1920: The Harlem Renaissance
Big Idea
As a result of the Great Migration and the changes that World War I brought to America, African American writers, poets, singers, and artists converged upon New York City with a different attitude toward life and their relationship to their country. What resulted was a great outpouring of artistic expression and Black pride.
Art in Action
African American artistic, literary, musical, and dramatic outpouring emerged as African Americans moved North and West, came together, and argued, created, and formed ideas about what the future of the African Americans in the United States should be. Termed the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke’s The New Negro formed the initial anthology introducing their work to the wider world.
His anthology represented a newly organized and empowered group of intellectuals who as historian Jonathan Scott Holloway (1995) noted, “believed they had proven their worthiness and deserved their place at the table. They no longer had to wait passively for white benefaction to fear their own ‘blackness.’ Compared to their predecessors, the New Negroes were politically aggressive, culturally articulate, and urbane” (p. 60).
Some of the more well known works by Black participants in this Renaissance are listed below:
Writers:
Zora Neale Hurston
Langston Hughes
Claude McKay
Nella Larsen
Countee Cullen
Jean Toomer
Jessie Fauset
Aaron Douglas
Dancer: Josephine Baker
Political activist: Marcus Garvey
Jazz composer: Duke Ellington
Blueswoman: Bessie Smith
Students
Want to learn more? Watch the video below on the Harlem Renaissance.
Video from Crash Course African History on the Harlem Renaissance.
Your Turn
Why does the Harlem Renaissance occur when it does? What did it represent in the African American communities?
-
Explore “The New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance” from the National Museum of African and African American History.
Explore “Uncovering America” from the National Gallery of Art.
Poetry from The Poetry Foundation from the Harlem Renaissance.
The Harlem Renaissance from The MET
-
National Gallery of Art teaching resources.
PBS: Lesson Plans
Classroom materials from the Library of Congress.
Learning for Justice: The Harlem Renaissance.
Classroom activities from The Kennedy Center. (Grades 9-12)
-
View this bust at the Saint Louis Art Museum from August Savage, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.
Influential African American writers from Missouri.
Read about Josephine Baker who is associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and was born in St. Louis.
-
Cooks, B. R. (2011). “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968.” Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum. University of Massachusetts Press.
Jackson, L. P. (2011). The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton University Press.