What Was the Harlem Renaissance?

The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a movement of the 1920s and ’30s that sought to redefine Black identity through literature, music, painting, photography, and intellectual thought. It was a direct response to negative stereotypical images that proliferated throughout popular culture in the United States in the wake of the Civil War. Well into the 20th century, depictions of Black people as Sambos, mammies, and pickaninnies, appearing on everyday household items and in popular entertainments, were meant to justify segregation. The New Negro, as an educated and cultured Black person, was a direct rejection of those stereotypical images.

As a major predecessor of the Harlem Renaissance, Black abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) recognized the power of images and used his own image to combat racism, becoming one of the most photographed Americans of the 19th century. He wanted to project intelligence, strength, and dignity, and he called for truthful images of Black people. But positive imagery alone could not change the Jim Crow laws that ruled the South.

Beginning around 1916, African Americans began to move out of the South, where they were largely unprotected from violence and inequality. This Great Migration saw the relocation of approximately 1.5 million African Americans from the South to start new lives in northern cities, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit. Sharecropping, the primary form of work in the South for Black people, was not much better than slavery, as the system kept sharecroppers in debt to those who owned the land that they worked. There were industrial jobs in the North that paid better. And because World War I (1914–1918) created a labor shortage, Black workers could fill a need.

At the same time, Black intellectuals were defining the concept of the New Negro as a generation of Black people who rejected racial stereotypes and demanded full participation in American society. In 1925 the writer and educator Alain Locke, often called the “father of the Harlem Renaissance,” published the anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, which featured writings from premier Black thinkers of the day. In his essay “The New Negro,” Locke wrote, “For the younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the masses, and under the very eyes of the professional observers is transforming what has been a perennial problem into the progressive phases of contemporary Negro life.”

With the mass movement of Black people to Harlem in the 1920s, the neighborhood—an area of upper Manhattan covering roughly 1.4 square miles—became known as the “mecca of the New Negro.” And in that mecca, the visual arts flourished. The art world was changing with innovations by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, who looked to African art as inspiration, and Locke encouraged Black artists to do the same in order to shape a new cultural identity. While the capital of the art world was moving from Paris to New York around this time, Black artists were still excluded from the mainstream. Instead of showing their work in major galleries and museums, they exhibited in patrons’ homes, churches, and school gymnasiums.

The Harmon Foundation was instrumental in getting the work of Black artists seen by larger audiences. With the guidance of Locke, Mary Beattie Brady led the philanthropic organization, which was established by William E. Harmon, a white real estate developer. The foundation awarded Black people’s achievement in fine arts, business, education, literature, music, race relations, religious service, and science. The prizes granted to artists who won the fine arts awards were career changing. They afforded artists like Hale Woodruff, Meta Warrick Fuller, Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, James A. Porter, and Archibald Motley Jr. the opportunity to become known to a wider audience and in some cases travel to Europe to study.

One of the most successful Harlem artists of the time, Aaron Douglas, used African forms in his work to create art comparable to that of European modernists like Picasso and Matisse. Douglas found his way to Harlem from Topeka, Kansas, after reading about the neighborhood in The Crisis, for which he would later create illustrations. He once said, “We can go to African life and get a certain amount of form and color, understanding and using this knowledge in development of an expression that interprets our life.”

With the encouragement of Winold Reiss, a German portraitist, Douglas began to employ African themes in his work. By flattening his figures, using bold geometric shapes, painting silhouettes, and employing African motifs, his work defined the visual art of the movement. Douglas’s Aspects of Negro Life, his most famous work, was created in 1934. Each of the piece’s four panels memorializes an aspect of the African American story, visually narrating the journey of Black people from Africa to enslavement to the Harlem Renaissance.

Augusta Savage, an outspoken artist who gained notoriety during the Harlem Renaissance, received the Otter Kahn prize from the Harmon Foundation in 1928 for her acclaimed sculpture Head of a Negro. She sculpted portraits of notable Black figures, including W.E.B. DuBois. From 1929 to 1931, she studied in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and exhibited her work at Salon d’Automne. In 1934, she became the first African American to join the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. Savage was also an educator who became the first director of the Harlem Community Arts Center where she would teach and mentor emerging artists, including Jacob Lawrence.

Another artist of the Harlem Renaissance was James Van Der Zee, who, through his photography, showed how the people of Harlem were flourishing. Van Der Zee’s photo studio captured their essence. His were not standard photographs but meticulously staged tableaux with props to tell the stories of the sitters. Van Der Zee’s photographs are evidence of a people coming into their own.

The Harlem Renaissance had profound implications for the social, cultural, and intellectual life of Black people. Black artists developed poetry, novels, music, and fine art that challenged the dominant culture and solidified a space for Black people in American artistic production. But most of all, they advocated for civil rights. This movement made known the intellect and talent of Black people and influenced future movements demanding the equal rights that Black people deserved.