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The band started in New York City under name of the Washingtonians in 1923, they then briefly became known as Duke Ellington and his Kentucky Club Orchestra, then as Duke Ellington and his Cotton Club Orchestra from 1927 to 1930.

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The most prolific writer of the Harlem Renaissance was Langston Hughes. Hughes cast off the influences of white poets and wrote with the rhythmic meter of blues and jazz. Claude Mckay urged African Americans to stand up for their rights in his powerful verses. Jean Toomer wrote plays and short stories, as well as poems. Zora Neale Hurston was noticed quickly with her moving novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Music met prose in the form of musical comedy. The 1921 production of Shuffle Along is credited with initiating the movement. Actor Paul Robeson electrified audiences with his memorable stage performances.

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The radio created the conditions for national fads. Without such a method of live and immediate communication, fads could amount only to local crazes. Roaring Twenties fads ranged from the athletic to the ludicrous. One of the most popular trends of the decade was the dance marathon. The Charleston swept the nation's dance halls, and young Americans were eager to prove their agility. In a typical dance marathon, contestants would dance for forty-five minutes and rest for fifteen. The longest marathons lasted thirty-six hours. Beauty pageants came into vogue. The first Miss America Pageant was staged in Atlantic City in 1921. One of the most bizarre fads was Flagpole Sitting. The object was simple: be the person who could sit atop the local flagpole for the longest period of time. Fifteen-year-old Avon Foreman of Baltimore set the amateur standard — ten days, ten hours, ten minutes, and ten seconds.

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Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and bandleader of a jazz orchestra. He led his jazz orchestra from 1923 until his death in 1974. His career spanned over 50 years.

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The famous novel Written by Zora Neale Hurston in 1937. The story is about Janie Crawford and her search for true love after been through three marriages. She not only finds out what true love looks like, she discovers herself in the process.

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Alain Locke was an important supporter of the Harlem Renaissance. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 13, 1886, and died on June 9, 1954. Alain Locke attended Harvard University, Oxford University, and University of Berlin. He was a gifted Philosopher, and is regarded as the originator of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement. Alain contributed to both movements was his emphasis on values, diversity, and race relations.

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The Harlem Riot of 1935 happened in New York City on March 19th due to unemployment and police brutality. It all started when a 16 year old boy named Rivera stole from store but then was caught. Officers took Rivera down to the basement of the store and beat him. Spectator though Rivera had been killed because a hearse showed up but no harm had been done to Rivera and wasn't killed. When the police tried to get rid of the big crowd of people, a riot broke loose over what happened.

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During the early 20th century, African-American poets, musicians, actors, artists and intellectuals moved to Harlem in New York City and brought new ideas that shifted the culture forever. From approximately 1918 to the mid 1930s, talent began to overflow within this newfound culture of the black community in Harlem, as prominent figures—Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, to name a few—pushed art to its limit as a form of expression and representation.

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Zora Neale Hurston was a famous novel writer during the Harlem Renaissance. Her most well known novel is, "Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, and died in 1960.

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In 1920, Jack Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion, opened the Club Deluxe on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in the center of Harlem. Owney Madden, a white gangster, took over operations in 1923 and renamed the venue the Cotton Club. Madden expanded the former 400-seat nightclub to 700 seats, and updated the decorations to reflect a stylish 'plantation environment' to cater to the upper-class white patrons who came to enjoy the performances of the best jazz musicians of the day. It quickly became the most popular cabaret in Harlem.

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The Harlem Renaissance was a period in American literature from the end of World War I to the 1930's. It included writers like Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. DuBois, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes, who wrote about the alienation and marginalization in American society.

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Men wore well-tailored pinstriped suits, tuxedos, silk shirts and handkerchiefs, raccoon fur coats, fedora hats, suspenders, bow ties, black patent leather shoes and spats. The fashion and clothing for men also included short suit jackets, cuffed trousers, waistcoats and wide-leg "Oxford Bags". Sports and leisure influenced other clothing like jumpers, jodhpurs  and knickerbockers. The famous 'Zoot Suit' was also a strong fashion statement for men during the Harlem Renaissance. During the 1920's, men abandoned formal clothes and began to wear sports clothing for the first time.

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No aspect of the Harlem Renaissance shaped America and the entire world as much as jazz. Jazz flouted many musical conventions with its syncopated rhythms and improvised instrumental solos. Thousands of people went night after night to see the same performers. Improvisation meant that no two performances would ever be the same. Harlem's Cotton Club boasted the talents of Duke Ellington. Singers such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday popularized blues and jazz vocals. Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong drew huge audiences as white Americans as well as African Americans caught jazz fever.

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The Cotton Club might be Harlem's most famous surviving jazz venue, but during the Harlem Renaissance that started after World War I and ended sometime during the Great Depression, it was also the neighborhood's most notorious. It had been opened by Jack Johnson, the first African American world heavyweight boxing champion, as the Club Deluxe (or Club De Luxe) in 1920. White gangster and bootlegger Owney "The Killer" Madden bought and took over the club in 1923-the same year he was released on parole from what would have been a twenty year-long imprisonment at Sing Sing. He would use the venue, which he had renamed the Cotton Club, primarily as a means to sell bootlegged alcohol. The club was closed in 1925 for selling alcohol, but quickly re-opened. After prohibition, the club continued to feature some of America's best jazz musicians, and attracted New York's celebrities and socialites.

Although almost all of the performers and servers at the venue were black, Madden's Cotton Club exclusively catered to white patrons; even the families of headlining black performers weren't allowed in. Langston Hughes described the venue as "a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites," and noted that white visitors to the neighborhood would flood "the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang, and where now the strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers-like amusing animals in a zoo."

One major craze of the Jazz Age was exoticism, or Westerners' romantic re-imagining of non-Westerners as being charmingly primitive and primal, and as such, the black dancers (who were only hired if they had light skin) were sometimes costumed to evoke exotic savages or animals, or dressed as plantation workers. The club did pay its performers extremely well, which could be the explanation for why so many talented black performers worked for the racist and anti-integrationist establishment.

The club kept up its exclusionary practices for seventeen years. Race riots caused the club's Harlem location to close in 1936, but a new Cotton Club was opened quickly enough at Broadway and 48th Street. It's current location on West 125th Street still caters to jazz lovers and swing dancers.
See more from our Vintage Photography column Image via The Library of Congress

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Vintage Photos: Inside the Cotton Club, One of NYC's Leading Jazz Venues of the 1920s and '30s

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The Cotton Club might be Harlem's most famous surviving jazz venue, but during the Harlem Renaissance that started after World War I and ended sometime during the Great Depression, it was also the neighborhood's most notorious. It had been opened by Jack Johnson, the first African American world heavyweight boxing champion, as the Club Deluxe (or Club De Luxe) in 1920.

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Disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws led many African-Americans to hope for a better life up in the north. Hate groups started to scare African-American  families in the deep South. Most blacks toiled as sharecroppers trapped in an endless cycle of debt. In the 1890s, a boll weevil blight damaged the cotton crop throughout the region, making things even worse. All these factors served to push African Americans to seek better lives. The increase northern economy forged the pull. Industrial jobs were numerous, and factory owner for sources of cheap labor.

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Life was a cultural movement in the United States that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. While the zenith of the movement occurred between 1924 and 1929, its ideas have lived on much longer.

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Langston Hughes was an African Poet who wrote poems about the joys and difficulties of being human, American, and being black. Langston Hughes lived from 1902 to 1967. Some Langston Hughes poems are Dream Variations, Theme for English B, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Night Funeral In Harlem, and Madam's Past History.

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Spanning the 1920s to the mid-1930s, the Harlem Renaissance was a literary, artistic, and intellectual movement that kindled a new black cultural identity. Its essence was summed up by critic and teacher Alain Locke in 1926 when he declared that through art, “Negro life is seizing its first chances for group expression and self determination.” Harlem became the center of a “spiritual coming of age” in which Locke’s “New Negro” transformed “social disillusionment to race pride.” Chiefly literary, the Renaissance included the visual arts but excluded jazz, despite its parallel emergence as a black art form.

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James Weldon Johnson was the leading writer in the Harlem Group. He is also known best for his role as executive director of the NAACP. Some poems by James Weldon Johnson are The Creation, Go Down Death, and Lift Every Voice and Sing.