- Decade of extraordinary creativity in the arts for black Americans
- Creativity found its focus in the activities of Africans Americans living in New York City, particularly in the district of Harlem
- In poetry, fiction, drama, and the essay, as in music, dance, painting, and sculpture, African Americans worked not only with a new sense of confidence and purpose but also with a sense of achievement
- The irresistible impulse black Americans to create boldly expressive art of high quality as a primary response to their social conditions, as an affirmation of their dignity and humanity
- Negritude was a movement, mainly among French speaking black writers, that emphasized a distinctly African aesthetic
- Harlem and New York were crucial to the movement in the United States
- New York City became a magnet source for thousands of blacks fleeing the south due to legal segregation (Plessy v. Fegrguson) in the south
- Blacks settled in New York City and several northern cities (e.x. Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland)
- Harlem was the home to all classes of blacks, including the leading writers and artists
- World War I (1914-1918), United States in 1917 and whites were joining the army, made job opportunities availble to blacks
- National interest in African American culture grew by a variety of factors, such as jazz and blues
- Writer and civil rights leader, James Weldon Johnson quoted " Harlem was becoming the Negro capital of the world
- Harlem and New York were headquarters to many important African American organizations
- National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association
- Ridgely Torrence's plays featured black actors who represented yearnings and complex emotions
- James Weldon Johnson, (1922) Book of American Negro Poetry (emphasized the promise of youthful writers)
- The New Negro (1925) helped to define the emergence of the movement
- The 1920s saw a rise in accomplished musicians
- Carl Van Vechten and Charlotte Osgood Mason were white figures during the renaissance
- Occupational conflicts and tensions grew among the writers and artists
Harlem Shadows
I hear the halting footsteps of a lass
In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall
Its veil. I see the shapes of girls who pass
To bend and barter at desire's call.
Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet
Go prowling through the night from street to street!
Through the long night until the silver break
Of day the little gray feet know no rest;
Through the lone night until the last snow-flake
Has dropped from heaven upon the earth's white breast,
The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet
Are trudging, thinly shod, from street to street.
Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way
Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace,
Has pushed the timid little feet of clay,
The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!
Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet
In Harlem wandering from street to street.