The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music,

dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics, and scholarship centered in Harlem,
Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s.At the time, it was known as the
"New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain
Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across
the urban areas in the Northeastern United States and the Midwestern United States
affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the
Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow
Deep South,[2as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who
migrated north.

Mainstream recognition of cultural developments and idea of New Negro

Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood, many francophone black writers from
African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris, France, were also influenced by the
movement.Harlem had also seen significant Black immigration from British, French and
other colonies in the Caribbean. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James
Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, took place between 1924—when
Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white
publishers were in attendance—and 1929, the year of the stock-market crash and the
beginning of the Great Depression. The Harlem Renaissance is considered to have been a
rebirth of the African-American arts, and many of it ideas and forms influenced society and
thought in the following decades.

Background
During the early portion of the 20th century, Harlem was a destination for migrants from
around the country, attracting both people from the South seeking work and an educated
class who made the area a center of culture, as well as a growing "Negro" middle class.
These people were looking for a fresh start in life and this was a good place to go. The
district had originally been developed in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for the
white middle and upper middle classes; its affluent beginnings led to the development of
stately houses, grand avenues, and world-class amenities such as the Polo Grounds and the
Harlem Opera House. During the enormous influx of European immigrants in the late 19th
century, the once exclusive district was abandoned by the white middle class, who moved
farther north.

Harlem became an African-American neighborhood in the early 1900s. In 1910, a large

block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various African-American realtors
and a church group. Many more African Americans arrived during the First World War. Due
to the war, the migration of laborers from Europe virtually ceased, while the war effort
resulted in a massive demand for unskilled industrial labor. The Great Migration brought
hundreds of thousands of African Americans to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit,
Washington, D.C., and New York.

Despite the increasing popularity of Negro culture, virulent white racism, often by more
recent ethnic immigrants, continued to affect African-American communities, even in the
North.After the end of World War I, many African-American soldiers—who fought in
segregated units such as the Harlem Hellfighters—came home to a nation whose citizens
often did not respect their accomplishments.Race riots and other civil uprisings occurred
throughout the United States during the Red Summer of 1919, reflecting economic
competition over jobs and housing in many cities, as well as tensions over social territories.

Mainstream recognition of Harlem culture

The first stage of the Harlem Renaissance started in the late 1910s. In 1917, the premiere of
Granny Maumee, The Rider of Dreams, and Simon the Cyrenian: Plays for a Negro Theater
took place. These plays, written by white playwright Ridgely Torrence, featured African-
American actors conveying complex human emotions and yearnings. They rejected the
stereotypes of the blackface and minstrel show traditions. In 1917, James Weldon Johnson
called the premieres of these plays "the most important single event in the entire history of
the Negro in the American Theater".

Another landmark came in 1919, when the communist poet Claude McKay published his
militant sonnet "If We Must Die", which introduced a dramatically political dimension to the
themes of African cultural inheritance and modern urban experience featured in his 1917
poems "Invocation" and "Harlem Dancer". Published under the pseudonym Eli Edwards,
these were his first appearance in print in the United States after immigrating from
Jamaica.Although "If We Must Die" never alluded to race, African-American readers heard
its note of defiance in the face of racism and the nationwide race riots and lynchings then
taking place. By the end of the First World War, the fiction of James Weldon Johnson and
the poetry of Claude McKay were describing the reality of contemporary African-American
life in America.

The Harlem Renaissance grew out of the changes that had taken place in the African-
American community since the abolition of slavery, as the expansion of communities in the
North. These accelerated as a consequence of World War I and the great social and cultural
changes in the early 20th-century United States. Industrialization attracted people from rural
areas to cities and gave rise to a new mass culture. Contributing factors leading to the
Harlem Renaissance were the Great Migration of African Americans to Northern cities, which
concentrated ambitious people in places where they could encourage each other, and the
First World War, which had created new industrial work opportunities for tens of thousands
of people. Factors leading to the decline of this era include the Great Depression.

Literature ( Important)

In 1917, Hubert Harrison, "The Father of Harlem Radicalism", founded the Liberty League
and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper, respectively, of the "New
Negro Movement". Harrison's organization and newspaper were political but also
emphasized the arts (his newspaper had "Poetry for the People" and book review sections).
In 1927, in the Pittsburgh Courier, Harrison challenged the notion of the Renaissance. He
argued that the "Negro Literary Renaissance" notion overlooked "the stream of literary and
artistic products which had flowed uninterruptedly from Negro writers from 1850 to the
present," and said the so-called "Renaissance" was largely a white invention.Alternatively, a
writer like the Chicago-based author, Fenton Johnson, who began publishing in the early
1900s, is called a "forerunner" of the Harlem Renaissance, "one of the first negro
revolutionary poets".
Nevertheless, with the Harlem Renaissance came a sense of acceptance for African-
American writers; as Langston Hughes put it, with Harlem came the courage "to express our
individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame".Alain Locke's anthology The New
Negro was considered the cornerstone of this cultural revolution.The anthology featured
several African-American writers and poets, from the well-known, such as Zora Neale
Hurston and communists Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, to the lesser known, like the
poet Anne Spencer.

Many poets of the Harlem Renaissance were inspired to tie threads of African-American
culture into their poems; as a result, jazz poetry was heavily developed during this time. "The
Weary Blues" was a notable jazz poem written by Langston Hughes. Through their works of
literature, black authors were able to give a voice to the African-American identity, and
strived for a community of support and acceptance.

Music

A new way of playing the piano called the Harlem Stride style was created during the Harlem
Renaissance helping to blur the lines between the poor African Americans and socially elite
African Americans. The traditional jazz band was composed primarily of brass instruments
and was considered a symbol of the South, but the piano was considered an instrument of
the wealthy. With this instrumental modification to the existing genre, the wealthy African
Americans now had more access to jazz music. Its popularity soon spread throughout the
country and was consequently at an all-time high.

Innovation and liveliness were important characteristics of performers in the beginnings of

jazz. Jazz performers and composers at the time such as Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Jelly
Roll Morton, Luckey Roberts, James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Andy Razaf, Fats
Waller, Ethel Waters, Adelaide Hall,[36] Florence Mills and bandleaders Duke Ellington,
Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson were extremely talented, skillful, competitive and
inspirational.