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What is remarkable about the movement that stirred to life in the working-class neighborhoods of New York City’s Harlem in the 1920s was the reach of this cultural celebration of Black life, the Black community, and supremely Black artists, a reach so vast the movement came to be called the Harlem Renaissance. 

The movement was not only expressed in literature. Black composers, essayists, choreographers, sculptors, photographers, and painters gathered in the clubs, churches, and speakeasys of Harlem and together encouraged expressions of the Black imagination. The artists in the Harlem Renaissance challenged, upended, and upcycled every art form inherited from the United States’ white establishment in a joyous and raucous declaration of their cultural independence. 

The Harlem Renaissance was sparked in large part by what cultural historians call the Great Migration. In the opening decades of the new century, an estimated 150,000 Black families left the poverty and indignities of the Jim Crow South and relocated to the North for better employment opportunities and a better life in northern cities such as Detroit, Kansas City, Chicago, and New York. Long after the Civil War had ended slavery, Black families still struggled against discrimination and bigotry in the South and lived as second-class citizens.