During the 1920s, Harlem, New York saw a “dramatic upsurge of creativity in literature, music, and art within black America” (Rampersad, 1992, p. ix). It was attributable to World War I and the Great Migration, which landed 1.75 million southern and Caribbean blacks in northern cities between 1915 and 1930 alone.

Many blacks in the arts migrated to Harlem seeking opportunities. They were young, usually college-educated, and voiced the “New Negro.” Their promoters included magazine editors Charles S. Johnson (Opportunity) and W. E. B. Du Bois (Crisis), and white patrons such as philanthropist Charlotte O. Mason and photographer-writer Carl Van Vechten, who provided financial and media support. Cultural artists expressed the race pride and dignity of ordinary and elite blacks alike. Band leader Fletcher Henderson and others did so through music. Harlem's nightlife highlighted the chic Cotton Club, with black chorus girls and a mostly white clientele, as well as “rent parties” among migrants in the tenements.

A landmark of the renaissance was The New Negro (1925), edited by Alain Locke, “dean of the movement” and professor of philosophy at Howard University. In the anthology, he showcased emerging talents, including Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston in fiction and Claude McKay and Langston Hughes in poetry. In short stories, novels, paintings, and poems, they celebrated black history and life, blues and jazz music, popular song and dance, and hope for black civil rights and self-determination.