The Harlem Renaissance

Background

Jim Crow laws, sharecropping and racial terror pushed many African Americans to leave the rural South. In the Great Migration they moved to cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York. Harlem, an area of about three square miles in upper Manhattan, drew nearly 175,000 Black residents and became, in the words of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), the largest concentration of Black people in the world.

A New Negro

From the end of World War I to the mid-1930s, Harlem became a centre of Black publishing, newspapers, theatre, music and nightlife, and a magnet for writers and artists. It is also known as the New Negro Movement. In March 1925 the magazine Survey Graphic published a special issue, "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro", guest-edited by the Howard University philosopher Alain Locke, with illustrations by Winold Reiss. Locke argued that migration to the city was transforming Black life and self-understanding. Later that year he expanded the issue into the anthology The New Negro, widely treated as the movement's manifesto. Contributors included James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Arthur A. Schomburg, and poets such as Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer and Langston Hughes.

Literature, art and music

The movement spanned poetry, fiction, drama, painting, sculpture, jazz, opera and dance. Writers included Hughes, Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston. Visual artists such as Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, Charles Alston and William H. Johnson combined modernist forms with references to African sculpture and folk traditions to portray Black urban life, while painters such as Laura Wheeler Waring took a more classical approach. Musicians including Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and performers such as Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, shaped the period's sound and image. Political thinkers including Du Bois and Marcus Garvey contributed a new assertiveness about civil and political rights.

Decline

The NMAAHC traces the end of the movement's heyday to the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, which hit Black-owned businesses and publications and cut funding from patrons, foundations and theatres. Work associated with the movement continued into the 1930s, as with Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), so end dates vary.

Changing interpretations

Scholars and institutions frame the movement in different ways. The Library of Congress describes it broadly as a feature of the 1920s and 1930s with a particular concentration in Harlem. The NMAAHC stresses that similar creative activity happened in Cleveland, Los Angeles and other migration cities. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2024 exhibition and catalogue, edited by Denise Murrell, goes further, presenting the Harlem Renaissance as the first international modern art movement led by African Americans and as part of a transatlantic exchange with artists in Europe and across the African diaspora. The NMAAHC, for its part, emphasises the movement's political legacy, arguing that it helped lay foundations for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.