By Jonathan Anthony Burkett
Between the end of World War I and the mid-1930s, a few square miles of upper Manhattan produced poems, novels, songs, paintings and ideas that changed how America saw Black life, and how Black Americans saw themselves. We call it the Harlem Renaissance. The story is more than a history lesson. It shows what happens when people decide their own voices matter and build the platforms to be heard.
How Harlem Became the Center
The Harlem Renaissance grew out of the Great Migration, when large numbers of Black Southerners moved north in the early twentieth century. They were looking for work and for a life away from Jim Crow segregation and racial violence. Many of them settled in Harlem, which quickly became one of the most important Black communities in the country.
Harlem also drew people from the Caribbean, including Jamaica. Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica in 1914, grew it into a mass movement from Harlem, and Jamaican-born poet and novelist Claude McKay became one of the era's major writers. The mix of Southern, Northern and Caribbean experiences gave the neighborhood an energy that showed up in everything its artists made.
The Writers Who Found Their Voice
Literature sat at the heart of the movement. Langston Hughes wrote poetry shaped by the rhythms of jazz and blues and centered on ordinary working people. Zora Neale Hurston collected Black Southern folklore and wrote fiction rich with everyday speech; her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, came out in 1937. Countee Cullen wrote formal, musical poems, and Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) mixed poetry and prose in a way readers had not seen before.
Ideas traveled through print. Alain Locke edited The New Negro (1925), an anthology that became a kind of mission statement for the period. Magazines such as The Crisis, published by the NAACP and edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, and Opportunity, from the National Urban League, gave new writers a place to publish and a reason to keep going.
The Sound of the Era
If writing was the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, music was its heartbeat. Jazz and blues filled clubs, theaters and apartments across the neighborhood. Duke Ellington led his orchestra at the Cotton Club, Louis Armstrong reshaped what a soloist could do, and Bessie Smith became one of the most powerful blues voices of her time.
There was a painful contradiction here too. Some of Harlem's most famous clubs, the Cotton Club among them, featured Black performers while turning away Black customers. The artists still found ways to make the music their own, and through records and radio it reached far beyond Harlem's streets. Much of the music people love today, from soul to hip hop, can trace part of its family tree back to these years.
Art, Theater and the Question of Who Gets to Tell the Story
Visual artists added their own language. Aaron Douglas created bold, layered illustrations and murals drawing on African and African American history, and sculptor Augusta Savage became both an artist and a teacher to younger talent. On Broadway, Shuffle Along (1921), by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, helped open the door for Black performers and creators on the American stage.
Underneath it all was a big question: who gets to define Black life? Some leaders believed art should serve the fight for civil rights. Younger artists, Hughes among them, argued that they should be free to write honestly about all of Black experience, the beautiful and the messy, without asking permission. That debate about authenticity and self-definition still matters to every creator today.
Why It Faded, and Why It Never Really Ended
The Great Depression hit Harlem hard. Money for publishing, patronage and nightlife dried up, and by the mid-1930s the movement had lost much of its momentum. But the work did not disappear. Later generations of writers, civil rights activists and musicians built directly on what Harlem had started.
If you make anything, whether books, music, art or a business, the Harlem Renaissance still has practical lessons to offer:
- Tell your own story in your own voice. The work that lasted was honest about real life, not polished to please outsiders.
- Build your own platforms. Magazines, anthologies and community spaces gave artists a way to be heard without waiting to be chosen.
- Lean on community. Writers, musicians and painters fed off each other's ideas and pushed each other forward.
- Mix your influences. Southern roots, city life and Caribbean culture blended into something new.
- Think long term. Many of these works found their biggest audiences decades after they were made.
Carrying the Spirit Forward
That same do-it-yourself spirit lives on in independent creators today. Jonathan Anthony Burkett, for example, publishes his own books and releases his music through his own label, Upstormed Records, telling stories of resilience, faith and love on his own terms.
The best way to honor the Harlem Renaissance is to read it, listen to it and then make something of your own. Start with a Langston Hughes poem or a Duke Ellington record, then keep the conversation going with stories by a writer working in that tradition today. You can explore Jonathan's books here.
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