
What year did the Harlem Renaissance start and end?
When did the Harlem Renaissance occur? The movement is considered to have begun about 1918 and continued to 1937. However, its most productive period was in the 1920s, as the movement's vitality suffered during the Great Depression (1929–39). Click to see full answer.
What caused the Harlem Renaissance?
- Blog
- Feb. 11, 2022 Using Prezi Video for virtual sales presentations that convert
- Feb. 11, 2022 How to build high-performing teams
- Feb. 10, 2022 The future of sales in 2022 and beyond
- Latest posts
What are facts about the Harlem Renaissance?
Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural, social and artistic movement which peaked in the 1920s. Centered at the Harlem neighborhood in New York City, the movement spread through the United States and reached as far as Paris. Chiefly caused due to the Great Migration, Harlem Renaissance declined and came to an end during the Great Depression.
What was daily life like during the Harlem Renaissance?
Their houses were small palaces or villas. They would go to banquets and eat things like soup, wine and meat. Soups were really expensive. There were 70 French types of soups. Trade was important...

When did the Harlem Renaissance begin?
1920Harlem Renaissance / Began approximately
When did the Harlem Renaissance begin and end?
Lasting roughly 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.
When did the Harlem Renaissance begin quizlet?
This period, beginning with 1920 and extending roughly to 1940, was expressed through every cultural medium—visual art, dance, music, theatre, literature, poetry, history and politics.
Which is true of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s?
Terms in this set (20) Which is true of the "Harlem Renaissance" of the 1920s? d) the era gave rise to Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and "The Cotton Club".
What was Harlem like in the 1920s?
During the 1920s and 1930s, Harlem was a haven, a place of self-discovery, cultural awareness, and political activism for African Americans. It nourished an artistic flowering of unprecedented richness. It was literature, painting, and music; it was movies, poetry, and jazz.
What was Harlem like in the 1950s?
Harlem was, and is, a predominantly black neighborhood. In the 1950s Harlem's black population reached its peak numbers at 98 percent. However, the outstanding amount of social and physical change it has witnessed over the past few decades threatens to change the face of Harlem, as we know it.
How did the Harlem Renaissance start?
One of the factors contributing to the rise of the Harlem Renaissance was the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities between 1919 and 1926. The two major causes that fueled the Great Migration were the Jim Crow segregation laws of the south and the start of World War I.
When and why did the Harlem Renaissance end?
The End of Harlem Renaissance The decline of the Harlem Renaissance was due to the stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting Great Depression. The economic instability forced people to seek their interests elsewhere rather than relishing in the revitalization of Harlem.
Which of the following artists is associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s?
Famous artists of the Harlem Renaissance included: sociologist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois, writers Claude McKay, Langton Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, musician Duke Ellington, and entertainer Josephine Baker. These artists strived to express their racial identity and pride.
What was the Harlem Renaissance?
The Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural movement that flourished in the 1920s and had Harlem in New York City as its symbolic capit...
Who were notable people of the Harlem Renaissance?
Key figures included educator, writer, and philosopher Alain Locke, who was considered the movement’s leader; sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, who helpe...
When did the Harlem Renaissance occur?
The movement is considered to have begun about 1918 and continued to 1937. Its most productive period was in the 1920s, as the movement’s vitality...
Why was the Harlem Renaissance significant?
The Harlem Renaissance was a turning point in Black cultural history. It helped African American writers and artists gain more control over the rep...
What was the first stage of the Harlem Renaissance?
The first stage of the Harlem Renaissance started in the late 1910s. In 1917, the premiere of Granny Maumee, The Rider of Dreams, Simon the Cyrenian: Plays for a Negro Theater took place. These plays, written by white playwright Ridgely Torrence, featured African-American actors conveying complex human emotions and yearnings. They rejected the stereotypes of the blackface and minstrel show traditions. James Weldon Johnson in 1917 called the premieres of these plays "the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American Theater".
What was the Harlem Renaissance?
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater and politics centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the " New Negro Movement ", ...
What did the majority of African Americans do during the reconstruction era?
During the Reconstruction Era, the emancipated African Americans, freedmen, began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural self-determination.
What was the Harlem Stride style?
A new way of playing the piano called the Harlem Stride style was created during the Harlem Renaissance, and helped blur the lines between the poor African Americans and socially elite African Americans. The traditional jazz band was composed primarily of brass instruments and was considered a symbol of the south, but the piano was considered an instrument of the wealthy. With this instrumental modification to the existing genre, the wealthy African Americans now had more access to jazz music. Its popularity soon spread throughout the country and was consequently at an all-time high.
What was the role of Christianity in the Harlem Renaissance?
Christianity played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance. Many of the writers and social critics discussed the role of Christianity in African-American lives. For example, a famous poem by Langston Hughes, "Madam and the Minister", reflects the temperature and mood towards religion in the Harlem Renaissance.
How did the Harlem Renaissance impact the African American experience?
The Harlem Renaissance was successful in that it brought the Black experience clearly within the corpus of American cultural history. Not only through an explosion of culture, but on a sociological level, the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance redefined how America, and the world, viewed African Americans. The migration of southern Blacks to the north changed the image of the African American from rural, undereducated peasants to one of urban, cosmopolitan sophistication. This new identity led to a greater social consciousness, and African Americans became players on the world stage, expanding intellectual and social contacts internationally.
When did Harlem become an African American neighborhood?
Harlem became an African-American neighborhood in the early 1900s. In 1910, a large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various African-American realtors and a church group. Many more African Americans arrived during the First World War.
What musical was the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance?
Shuffle Along, a musical by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, opens on Broadway and makes a major contribution to the Harlem Renaissance, most significantly by opening the way for a number of other Black shows that laid a foundation for the “Jazz Age” of the 1920s.
Who was the author of The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White?
George B. Hutchinson, author of The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, speaking about James Weldon Johnson's way of incorporating Black vernacular speech and styles of Black preaching in his book God's Trombones (1927).
Who was the first jazz soloist?
Louis Armstrong emerges as the first great jazz soloist when he moves from King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago to Fletcher Henderson’s band in New York City. Henderson’s band soon has competitors in “big bands” led by the likes of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Chick Webb, and Jimmie Lunceford.
Where did the Great Migration take place?
The Great Migration, a widespread migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West, begins about this time. Harlem, in New York, New York, will become firmly established as a Black residential and commercial area.
What was the Harlem Renaissance?
A combustible mix of the serious, the ephemeral, the aesthetic, the political, and the risqué, the Harlem Renaissance was a cultural awakening among African Americans during the 1920s and 1930s. Through literature, music, theatre, and the visual arts, the New Negroes, as they announced themselves, embraced the opportunities and challenges ...
Why is the book Harlem a proletarian novel?
McKay (pictured above) described it as a ‘proletarian novel', because it depicted the struggles of a working-class protagonist. It might be better described as an experimental novel that attempts to render the jazz-inflected life of Harlem in prose; its most evocative scenes depict jazz performances – the instruments, voice and dance.
What was Langston Hughes' first book?
Langston Hughes’s first book contains some of his most famous poems including 'Dream Variations', 'Mother to Son,' and 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers'. The volume was an auspicious debut for a 24 year-old writer. The title poem, set against the backdrop of Harlem that would inspire Hughes’s imagination for the next four decades, introduced a new genre of poetry, which drew on the blues as a model of poetic meter, rhyme scheme, and structure. The blues offered a worldview as well, one that accepted death and trouble as facts of life that could not be transcended, but could be survived.
What was 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. Critic and teacher Alain Locke described it as a "spiritual coming of age" in which the black community was able to seize upon its "first chances ...
How many African Americans were in Harlem?
The Harlem section of Manhattan, which covers just 3 sq mi, drew nearly 175,000 African Americans, turning the neighborhood into the largest concentration of black people in the world.
What was the white literary establishment interested in?
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, as Langston Hughes put it, than the "expression of our individual dark-skinned selves."
What was the Harlem Renaissance?
The Harlem Renaissance. The Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in 1926 was The Place and Lindy Hop was The Dance! It was time for a cultural celebration. African Americans had endured centuries of slavery and the struggle for abolition. The end of bondage had not brought the promised land many had envisioned.
Who was the most prolific writer of the Harlem Renaissance?
The most prolific writer of the Harlem Renaissance was Langston Hughes. Hughes cast off the influences of white poets and wrote with the rhythmic meter of blues and jazz. Claude McKay urged African Americans to stand up for their rights in his powerful verses.
When did African Americans move to the North?
Instead, white supremacy was quickly, legally, and violently restored to the New South, where ninety percent of African Americans lived. Starting in about 1890, African Americans migrated to the North in great numbers.
Who was the singer at the Cotton Club in Harlem?
Harlem's Cotton Club boasted the talents of Duke Ellington. Singers such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday popularized blues and jazz vocals. Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong drew huge audiences as white Americans as well as African Americans caught jazz fever.
How did the Great Migration begin?
The Great Migration began because of a "push" and a "pull." Disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws led many African Americans to hope for a new life up north. Hate groups and hate crimes cast alarm among African American families of the Deep South. The promise of owning land had not materialized. Most blacks toiled as sharecroppers trapped in an endless cycle of debt. In the 1890s, a boll weevil blight damaged the cotton crop throughout the region, increasing the despair. All these factors served to push African Americans to seek better lives. The booming northern economy forged the pull. Industrial jobs were numerous, and factory owners looked near and far for sources of cheap labor.
What was the Harlem Renaissance?
The Harlem Renaissance. was born out of necessity, circumstance, and creativity. As one of the most influential movements in African-American history, The Harlem Renaissance strengthened the foundation of what we have come to know as “the culture.”.
Who was the first editor-in-chief of the National Urban Leagues?
Charles S. Johnson, the first editor-in-chief of the National Urban Leagues’ academic journal, captured Black culture and provided opportunities for new artists. Alain LeRoy Locke and The New Negro anthologized African and African-American art and literature, while simultaneously providing a manifesto for the New Negro Movement ...
What was the purpose of the Black Upper Class?
A Black Upper Class emerged and with it came a mission to document the experience of African-American’s like never before, and provide space for the work of a Black creative Class —this was especially true in Harlem.
Was the Harlem Renaissance bigger than the Harlem district?
The Harlem Renaissance was bigger than the Harlem district in New York City. A lot happened between the years of 1918 and 1937, and for every inch gained in Harlem, a mile was being traveled by Black people elsewhere in America to escape disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws.

Overview
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included t…
Background
Until the end of the Civil War, the majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived in the South. During the Reconstruction Era, the emancipated African Americans, freedmen, began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural self-determination. Soon after the end of the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 gave rise to speeches by African-Americ…
Development
During the early portion of the 20th century, Harlem was the destination for migrants from around the country, attracting both people from the South seeking work and an educated class who made the area a center of culture, as well as a growing "Negro" middle class. These people were looking for a fresh start in life and this was a good place to go. The district had originally been developed in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for the white middle and upper middle classes; its affl…
Characteristics and themes
Characterizing the Harlem Renaissance was an overt racial pride that came to be represented in the idea of the New Negro, who through intellect and production of literature, art, and music could challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes to promote progressive or socialist politics, and racial and social integration. The creation of art and literature would serve to "uplift" the race.
Influence
The Harlem Renaissance was successful in that it brought the Black experience clearly within the corpus of American cultural history. Not only through an explosion of culture, but on a sociological level, the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance redefined how America, and the world, viewed African Americans. The migration of southern Blacks to the north changed the image of the Africa…
Works associated with the Harlem Renaissance
• Blackbirds of 1928
• Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (book)
• The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
• Shuffle Along, musical
See also
• Black Arts Movement, 1960s and 1970s
• Black Renaissance in D.C.
• Chicago Black Renaissance
• List of female entertainers of the Harlem Renaissance
External links
• "A Guide to Harlem Renaissance Materials", from the Library of Congress
• Bryan Carter (ed.). "Virtual Harlem". University of Illinois at Chicago, Electronic Visualization Laboratory.
• "The Approaching 100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance", by HR historian Aberjhani