The Harlem Renaissance: The African-American Revival of Music, Dance, and Art

While centered in Harlem, a destination for many African Americans fleeing Southern racism during the Great Migration, the Renaissance also resonated in Black urban communities nationwide. It was further fueled by a renewed militancy in demanding civil rights. The cultural awakening even influenced francophone Black writers and artists based in Paris from African and Caribbean colonies.

From 1924, when the journal Opportunity hosted a gala for Black authors attended by major white publishers, through 1929 and the looming Great Depression, this “flowering of Negro literature” as James Weldon Johnson described it reached extraordinary heights. Some argue the Harlem Renaissance never truly ended, its spirit living on through later musical movements from jazz, blues and swing to soul, funk, hip hop and beyond. The Renaissance marked a cultural rebirth that still reverberates in African American identity today.