The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and social explosion in the first two decades of the 1900s which epicenter was placed in Harlem, New York.
Before that many of the African Americans lived in rural areas, they started to move from the south after the abolition of slavery and they went to the north. With the outcome of the First World War, many people began to move from rural areas to the industrialized cities to give a hand. That started to create a new mass culture which ended in the Harlem Renaissance.