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

“America was never America to me,” wrote the Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes in 1935’s Let America Be America Again.

From The Guardian • Nov. 6, 2017

Yet only now, on the cusp of a new decade, are there tentative signs of another Harlem renaissance.

From Time Magazine Archive