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.

What’s important to know?

1. The New Black: As a new generation of creatives gathered in Harlem, New York, they articulated a more aggressive and powerful view of Black agency and rights in American society and shared this through their prolific artistic expressions.

2. Art in Action: Some of the literary, artistic, and musical greats coming out of the Harlem Renaissance are listed below for further exploration.

1: The New Black

African American art, literature, music, and performance grew as they moved North and West, united to discuss, create, and develop ideas for their future in the United States. Termed the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke’s The New Negro formed the initial anthology introducing their work and the new mindset behind this work to the wider world.

Scholar Elizabeth McHenry (2021) wrote about the significance of this work in the context of the early twentieth-century. White people expected (and worked toward) Black failure and so success was often a contested realm. As McHenry wrote of the system of success established by White culture, Black success was often not recognized as such because of their “failure to participate in a system of valuation that is predicated on exploitation and conformity” (p. 6).

Students

Listen to jazz artists Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong playing “Umbrella Man.”

Despite being excluded and blocked from participation in main stream literary and artistic venues, the success of the Harlem Renaissance then “must be seen as a remarkable historical record of the road maps of their rejection of this positioning” (p. 5).

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).

2: Art in Action

Some of the more well known works by Black creatives in the Harlem 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, Dizzy Gillespie

• Blues Singer: Bessie Smith

Students

Want to learn more? Watch the video below on the Harlem Renaissance.

Your Turn

Why does the Harlem Renaissance occur when it does? What did it represent in the African American communities?