The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance

This article relates to A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

Tia Williams' novel A Love Song for Ricki Wilde contains flashbacks to the Harlem Renaissance, considered a golden age for Black culture and art in the United States. This movement, centered in Manhattan's Harlem neighborhood, took place between the 1910s and 1930s.

During the period known as the Great Migration, when large numbers of Black families from the American South began to move north, many landed in Harlem. The neighborhood became a cultural destination as nightclubs and underground speakeasies opened at a time when jazz music was beginning to flourish. Greats like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington regularly performed in Harlem, often accompanied by large stage shows. Integrated bars like The Savoy featured dancing late into the night. It was in bars like these that iconic 1920s dance fads, such as the Charleston and tap dancing, began to gain popularity.

The first Broadway musical to be written and produced by Black people, Shuffle Along, debuted in 1921 and launched the careers of notable performers, including Josephine Baker and Adelaide Hall. It broke new ground by featuring a serious Black love story that wasn't played for comedic effect. Following its success, more Black-produced musicals appeared on Broadway.

Visual art by Black American artists took off like never before, with some drawing inspiration from African art traditions. Perhaps the most well-known of these is Aaron Douglas, who trained as a landscape painter before finding the unique approach he would be remembered for. His highly stylized silhouettes of Black subjects were informed by both the contemporary art deco movement and the flat aesthetic of ancient Egyptian art.

The Black literary scene also experienced massive growth, with writers like Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes gaining acclaim. Hughes was a developer of jazz poetry, a literary style that echoes the rhythms and repetition of jazz music. He also wrote plays, short stories, and non-fiction, and was a tireless champion for the Black working class. The novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston introduced books that depicted the lived experiences of Black people in the South in a way no white author could. Work by Black writers began to be picked up by mainstream publications like Harper's.

The Harlem Renaissance was closely tied to the beginnings of the civil rights movement, as popular Black writers and public intellectuals began to speak of Black pride, and magazines published by the NAACP and the National Urban League featured celebrated Black literary voices.

A number of factors played into the winding down of the era, including the 1929 stock market crash that began the Great Depression, as well as the end of prohibition in 1933, which made speakeasies less of a draw.

While the Harlem Renaissance took place during a deeply racist time, it permanently cracked open the doors of Broadway and major publishing houses to Black artists, and paved the way for the civil rights movement. Work from the period, like Louis Armstrong's music and Langston Hughes's poetry, continues to make an impact today.

Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction by Aaron Douglas, 1934
From The New York Public Library

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This "beyond the book article" relates to A Love Song for Ricki Wilde. It originally ran in March 2024 and has been updated for the February 2025 paperback edition. Go to magazine.