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Referring to the development of the Harlem neighbourhood in New York City as the cultural centre point for Black people in the early 20th century, the Harlem Renaissance referred to the social and artistic explosion as a result of this period. It lasted from 1910s to the mid-1930s and came to be known as the golden period of the African American culture through literature, art, music, and stage performance.
The Great Migration
The northern Manhattan neighbourhood of Harlem was initially meant to be an upper-class white neighbourhood in the 1880s, however rapid overdevelopment resulted in several empty buildings with landlords who were desperate to find residents for them.
When a few middle-class Black families from another neighbourhood called Black Bohemia moved to Harlem, this paved the way for other Black families as well. There was an initial pushback from some white residents to keep the Blacks out of the area, however they failed and eventually fled the area entirely. Certain outside factors led to the increase in population and from 1910 to 1920, large populations of African Americans migrated from the South to the North. Prominent figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois led what later became known as the Great Migration.
When natural disasters in the south during 1915-1916 put Black workers out of work and the World War I momentarily put a pause on immigration, northern recruiters headed south to entice Black people with work opportunities resulting in some 300,000 African Americans moving north with Harlem one of the most popular destinations.
The considerable population shift resulted in a Black Pride movement with leaders like Du Bois working to ensure that Black Americans got the credit they deserved for cultural areas of life.
Literature
Two of the earliest breakthroughs in this movement were in poetry, with Claude McKay's collection Harlem Shadows in 1922 and Jean Toomer's Cane in 1923.
Countee Cullen also called Harlem his home since the age of 15 with the neighbourhood informing his poetry. He studied at New York University, winning several prizes in poetry contests before going to Harvard and publishing his first collection of poetry - Color. He followed it up with Copper Sun and The Ballad of the Brown Girl, and went on to write plays as well as children's books. Cullen received a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry and married he daughter of W.E.B. DuBois. Their wedding was a major social event in Harlem. Cullen's reviews for Opportunity magazine focused on works from the African-American literati.
Civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man in 1912 and God's Trombones in 1927 also left indelible marks on the world of fiction. Jessi Redmond Fauset's 1924 novel There Is Confusion explored the idea of Black Americans finding a cultural identity in a white-dominated Manhattan. Fauset was also the literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis and developed a magazine for Black children with Du Bois.
