Harlem Renaissance

This guide provides access to selected Library of Congress digital and print resources as well as links to external websites on the Harlem Renaissance that include: related resources; Today in History; external websites; and selected bibliographies.

The Virtual Harlem project is a virtual representation of Harlem, New York as it existed during the Harlem Renaissance/Jazz Age. The project is one of the earliest virtual reality environments created for use in the humanities and especially for the use in an African American literature course.

Poets.org offers information on notable Harlem Renaissance poets, including Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Arna Bontemps, and Countee Cullen. Poets’ pages include biographical information, lists of their published works, and external links to other helpful websites.

In its 20-year span, Harlem Renaissance writers created an authentic voice for African-Americans that showed their humanity and desire for equality in the United States' society.

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s was a period characterized by an outpouring of literature by African Americans. Although it was primarily a literary and intellectual movement, it is our hope to also explore the role of the visual arts, music and performing arts. This cultural renaissance was not limited to Harlem, but was evident in other cities across the country.

While the Harlem Renaissance may be best known for its literary and performing arts—pioneering figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Ma Rainey may be familiar—sculptors, painters, and printmakers were key contributors to the first modern Afrocentric cultural movement and formed a black avant-garde in the visual arts.

The New Negro Renaissance is the most widely discussed period of African-American literary history not only because of ongoing scholarly debates over its origins, beginning, and end, but also because of its fundamental importance to twentieth-century thought and culture. The Renaissance coincided with the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the Lost Generation, and its impact was keenly felt on an individual and collective level within the African-American community as well as on America's robust cultural industries, music, film, theater—all of which fully benefited from the creativity and newly discovered contributions of African Americans.

This website & blog are from the National Museum of African American History & Culture. The Great Migration drew to Harlem some of the greatest minds and brightest talents of the day, an astonishing array of African American artists and scholars. Between the end of World War I and the mid-1930s, they produced one of the most significant eras of cultural expression in the nation’s history—the Harlem Renaissance. Yet this cultural explosion also occurred in Cleveland, Los Angeles and many cities shaped by the great migration.

esurgence in black culture, also called the New Negro Movement, which took place in the 1920s and early 1930s, primarily in Harlem, a neighborhood of the New York City borough of Manhattan, but also in major cities throughout the USA, such as Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, Atlanta, and Washington, DC, as well as in the Caribbean and in Paris.

A wonderful digital archive that includes information on the artists, actors, dancers, writers, and supporters of the Harlem Renaissance period. Sponsored by the Kennedy Center for the Arts.

One of the most consulted collections at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, which has thousands of objects related to the Harlem Renaissance. This archive of art, literature, photographs, and ephemera is the foundation for Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaissance & The Beinecke Library, a building-wide exhibition at the recently renovated institution.

Find resources related to the authors, film, artists, and music of the 1920s in America & Europe