Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of African-American social thought and culture based in the African-American community forming in Harlem in New York City (USA). This period, extending from roughly 1920 to 1940, was expressed through every cultural medium—visual art, dance, music, theatre, literature, poetry, history and politics. Instead of using direct political means, African-American artists, writers, and musicians employed culture to work for goals of civil rights and equality. Its lasting legacy is that for the first time (and across racial lines), African-American paintings, writings, and jazz became absorbed into mainstream culture. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after an anthology of notable African-American works entitled The New Negro and published by philosopher Alain Locke in 1925.

Notable Figures and their Works

Novels

• Sherwood Anderson — Dark Laughter (1925)
• Jessie Redmon Fauset — There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun (1929), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), Comedy, American Style (1933)
• Rudolph Fisher — The Walls of Jericho (1928), The Conjure-Man Dies (1932)
• Langston Hughes — Not Without Laughter (1930)
• Zora Neale Hurston — Jonah's Gourd Wine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
• Nella Larsen — Quicksand (1928), Passing (1929)
• Claude McKay — Home to Harlem (1927), Banjo (1929), Gingertown (1931), Banana Bottom (1933)
• George Schuyler — Black No More (1930), Slaves Today (1931)
• Wallace Thurman — The Blacker the Berry (1929), Infants of the Spring (1932), Interne (1932)
• Jean Toomer — Cane (1923)
• Carl Van Vechten — Nigger Heaven (1926)
• Eric Walrond — Tropic Death (1926)
• Walter White — The Fire in the Flint (1924), Flight (1926)

Drama

• Charles Gilpin, actor
• Florence Mills, actress
• Eugene O'Neill, playwright—Emperor Jones, All God's Chillun Got Wings
• Paul Robeson, actor, singer, political activist

Poetry

• Langston Hughes, poet
• Jessie Fauset, editor, poet, essayist and novelist
• Countee Cullen, poet — The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929)
• Claude McKay, poet
• James Weldon Johnson, poet
• Arna Bontemps, poet

Painting and Sculpture

• Romare Bearden
• John T. Biggers
• Edward Burra
• Aaron Douglas
• Palmer Hayden
• Sargent Claude Johnson, sculptor and printmaker
• William H. Johnson
• Loïs Mailou Jones
• Jacob Lawrence
• Archibald Motley
• Hale Woodruff

Dance

• Josephine Baker
• Leroy Jones
• George Snowden

Music

• Louis Armstrong, trumpeter
• Cab Calloway, singer and bandleader
• Benny Carter, saxophonist
• Duke Ellington, composer and pianist — "Take the A Train", "Black & Tan Fantasy", "Mood Indigo"
• Ella Fitzgerald, singer
• Pops Foster
• Benny Goodman, Clarinetist
• Fletcher Henderson
• Johnny Hodges, saxophonist
• Billie Holiday, singer — "Strange Fruit"
• Luis Russell
• Bessie Smith, singer
• William Grant Still, composer
• Ethel Waters
• Chick Webb, bandleader
• Kashif Usman, entrepreneur

Intellectual and Social Thought

• Benjamin Brawley — The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (1919), Social History of the American Negro (1921)
• W.E.B. DuBois — The Souls of Black Folks (1903) Darkwater (1920)
• Marcus Garvey, Aims and Objects for a Solution of the Negro Problem Outlined (1924)
• Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist
• Alain Locke, published The New Negro