The Harlem Renaissance (also called the New Negro Movement) was a social, cultural, and artistic movement of African-American writers and painters between about 1920 and 1930.
The Harlem Renaissance was the first flowering of African-American art that went beyond individual works. Similar to the jazz era, the movement was triggered by the mass exodus of African-Americans from the southern states to the north (Great Migration). In New York's Harlem district, the African-American Philip Payton had taken over the real estate market from 1904 to a large extent. Since that time - and especially in the 1920s - Harlem had become synonymous with African American culture as the black middle class lived there.
The anthology The New Negro (1925), edited by Alain LeRoy Locke, had a major impact on the movement, in which the philosopher and critic collected prose, poetry, plays, and essays from a new generation of African-American authors. In his preface, Locke described the migration from the southern states to the north as "a kind of spiritual liberation" through which Afro-American art was able to develop its own identity for the first time - beyond the white role models. In the art of the Harlem renaissance also African traditions, African-American traditions as well as gospel and jazz play a big role. White writers, especially the journalist and photographer Carl van Vechten, also supported the movement - and were influenced by it. The patron Charlotte Mason employed and promoted a number of artists, but also had her own understanding of Native American and African American culture.
