Harlem Renaissance

The Rise of the Harlem Renaissance

Beginning with the end of World War I in 1917 and concurrent with the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance was made possible in part by powerful social forces effecting sweeping changes across the United States. A mass exodus of an estimated 5 million African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, “The Great Migration” (1915–1960) was described by Harlem Renaissance spokesman Alain Locke (1885–1954) as “a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from mediaeval America to modern.” These “shifting crystallizations” in U.S. demography resulted in the rise of a Black middle class in major U.S. cities, particularly in the Northeast. In the midst of this status revolution, one place stood out in particular: Harlem.

Harlem is a large sector of upper Manhattan in New York City—“little more than a note of sharper color in the kaleidoscope of New York,” according to Locke. Harlem catalyzed the formation of a distinct racial consciousness that had previously been “a race more in name than in fact” or “more in sentiment than in experience,” reflecting a “common condition rather than a common consciousness.” The Harlem Renaissance offered African Americans their “first chances for group expression and self-determination.” The Harlem Renaissance succeeded in the first objective but failed in the latter one.

Parties played a major role both in Harlem nightlife and in the Renaissance itself, and its official inaugural was a formal banquet. On March 21, 1924, Opportunity editor and sociologist Charles S. Johnson invited a group of young writers and artists to a dinner party of the Writers Guild held in the Civic Club, a restaurant on West Twelfth Street near Fifth Avenue in Harlem. The Civic Club was the only “upper-crust” New York nightclub free of color or sex restrictions. The party was called to celebrate Jessie Redmon Fauset's first novel, There Is Confusion, and to recognize “a newer school of writers” that included Eric Walrond, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Bennett.

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