Harlem Renaissance: Home

"This artistic and sociocultural awakening among African-Americans was a national phenomenon, reverberating through many urban centers. Viewed by some scholars as a distinctly African-American experiment in modernism and/or cultural pluralism, it found many outlets, from literature, painting, and sculpture to jazz, dance, and Broadway shows.

Though it peaked in 1923–1929, the movement can be dated from the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, the outbreak of World War I in 1914, or the publication of Claude McKay's poem Harlem Dancer in 1917 to as late as 1937, when Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God, or 1940, when Richard Wright's Native Son introduced a harsh new realism into black writing. Politically, it was part of a continuing response—which included the 1905 Niagara Movement and the NAACP—to the failure of Booker T. Washington's accommodationism to reverse the black disfranchisement that began after Reconstruction and extended through the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision and beyond."

From:

Singh, Amritjit. "Harlem Renaissance.." The Oxford Companion to United States History. : Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference. 2004. Date Accessed 12 Nov. 2013 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195082098.001.0001/acref-9780195082098-e-0670>.