal Opportunity held a party at which Black writers met white publishers, to the stock-market crash of 1929. Locke's anthology The New Negro appeared in 1925, featuring Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, McKay and others. Hughes developed jazz poetry in works such as "The Weary Blues", and in his 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" argued that Black artists should express themselves freely, whatever any audience thought. Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, James Weldon Johnson and Eric Walrond also became nationally known, while the magazines The Crisis and Opportunity published and promoted new writers.

Jazz and blues were at the movement's heart. Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Fats Waller and Ethel Waters were among the leading performers of the era, and pianists developed the Harlem stride style. Many famous venues, including the Cotton Club, admitted only white customers even though their stars were Black. The painter Aaron Douglas combined African, Egyptian and modernist forms, and the sculptor Augusta Savage opened a free art school in 1932. Blues singers such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Gladys Bentley openly explored same-sex love in their songs and stage personas.

The movement was never unified. W. E. B. Du Bois promoted an educated elite he called the "talented tenth", while Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement offered a different kind of racial pride. Du Bois criticised McKay's novel Home to Harlem (1928) for pandering to white readers, and Hubert Harrison argued that the very idea of a "renaissance" overlooked decades of earlier Black writing. Much of the work depended on white patrons and publishers. The Great Depression cut off money and opportunity, and the movement faded in the 1930s.

Its influence spread beyond Harlem to Black communities in other cities of the Northeast and Midwest, and to French-speaking Black writers from Africa and the Caribbean living in Paris. The Harlem Renaissance opened mainstream publishing to Black authors, placed the Black experience at the centre of American culture, and helped lay the foundations of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Our 1920 and 1930 maps show the United States during the years of the Harlem Renaissance.