The Harlem Renaissance

Black Americans entered the 1920s weighed down by Jim Crow segregation, lynching, and the racial violence of 1919’s “Red Summer.” Harlem Renaissance writers and artists sought to define Black life on their own terms. Alain Locke, one of its leading figures, proclaimed in 1925 that the generation of subservience was over and that African Americans were “achieving something like a spiritual emancipation.”

The movement worked through culture: novels, poetry, short stories, theater, painting, and music. Locke’s anthology The New Negro (1925) gathered writing by men and women, young and old, Black and white — a book, as The American Yawp puts it, of African Americans rather than only about them.

The Renaissance grew up against Jim Crow and racial violence. Even its successes were shaped by segregation: white audiences traveled to Harlem’s Cotton Club and Smalls to hear “real jazz,” but the surrounding Black community was usually excluded from those venues. The New York Times ridiculed jazz as “savage.”

Between 1922 and 1935, Harlem Renaissance writers published some twenty-six novels, ten volumes of poetry, and countless short stories; women such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston wrote nearly a third of the novels. The movement also flourished in theater, art, and music, as jazz rocketed in popularity and musicians like Louis Armstrong developed their art in New York.

As the Renaissance faded, The American Yawp stresses that it was one chapter in a much longer history of Black cultural and intellectual achievement. How far art alone could change a segregated society remained an open question, and other leaders, such as Marcus Garvey and his Harlem-based Universal Negro Improvement Association, offered very different answers.