1. HARLEM RENAISSANCE
African-American Culture in the 1920’s

2. Harlem: A neighborhood in New York City. The
center of the African American political, cultural,
and artistic movement in the 1920s and early 1930s.

3. The Neighborhood

4. Push Factors:
Why to Get Out of the South
• Jim Crow laws
• Lynching and KKK
• Flood
• Boll Weevil infestation

5. Pull Factors:
Why to Head North
• Jobs
• NAACP
• Leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois
and Booker T. Washington
inspire people

6. Title
1930
1920
1911
1920

7. The Harlem section of New York
City was transformed from a
deteriorating area into a thriving
middle class community
Before
After

8. Rise of the Black Middle Class

9. Rise of the Black Elite

10. Flowering of Black Culture
• Harlem Renaissance:
A period of time during
the 1920’s and early
1930’s when a group
of talented African-
American writers,
thinkers and artists
made a sizable
contribution to
American culture

11. Music: Jazz
• Began with African-American
musicians in New Orleans and
transported North during Great
Migration
• Blended blues and ragtime with
improvisation and syncopated
rhythms to produce totally new
sound
• Has been called the single greatest
contribution Americans have
made to world culture
• Jazz influenced all American
popular music that came after it

12. THE JAZZ AGE
• The era from right after WWI until the stock
market crash in 1929, during which jazz
increased in popularity. It was a reaction to
the hardship of the war and was characterized
by prosperity, extravagance and self-indulgent
behavior

13. Louis Armstrong
Greatest trumpet player of the Jazz
Age
Reinvented the range of sounds a
trumpet makes

14. Duke Ellington
Master composer and
bandleader who wrote over
1,000 jazz songs

15. Great Jazz Singers
Billie Holliday
Bessie Smith
Ella Fitzgerald

16. Cotton Club Apollo Theater
Many Jazz artists got their start at the Apollo
Theater or the Cotton Club in Harlem

17. Literature
• At the same time, African-
American authors were
giving their own voice to
the experience of being
black in America
• Plays depicting African-
Americans with complex
emotions are put on stage
(challenged minstrel
images)

18. LANGSTON HUGHES
• Poet, playwright and
novelist
• His first collection of poems:
I, Too, Sing America (1925)

19. HARLEM
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
--Langston Hughes

20. ZORA NEALE HURSTON
• Novelist, short story writer,
folklorist and anthropologist
• Novel: Their Eyes Were
Watching God
• Major influence on Ralph
Ellison, Toni Morrison and
Alice Walker

21. INTELLECTUALS:
MARCUS GARVEY
• Became convinced
uniting blacks only way to
improve their condition
• Founded the United Negro
Improvement Association
in 1914 to unite blacks
• Back-to-Africa movement
• Goal to form their own
country
• Black Star Line: fleet of
ships used by the UNIA