The Harlem Renaissance: A Decade That Remade American Culture

The Harlem Renaissance — the name given, in retrospect, to the concentration of Black artistic, literary, and intellectual activity that took place in Harlem between roughly 1918 and 1935 — was not a movement in the sense that its participants agreed on a shared program. It was a convergence. The Great Migration brought Black Southerners north by the hundreds of thousands; World War I veterans returned to New York with new political expectations; a generation of Black writers, scholars, musicians, and painters found themselves, for the first time in American history, in the same place at the same time.

The literary record alone is staggering. Langston Hughes published his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926; Zora Neale Hurston began the ethnographic fieldwork in Florida and Haiti that would culminate in Their Eyes Were Watching God; Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) invented a form — part novel, part poem cycle, part play — that American literature is still metabolizing. Countee Cullen won the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize in 1925 as an undergraduate. Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing turned the psychological novel inside out.

The political and intellectual architecture was as consequential as the art. W. E. B. Du Bois, editing The Crisis for the NAACP, used the magazine to publish virtually every Harlem Renaissance author at least once; his editorial judgment alone shaped the canon. Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, headquartered in Harlem, held international conventions that drew hundreds of thousands of delegates. Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro gave the movement its first self-theorization.

The music was perhaps the most internationally influential product of the era — stride piano, big-band swing, the harmonic innovations that would flower into bebop a decade later — but the full Renaissance was a unified cultural project. It ended not because it exhausted itself but because the Great Depression cut off the patronage, the publishing contracts, and the nightclub economy that had sustained it. What it produced remained. Virtually every subsequent Black cultural movement in America, from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s to the present, has understood itself in some form of relationship to Harlem in the 1920s.