The Harlem Renaissance

Originally called the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance was a literary and intellectual flowering that fostered a new black cultural identity in the 1920s and 1930s.

Black-owned magazines and newspapers flourished, freeing African Americans from the constricting influences of mainstream white society.

The Renaissance was more than a literary movement: It involved racial pride, fueled in part by the militancy of the "New Negro" demanding civil and political rights.

No aspect of the Harlem Renaissance shaped America and the entire world as much as jazz. JAZZ flouted many musical conventions with its syncopated rhythms and improvised instrumental solos.

The white literary establishment soon became fascinated with the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and began publishing them in larger numbers. But for the writers themselves, acceptance by the white world was less important.

One of the main goals of the black writers and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance was to show the Negro as a capable individual.

Harlem was a catalyst for artistic experimentation and a highly popular nightlife destination. Its location in the communications capital of North America helped give the "New Negroes" visibility and opportunities for publication not evident elsewhere

The Harlem Renaissance inspired notions of the United States as a new kind of nation in which diverse cultures should develop side by side in harmony rather than be "melted" together or ranked on a scale of evolving "civilization."

The Renaissance incorporated jazz and the blues, attracting whites to Harlem speakeasies, where interracial couples danced.

The Renaissance had little impact on breaking down the rigid barriers of Jim Crow that separated the races.

Nowhere was the Negro Vogue more evident than in nightclubs such as the Cotton Club and Connie's Inn, which became especially popular with whites in the late 1920s

The blues and jazz, became a worldwide sensation. Black music provided the pulse of the Harlem Renaissance and of the Jazz Age more generally.

An older generation of writers and intellectuals-James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Alain Locke, and Charles S. Johnson-served as mentors.

The movement included Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Rudolf Fisher, Wallace Thurman, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston.

African Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage and to become "The New Negro," a term coined in 1925 by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke in his influential book of the same name.

The recently migrated (African American) sought and found new opportunities, both economic and artistic.

Harlem brought notice to great works that might otherwise have been lost or never produced. The results were phenomenal. The artists of the Harlem Renaissance undoubtedly transformed African American culture.

Unfortunately, northerners did not welcome African Americans with open arms. While the legal systems of the northern states were not as obstructionist toward African American rights, the prejudice among the populace was as acrimonious.