Harlem Renaissance

A period of musical, literary, and cultural proliferation in the African-American community during the 1920s and early 1930s, especially focused around metropolitan areas including New York City.

Fenton Johnson was born and raised in Chicago. The son of one of the city’s wealthiest African American families, he attended the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Columbia University...

Born in Boston, poet and playwright Angelina Weld Grimké was named after her great-aunt, the abolitionist and suffragist Angelina Grimké Weld. Grimké earned a degree from the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics...

Born in Philadelphia, Mae V. Cowdery first published poetry in high school, when three of her poems appeared in the Philadelphia-based magazine Black Opals. That same year, she won the Crisis poetry contest...

Helene Johnson was born in Boston and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts. She never knew her father, and her mother was the child of former slaves. Johnson lived for a time at her grandfather’s house, as well...

Harlem Renaissance poet and activist Anne Bethel Scales Bannister Spencer was born on a Virginia farm in 1882. The daughter of former slaves, Spencer’s mother enrolled her in school for the first time when...

William Waring Cuney (he/him) was born in Washington, DC, in 1906, with his twin brother Norris Wright. Their parents were Norris Wright Cuney II and Madge Louise Baker.Waring Cuney’s work often addressed ...

An important figure in African-American literature, Jean Toomer (1894—1967) was born in Washington, DC, the grandson of the first governor of African-American descent in the United States. A poet, playwright...

James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He distinguished himself equally as a man of letters and as a civil rights leader in the early decades of the 20th century. A talented poet and novelist...

Sterling Allen Brown devoted his life to the development of an authentic black folk literature. A poet, critic, and teacher at Howard University for 40 years, Brown was one of the first people to identify ...

Like his close friend Langston Hughes and their fellow writers in the Harlem Renaissance, Arna Bontemps explored African-American experience in a wide variety of genres. As a poet, novelist, historian, anthologist...

Countee Cullen is one of the most representative voices of the Harlem Renaissance. His life story is essentially a tale of youthful exuberance and talent of a star that flashed across the African American ...

A member of the Harlem Renaissance, Georgia Douglas Johnson wrote plays, a syndicated newspaper column, and four collections of poetry: The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), An Autumn Love Cycle (1928...

Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Jamaica in 1889, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating...

Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem...

W. E. B. Du Bois was at the vanguard of the civil rights movement in America. Of French and African descent, Du Bois grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and attended Fisk University in Tennessee. After...