Harlem Renaissance

American  

noun

1. a renewal and flourishing of Black literary and musical culture during the years after World War I in the Harlem section of New York City.

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Harlem Renaissance Cultural  

1. An African-American cultural movement of the 1920s and 1930s, centered in Harlem, that celebrated black traditions, the black voice, and black ways of life. Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, and Dorothy West were some of the writers associated with the movement.

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Example Sentences

I’ve always been a fan of the Harlem renaissance.

From Seattle Times • Sep. 23, 2021

A friend recommended she read “Passing,” Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella examining the fluidity of racial identity as it pertains to two light-skinned Black women living in New York amid the Harlem renaissance.

From Los Angeles Times • Jan. 29, 2021

Nearly 100 years after the Harlem renaissance, the thoroughfare is still considered a historic nexus of black New York and the theater one of the most renowned places in the world for black performers.

From New York Times • Jun. 18, 2018

“Sometimes I romanticise – I go back even to the Harlem renaissance, when people would say, ‘This book isn’t going to sell but I believe in you.’

From The Guardian • Oct. 26, 2016

The son of intellectuals in New York City, themselves deeply involved in the Harlem renaissance of the '20s, Bearden spent long stretches of his boyhood and youth in the rural South and industrial Pittsburgh.

From Time Magazine Archive