Harlem Renaissance
Also known as: New Negro Movement
The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of African American literature, art, music, and thought centered in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s and early 1930s. It produced writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and reshaped American culture.
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s in which African American writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals — concentrated in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City — produced an outpouring of creative work asserting Black identity, dignity, and artistic excellence. Contemporaries often called it the New Negro Movement, after Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro.
The movement grew out of the Great Migration, in which hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the rural South for Northern cities seeking work and escape from Jim Crow segregation. Harlem became the cultural capital of Black America, home to figures including poets Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen; novelists Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen; and jazz and blues artists such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith.
The work of the period ranged widely — Hughes celebrated everyday Black life and the rhythms of jazz and blues in his poetry, Hurston recorded Southern Black folklore and dialect, and McKay's protest sonnets confronted racial violence directly. Debates within the movement, such as whether art should serve political uplift or stand on its own terms, remain central to how scholars read it. The movement faded during the Great Depression, but it permanently widened the place of Black voices in American literature and laid cultural groundwork for the later civil rights movement.
The AP English Literature exam frequently draws poetry and prose passages from Harlem Renaissance authors, so students should recognize the movement's historical context, major figures, and characteristic themes — identity, double consciousness, migration, and the tension between celebration and protest.
Key takeaways
- The Harlem Renaissance was a 1920s–early 1930s flowering of African American literature, art, and music centered in Harlem, New York.
- It grew out of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities.
- Major figures include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Duke Ellington.
- AP English Literature passages often come from Harlem Renaissance writers, so know the movement's themes and context.