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Riley B. King, known professionally as B.B. King, was an American blues singer-songwriter, guitarist, and record producer. He introduced a sophisticated style of soloing based on fluid string bending, shimmering vibrato and staccato picking that influenced many later blues electric guitar players.

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Eunice Kathleen Waymon, known professionally as Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. 

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Tony Lawrence is a Kittitian-American singer, actor, community activist and festival organiser. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was one of the main organisers of the annual Harlem Cultural Festival in New York City, including the 1969 festival celebrated in the 2021 documentary film Summer of Soul

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The 5th Dimension is an American popular music vocal group, whose repertoire includes pop, R&B, soul, jazz, light opera and Broadway — a melange referred to as "champagne soul". Formed as the Versatiles in late 1965, the group changed its name to "the 5th Dimension" by 1966

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https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/the-royalettes-1961-1969/

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Wilma Rudolph (1940–1994) won three gold medals as a sprinter at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. 

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"Her achievement is even more remarkable given the obstacles that she had to overcome: infantile paralysis, segregated medical treatment, and teenage pregnancy. Rudolph’s success made her one of the most celebrated female athletes in history and helped raise the profile of women’s track and field in the United States." (Smithsonian)

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https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/people-african-american-history/charles-brown-1939-1999/

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This work is known by two titles: Mother and Awaiting His Return. The woman who dominates the composition stares into space, her strongly modeled figure a study in patience. Given the work's date (1945), the framed star in the background (a symbol of the US military), and the word mother inscribed in the lithograph's lower left corner, the two titles make equal sense. The woman's face is easily interpreted as that of a mother waiting for a loved one to return from service in World War II. Artist Charles White has chiseled her facial features with determination while infusing her expression with sadness. The cubist faceting of her figure imparts a feeling of solidity and strength in her that is reinforced by her imposing size and foreground placement. Her hands and face are nearly architectural, with their sharp edges and straight-line markings of light and shadow. Yet her tired eyes, her chin set into the palm of her hand, and the merest hint of doubt in her expression signal concern.

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https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/people-african-american-history/grafton-tyler-brown-1841-1918/

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Bisa Butler (and other contemporary black artists)

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Bisa Butler (and other contemporary black artists)

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https://www.artandobject.com/slideshows/10-contemporary-black-artists-you-should-know-more-about

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The Harlem Cultural Festival was a series of events, mainly music concerts, held annually in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City.

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Mary Church Terrell- Women's suffrage leader

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Mary Church Terrell- Women's suffrage leader

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Breaking Barriers_ Black Dancers at American Ballet Theatre - American Ballet Theatre — Google Arts & Culture

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https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/millie-christine

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Between Two Worlds: Black Women and the Fight for Voting Rights

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Between Two Worlds: Black Women and the Fight for Voting Rights

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Was there ever a time when your voice wasn't being heard?

During the 19th and 20th centuries, Black women played an active role in the struggle for universal suffrage. They participated in political meetings and organized political societies. African American women attended political conventions at their local churches where they planned strategies to gain the right to vote. In the late 1800s, more Black women worked for churches, newspapers, secondary schools, and colleges, which gave them a larger platform to promote their ideas.

But in spite of their hard work, many people didn't listen to them. Black men and white women usually led civil rights organizations and set the agenda. They often excluded Black women from their organizations and activities. For example, the National American Woman Suffrage Association prevented Black women from attending their conventions. Black women often had to march separately from white women in suffrage parades. In addition, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony wrote the History of Woman Suffrage in the 1880s, they featured white suffragists while largely ignoring the contributions of African American suffragists. Though Black women are less well remembered, they played an important role in getting the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments passed.

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Between Two Worlds: Black Women and the Fight for Voting Rights (U.S. National Park Service)

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Was there ever a time when your voice wasn't being heard? During the 19th and 20th centuries, Black women played an active role in the struggle for universal suffrage. They participated in political meetings and organized political societies. African American women attended political conventions at their local churches where they planned strategies to gain the right to vote.

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/02/03/black-history-harlem-renaissance/22825245/

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Harlem today has become a hot real estate market as well-heeled buyers flood into the northern end of Manhattan seeking bargain properties.

The Harlem of recent decades, by contrast, was often synonymous with poverty and crime.

But Harlem 100 years ago was ground zero of an explosion of arts, politics and culture in black America. The Harlem Renaissance - known then as the "New Negro Movement" - saw the rise of jazz, the launch of such literary careers as Langston Hughes' and Zora Neale Hurston's, and a new sense of black identity and pride.

It wasn't just in Harlem. Chicago, Cleveland and other Northern cities saw similar cultural and artistic movements, born out of the massive migrations of African Americans from the rural South, first to Southern cities and then into the North.

"This is a period when the majority of black people in the United States are born as free people - the first generation when they're not largely born as slaves," says Minkah Makalani, assistant professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

"A lot of the stuff we see when we think of the Harlem Renaissance (was) already taking place in the South."
Minkah Makalani, University of Texas at Austin
But they still faced racial oppression and violence in the South, Makalani says, so "they find their way out of that and create some of the most vibrant artifacts and cultural practices that literally inform everything in the American culture today, be it dance, music, writing, poetry. It's a very vibrant robust period.

"You also have these kinds of compelling commentaries on democracy, on politics, on what a just society will look like. They're having these profound discussions about what does it mean to be a democracy, what does it mean to be a world power, where do black people fit in. And it's not monolithic."

The people and places associated with the Harlem Renaissance are a roll call for American letters, art and thought: musicians Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong; writer Wallace Thurman and mural artist Aaron Douglas; world-famous venues such as the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theatre; and United Negro Improvement Association founder Marcus Garvey, known as the "black Moses."

A 1929 publicity photo promoting a show at Harlem's Cotton Club shows Maude Russel and her Ebony Steppers in "Just a Minute." (Photo: Michael Ochs Archives, Getty Images)

The prospect of jobs added to the allure of Harlem and other areas of the industrialized North, but people also were motivated to migrate by Jim Crow laws and other racial oppression in the South, says Davarian Baldwin, the Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Connecticut's Trinity College.

"Part of the reason for their leaving was political," Baldwin says. "They already were prepared and engaged and remaking cities. They brought with them new expectations. They had to engage in debates not just with whites but older, more affluent African Americans in the North."

Those Southern migrations north coincided with huge migration trends across the globe, leading to convergences of numerous different groups in places like Harlem and political and cultural flourishings growing out of that, Baldwin says.

"Ford (Motor) really went out of its way to hire African-American workers for the first time," says Charles Lester, visiting assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania's Albright College. "All these job opportunities are drawing farmers to places like Detroit and Chicago and New York. The net effect is over 1 million Americans leave the South in a 20-year period. Half end up in five cities - Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, New York City and Pittsburgh. As you might imagine, it's going to create a lot of cultural side effects."

However, Makalani adds, "A lot of the stuff we see when we think of the Harlem Renaissance is already taking place in the South. Jazz is taking form in places like New Orleans and has roots in the blues and gospel and reflects this fantastic artistic imagination among black Southerners, and takes on a different life" in the North."

Of Northern communities experiencing this boom in African-American culture, Harlem disproportionately "gets a lot of the love, you might say," says Lester.

"In a lot of ways, Chicago dwarfs what's going on in Harlem, but it hasn't gotten the publicity," Lester says. "There are similar things going on in all kinds of cities. Memphis had Beale Street. Kansas City had a whole vibrant area around 12th Street. A lot of artists leave New Orleans and end up in Chicago."

While the Harlem Renaissance was centered in large part on literature and visual culture, "if you open it up to a wider understanding, Chicago was (author and filmmaker) Oscar Michaeux, Thomas Dorsey and gospel," says Baldwin.

Harlem got so much attention in part because New York was such a hub of publishing. "These were the ways we measure renaissance at that time - arts and letters," Baldwin says.

And Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, "really sort of exposed the broader American public to this cultural flourishing," Lester says. "They really went out their way to trumpet Harlem as the place. That work was very influential at the time."

Today, if there's a city having a Harlem-like flowering, it might be Atlanta, Lester says: "Atlanta has had this cultural explosion of the last 20, 30 years. African Americans feel safe to move to the South for the first time since the dismantling of Jim Crow. That's leading to a whole new cultural exchange."

Daneman also reports for the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle.

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Harlem Renaissance ushered in new era of black pride

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Harlem today has become a hot real estate market as well-heeled buyers flood into the northern end of Manhattan seeking bargain properties. The Harlem of recent decades, by contrast, was often synonymous with poverty and crime. But Harlem 100 years ago was ground zero of an explosion of arts, politics and culture in black America.