Beginning about 1916, a large number of African Americans moved from the rural American South and settled in the urban North and West. One of the communities where African Americans settled during this Great Migration was Harlem, in New York, New York.
After World War I Harlem became a thriving center of African American culture. The Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918–37) was the most influential movement in African American literary history. The movement also included musical, theatrical, and visual arts.
The Harlem Renaissance was unusual among literary and artistic movements for its close relationship to civil rights and reform organizations. During this time Black artists began to take control of how Black culture was being represented.
Sociologist, activist, editor, and author W.E.B Du Bois’s book The Souls of Black Folk (1903) had a profound effect on an entire generation that formed the core of the Harlem Renaissance. Booker T. Washington had urged Blacks to accept discrimination for the time being and elevate themselves through hard work and economic gain, thus winning the respect of whites. Du Bois argued that Washington’s strategy, rather than freeing Blacks from oppression, would serve only to perpetuate it.
The Harlem Renaissance was also greatly inspired by African American journals that published short pieces by promising writers. These journals included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’sThe Crisis and the National Urban League’s Opportunity.
Claude McKay is generally considered the first major poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His militant poem “If We Must Die” (1919) is one of the most-quoted works of African American literature of this time period.
The movement was popularized by African American philosopher Alain Locke in The New Negro (1925), an anthology of fiction, poetry, drama, and essays.
Principal contributors to the Harlem Renaissance included not only well-established literary figures, such as Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, but also new young writers, such as Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes.
Outside of literature, artists such as Henry Ossawa Tanner and Aaron Douglas and performers Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and Ethel Waters also made their mark. Photographer James VanDerZee’s portraits become a visual chronicle of the Harlem Renaissance.
Black music provided the pulse of the Harlem Renaissance and of the Jazz Age. The emergence of the race records industry brought the blues to audiences previously unfamiliar with the form. Blues singers such as Alberta Hunter, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rainey became famous.
Out of the blues came jazz, migrating to Northern urban centers, such as Chicago, Illinois, and New York, New York, during and after World War I. Great musicians, such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, emerged. The popularity of jazz among whites helped bring attention to the Harlem Renaissance.
The Harlem Renaissance continued into the 1930s. Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is widely regarded as one of the signal achievements of the Harlem Renaissance. Other writers, such as Arna Bontemps, also produced important works.
