The Harlem Renaissance-​100 years of Black Culture

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Sometimes in the most repressive times, we create the most extraordinary art. The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted.

Lasting from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art. The Harlem Renaissance gave African Americans a chance to live their dreams. Historians estimate that between 1910 and 1940, as many as 1.5 million African Americans migrated from the South to northern cities. The first wave of the Great Migration accompanied a flowering of black intellectual and artistic expression that became known nationally as the Harlem or Black Renaissance.

Many in the Harlem Renaissance were part of the Great Migration out of the south, to the north and Midwest. African Americans sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the South. Others were people of African descent from the Caribbean who came to America hoping for a better life. The Harlem Renaissance of Poetry, Literature and Jazz, was the flowering of creativity that had been suppressed for centuries. The era saw the burgeoning literary work by an avowed African Americans, which the writer Alain Locke compiled into an anthology. He called it The New Negro, and its name came to define a movement.

A new generation of black people – two generations out of slavery, using the arts as a way to help people gain broader civil and political rights. Featuring: Langston Hughes, Augusta Savage, Oscar Micheaux, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Ella Josephine Baker, Zuzu. Baker, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Gwendolyn Bennett, Zora Neale Hurston and Billie Holiday.