Roaring Twenties

The Harlem Renaissance: Black Cultural Awakening

In the decade between roughly 1920 and 1935, a single Manhattan neighborhood produced the most concentrated body of African American art, literature, music, and scholarship in the nation’s history. The movement became known as the Harlem Renaissance, although it had no formal beginning and no single founder. By 1930, Black writers were on the bestseller lists, Black musicians were on Broadway, and Black intellectuals were shaping the national conversation about race, citizenship, and the future of American democracy.

For the wider cultural context, return to the 1920s Arts and Entertainment pillar overview. For a deep dive into the literary wing, For the most important single figure, For the music and visual art,

The Great Migration and the Making of Harlem

The Harlem Renaissance was the cultural flower of the Great Migration, the movement of roughly 1.6 million African Americans out of the rural South between 1910 and 1940. The economic drivers were the boll-weevil devastation of Southern cotton agriculture, the labor demands of the First World War, and the persistent threat of racial violence in the South, particularly the East St. Louis riot of 1917 and the wave of lynchings that followed the end of the war in 1918-19. The cultural drivers were the Chicago Defender, the Black newspaper edited by Robert Sengstacke Abbott, which from 1917 actively recruited Southern Blacks to move north, and the example of the returning soldiers of the 369th Infantry Regiment (the “Harlem Hellfighters”) and other Black units, who came back from France in 1919 unwilling to resume the conditions they had left.

Harlem, the neighborhood in upper Manhattan where the movement was named, had been a white middle-class neighborhood in the 1890s. A real-estate bust in 1904-05 had left the neighborhood’s brownstones and apartment buildings vacant, and the Afro-American Realty Company, founded in 1904 by Philip A. Payton Jr., had successfully placed Black tenants in the vacant buildings. By 1920, Harlem was the largest Black community in the United States; the Black population of the neighborhood grew from about 50,000 in 1914 to roughly 200,000 by 1930. The neighborhood was poor and overcrowded, with unemployment rates that ran double those of white New York, but it was also the home of the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the 230th Street Y (later the Schomburg Center), the Lincoln Theatre, and the Lafayette Theatre, the cultural institutions of a self-conscious Black metropolis.

The Institutional Framework: The Crisis, Opportunity, and the UNIA

The Harlem Renaissance was supported by an institutional framework that had been built over the previous generation. The NAACP, founded in 1909 by a coalition of white Progressives (including Mary White Ovington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Ida B. Wells) and Black intellectuals, had made the legal battle against lynching, segregation, and disenfranchisement the central project of African American political life. Du Bois edited the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, founded in 1910, and used it as a literary and cultural forum as well as a political one; Jessie Fauset served as its literary editor from 1919 to 1926.

The National Urban League, founded in 1910, was the more moderate counterpart of the NAACP. Its magazine, Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, founded in 1923, was edited by Charles S. Johnson and became the principal literary magazine of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson’s annual literary contests, held between 1924 and 1928, helped launch the careers of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Arna Bontemps.

The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded in Jamaica in 1914 by Marcus Garvey, was the most controversial of the three institutions. Garvey moved to Harlem in 1918, and by 1922 the UNIA claimed a worldwide membership of several million. Garvey’s project of Black nationalism, his pan-African vision of a “Back to Africa” movement, his founding of the Black Star Line steamship company in 1919, and his publishing of the newspaper Negro World (begun 1918) were alternately supported and opposed by the other Harlem institutions. Du Bois, the NAACP’s director of publications, sharply attacked Garvey in The Crisis; the relationship between the two wings of the Harlem movement, the integrationist and the separatist, would remain strained through the decade.

The Key Writers

The writers of the Harlem Renaissance formed the most public, most successful, and most lasting wing of the movement. Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up in Cleveland and Lawrence, Kansas. He published The Weary Blues in 1926, Fine Clothes to the Jew in 1927, and Not Without Laughter in 1930; the Weary Blues won the Opportunity magazine literary contest in 1925. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was the daughter of a Florida sharecropper, attended Howard University, and was sent by Charles S. Johnson to Eatonville, Florida, in 1927 to do anthropological field work. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is now treated as one of the great American novels. Countee Cullen (1903-1946) was the most celebrated Black poet of the early Harlem Renaissance, with Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), and The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929). Claude McKay (1889-1948), born in Jamaica, came to the United States in 1912; his collection Harlem Shadows (1922) and his novel Home to Harlem (1928) were the most successful early publications of the movement, the latter winning the Harmon Gold Award. Jean Toomer (1894-1967) published Cane in 1923, an experimental work that mixed prose, poetry, and drama to portray the Black experience in the rural South; Cane was the single most influential work of the early Harlem Renaissance.

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) was the executive secretary of the NAACP from 1920 to 1930 and the author of God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) and Black Manhattan (1930). Nella Larsen (1891-1964) was the author of Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Wallace Thurman (1902-1934) was the editor of the magazine Fire!! (1926) and the author of the novel The Blacker the Berry (1929), a satire of intraracial color prejudice. Jessie Fauset (1882-1961) was the literary editor of The Crisis from 1919 to 1926 and the author of four novels, including There Is Confusion (1924) and Plum Bun (1929). Sterling Brown (1901-1989) was the Howard University professor whose Southern Road (1932) became a foundational academic work of the movement.

The Key Artists

The visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance were fewer in number, less integrated into the national art market, and slower to be canonized, but their work was no less consequential. The central figure was Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), born in Topeka, trained in Kansas City and New York, and influenced by his encounter with the Harlem community in the early 1920s. Douglas produced a body of paintings, illustrations, and murals that synthesized the silhouette, the flat plane, the African mask, and the Art Deco geometry into a visual idiom uniquely identified with the Harlem Renaissance. His four-panel mural cycle Aspects of Negro Life (1934, Schomburg Center) is the canonical work. Douglas taught at Fisk University from 1937 and was the central figure in the Nashville wing of the movement.

Augusta Savage (1892-1962) was the sculptor who, in 1923, became the first African American admitted to the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts in France under a special scholarship, and who, in 1934, created The Harp, her celebrated sculpture for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Savage ran the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in Harlem from 1932 and trained a generation of Black artists, including Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) was the first African American woman to receive a federal art commission. Archibald Motley (1891-1981) was a Chicago painter whose Blues (1929) depicted the Black urban life of Chicago with vivid color. The young Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), who grew up in Harlem, was working in the late 1920s on the series of narrative paintings of Black history, most famously The Migration Series (1940-41), that would make him the most widely recognized African American painter in the country.

The Key Musicians

The musical wing of the Harlem Renaissance, although it overlapped with the literary wing only at the edges, was by far the most internationally visible. Duke Ellington (1899-1974) was the composer, bandleader, and pianist who had moved to Harlem in 1923 and became the resident bandleader of the Cotton Club in 1927, a residency that produced the recordings that made him internationally famous. (For the nightclubs that hosted these musicians, Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) was the New Orleans-born trumpeter who joined King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in 1922 and who, in his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of 1925-28 for Okeh Records, defined the language of jazz improvisation. (For Armstrong and his contemporaries, Cab Calloway (1907-1994) was the singer, dancer, and bandleader who took over the Cotton Club band in 1931. Fletcher Henderson (1897-1952) was the bandleader whose orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom was the first Black band to play in a downtown Broadway house. Bessie Smith (1894-1937) was the blues singer whose recording of “Down Hearted Blues” (1923) sold 780,000 copies in its first six months and made her the first major Black recording star. Fats Waller (1904-1943) was the Harlem stride pianist and composer, the son of a pastor, who composed “Ain’t Misbehavin’” (1929).

The Key Venues

The Harlem Renaissance was anchored by a small number of venues that, by the late 1920s, were among the most famous in the world. The Cotton Club, opened in 1923 in the basement of the Douglas Casino at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue, was the most famous of the nightclubs; originally segregated, it was a Black band, an all-Black chorus, and a Black kitchen staff performing for an exclusively white audience. The Savoy Ballroom, opened in 1926 at 596 Lenox Avenue, was the only integrated ballroom in Harlem, and the home of the Lindy Hop, the dance that defined the Black social dance of the late 1920s and the 1930s. The Lafayette Theatre, at 7th Avenue and 131st Street, was the home of the Lafayette Players, the leading Black drama company of the 1910s and 1920s. The Apollo Theater in Harlem was not built until 1934, but its predecessor at 209 West 125th Street had been hosting Black performers since 1914.

White Patrons and the Politics of the Movement

The Harlem Renaissance was supported by a small but unusually committed group of white patrons, several of whom played an ambiguous role. Charlotte Osgood Mason supported Hughes, Hurston, and Toomer between 1927 and 1930 on terms that required them to present Black folk culture as “primitive” in the manner of the New York vogue for African art; the resulting tensions contributed to the break between Hurston and her patron in 1930. Carl Van Vechten, the white novelist and photographer, organized the 1924 party that introduced Hughes and Cullen to the white New York literary scene, and his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven was both a commercial sensation and a lightning rod for criticism of the white gaze on Harlem nightlife. Alain Locke, the Howard University philosopher and editor of The New Negro (1925), was the principal intellectual organizer of the movement, and his insistence on a “new” Black modernism free of the dialect poetry of the immediate post-Reconstruction era set the literary agenda for the late 1920s.

The 1925 Book: Alain Locke’s “The New Negro”

The publication in 1925 of Alain Locke’s The New Negro, an anthology of fiction, poetry, essays, and visual art subtitled “An Interpretation,” is the conventional starting point of the Harlem Renaissance as a self-conscious movement. Locke’s introduction, “The New Negro,” became the canonical statement of the modernist wing of the movement. The book included contributions by Hughes, Cullen, Toomer, Hurston, Du Bois, the sculptor Sargent Johnson, the cartoonist E. Simms Campbell, and the bibliophile Arthur A. Schomburg (whose collection of African American materials was acquired by the New York Public Library in 1926 as the Schomburg Collection, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture).

The Controversy over the Image of Black Life

The Harlem Renaissance was marked by a sustained argument about how Black life should be portrayed. The folklorists, including Hurston, argued for a dignified presentation of rural Black folk culture. The social realists, including Du Bois, McKay (in his poetry, if not in Home to Harlem), and many of the more politically committed younger writers, argued that the duty of the Black artist was to expose the conditions of segregation, lynchings, and labor exploitation. The more experimental wing, including Toomer, Douglas, and Hughes, argued for a free synthesis. The “primitive” stereotype, advanced by white patrons and by some of the more sensational Harlem nightclubs, was rejected by the more serious artists of the movement. The argument has not been resolved, and the politics of representation of the Harlem Renaissance is still being worked out in the literary criticism of the present.

The Legacy

The Harlem Renaissance ended, in any meaningful institutional sense, by 1935. The Great Depression had closed the white market for Black literature; Du Bois had resigned from the NAACP in 1934; Hurston was working on the Florida folklore that would result in Mules and Men (1935) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) but the immediate audience for her work was already shrinking. The politics of the 1930s more broadly had turned the cultural center of Black American life away from literature and toward politics and labor organizing.

The legacy, however, was permanent. The institutions they had built, the Schomburg Center, the Fisk University art collection, the Howard University library, were permanent. The musicians, including Ellington, Armstrong, and Calloway, would go on to define American popular music for the next half-century. The visual artists, including Douglas, Savage, and Lawrence, would define the African American visual tradition. The Harlem Renaissance is the foundational moment of African American modernism.

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