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Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Harlem race riot of 1935". Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 Mar. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Harlem-race-riot-of-1935. Accessed 11 May 2023.

Harlem Renaissance – Roaring 20’s. “Against the Odds Artists of the Harlem Renaissance.” YouTube, 26 May 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuV-sTH9vgM&list=LL&index=1&t=2112s.

History.com Editors. “Harlem Renaissance - Definition, Artists & How It Started.” HISTORY, 11 Jan. 2023, www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/harlem-renaissance

Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Blackpast.org, 26 June 2019, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/primary-documents-african-american-history/1926-langston-hughes-the-negro-artist-and-the-racial-mountain/.

Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Poetry Foundation, 2023, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44428/the-negro-speaks-of-rivers.

"James Weldon Johnson." AZQuotes.com. Wind and Fly LTD, 2023. 11 May 2023. https://www.azquotes.com/quote/576438

One Mic History. “The Harlem Renaissance: A Period of Radical Change.” YouTube, 2 Oct. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=uESWy9xz8B0.

‌The1920sChannel. “The Great Migration & the Harlem Renaissance.” YouTube, 4 June 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AQeRITMhD0.

“A Quote by Langston Hughes.” Goodreads.com, 2023, www.goodreads.com/quotes/148651-i-have-discovered-in-life-that-there-are-ways-of.

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The Stock Market Crash of 1929, many Black Americans believed it to be a white problem, but Black workers were often fired over white workers. Harlem's median income dropped 43%, and unemployment reached almost 50%. The city became a slum, and people moved out, including many of the artists and intellectuals that defined the Renaissance.

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Black art was suppressed in the U.S., as art schools didn't often accept Black students and museums didn't often display Black art. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was one of the first Black sculptors; her works, including Ethiopia and Mary Turner, depict ethnic pride. The William E. Harmon Foundation gave Black artists, including Fuller the opportunity to have their work displayed, and these exhibitions became a nationwide success, a 1931 exhibition was viewed by 150,000 people. William E. Harmon believed that this opportunity would allow Black Americans to become more self-sufficient, but he still viewed Black art as inferior.

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Langston Hughes was one of many influential Black writers who played an important role in the Renaissance. Other such writers include Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, Wallace Thurman, and Alain Locke. These, and other writers, were published in Opportunity, The Crisis, and Fire!!

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I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

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Hughes pioneered jazz poetry, which mirrors the sound of jazz; the precursor to modern rap music.

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Langston Hughes - "The Weary Blues" on CBUT, 1958

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This novel, by white author Carl Van Vechten, sparked controversy in the Harlem community for its title and depiction of Black Americans. Many older Black artists and intellectuals, including W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP, believed that Black art and literature should portray Black Americans in a positive light, and denounced the novel as vulgar, while younger artists, such as Langston Hughes and Fire!!, denounced the derogatory title but praised the work for its authentic and multifaceted depiction.

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Philip A. Payton Jr., a Black real estate entrepreneur, took advantage of the desperation, released some apartment buildings for Black Americans to rent.

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So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, “I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet,” as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world. I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians because he fears the strange unwhiteness of his own features. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose...

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

- Langston Hughes, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

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Charles S. Johnson believed in racial unity via exposure, and, to support these ideas, founded Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, under the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. To promote the Opportunity, Johnson held an event, at first, Jessie Fauset's debut novel, There is Confusion, but it evolved into a tremendous success, with over 100 publishers, editors, artists, and writers. The dinner was held on March 21, 1924.

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Controversy also surrounded what art forms Black artists should or shouldn't practice. Alain Locke believed that Black artists should take inspiration from their African heritage, and denounced those who practiced European styles as traditionalists. Allan Randall Freelon, another artist, believed that limiting Black artists to these inspirations would lead to Black art being ghettoized.

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At the turn of the 20th century, the west side of Manhattan, New York, was known as Black Bohemia, for its Black American community. A result of racial steering realtors, lender redlining, and violence. Filled with boarding houses, tenements, brothels, and gambling dens. Poverty and exploitation: Black workers made $7 dollars a week, and a four-bedroom apartment cost $20 dollars a month or more, and more expensive than similar white apartments.

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A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.... No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

- James Weldon Johnson

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In March of 1935, after 16-year-old Lino Rivera stole a 10-cent penknife from a dim store and was detained by police, protests broke out. 10,000 people took to the streets, and this resulted in looting, the destruction of property, and clashes with the all-white police force. The protest lasted for two days, and, by the end, 125 had been arrested, 100 had been injured, 3 were dead, and property damage exceeded $2,000,000. This is considered by many to be the first modern American race riot, and was the death blow for the Renaissance, which was already struggling under the Great Depression.

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Black theater productions and musicals found success as well, though perhaps not on the level of Black music. Wallace Thurman and William Rapp created the play Harlem, which went to Broadway in 1929. Shuffle Along was an even greater success, composed by Eubie Blake, lyrics by Noble Sissle, went to Broadway and was shown 500 times. Despite these successes, the New Negro Movement lacked authentic African-American theater, W.E.B. DuBois denounced common theater depictions of Black people, and said that that theater should be by Black Americans and for Black Americans. DuBois founded Krigwa Players and Harlem Experimental Stock Company to pursue this.

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White residents in Harlem did not accept these Black residents. The Hudson Realty Company purchased apartment buildings, evicted their Black residents, and rented to whites, while the Property Owners Protective Association Incorporated worked to prevent Black entrepreneurs like Payton from taking out mortgages. Payton fought back, creating the Afro-American Realty Company to rent out more apartments, but, due to POPAI, AARC went under.

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The writers Richard Nugent, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennet, Aaron Douglas, John Davis, Wallace Thurman, and Langston Hughes pooled their talents to create Fire!! a journal that sparked controversy for its depictions of Black Harlemites. Despite ending in 1926 after only one issue, Fire!! had a significant impact on the Black literary climate.

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1929 Chicago Speakeasy ASMR: Ambience of Golden Age Radio & Bar Sounds for Studying, Relaxing

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1929 Chicago Speakeasy ASMR: Ambience of Golden Age Radio & Bar Sounds for Studying, Relaxing

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After Reconstruction, the lives of Black Americans became more and more threatened: segregation, voter suppression, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and the return of the Ku Klux Klan. Black Americans in the South seemed doomed to menial labor, sharecropping, and poverty. Over 1,000,000 Black Americans moved to the North as a result.

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Harlem seemed like a paradise compared to Black Bohemia's overcrowding, poverty, and violence. In the 1880s, Harlem was intended to be a haven for upper-class white Americans, elevator railway and subway development. The area became overdeveloped: empty apartments and desperate realtors.

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“The Negro artists wondered if we should be following the dictates of our heritage of the Negro, that is, should we have devoted ourselves to gaining information from Africa or should we have just become, artists, painters, and sculptors without thinking of race?”

- James Lesesne Wells

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Aaron Douglass father of Black American art, most celebrated Harlem visual artist. His work reflected the richness of African culture and heritage. Hired by WEB to create art for The Crisis. James Wood Johnson’s the Opportunity, and so did publishing companies.

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Payton didn't stop at this setback; he worked with James C. Thomas and the St. Philip's Protestant Episcopal Church to buy apartment buildings and evict white residents. As more Black residents moved in, white residents left, and eventually, Harlem was home to $200,000,000 worth of Black-owned real estate, or $1,800,000,000 today.

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The rise of Black music and race records into the mainstream started with Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues. Jazz and the blues were an evolution of the plantation songs, ragtime, and earlier forms of Black music, but had never been renowned until now. Throughout the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, Black music would cross racial and cultural boundaries once thought impossible. Renowned Black musicians include: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway.

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Harlem speakeasies were the hearts of the jazz scene; the most popular was the Savoy Ballroom. Harlem nightclubs were popular even among white people; many whites wanted to experience these nightclubs without having to rub shoulders with Black patrons, so clubs such as the Cotton Club were established, with Cab Calloway.

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I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.

- Langston Hughes