Listen to part of a lecture in an African American history class. The professor has been discussing the early part of the 20th century. Harlem renaissance, unprecedented in united states culture and history, introduced a significant period that emphasized self identity as well as group consciousness among black people both in the United States and abroad. Now, to sharpen my definition a bit, it was a literary awakening that occurred among African Americans that was characterized by an assertiveness on their part and an outburst of creativity never seen before. There were several major figures or writers who produced fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and so forth during the period. The writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Langston Hughes fashioned innovative literary forms. What Hughes really wanted to do was to somehow capture the folk traditions of his people and incorporate them into new forms he he wanted to create, and to improve upon conventional forms. It's not that he was against using conventional forms. It's just that he wanted to improve upon them or create one's more reflective of the heritage of his people. So in doing that, what he did was incorporate blues, Jazz, spiritual zahn, many of the forms of the African American musical idiom into his poetry. he was the first, for example, uh, to write a gospel play. And then there was Zora Neale Hurston, who published her classic novel. Their eyes were watching god in 1937. She was one who celebrated like Hughes. She celebrated the folk traditions of African Americans and infused dialect folklore. she was an anthropologist and a folklorist. So he worked within those mediums to produce worker, a celebrity of her heritage. Most of the cultural activity was centered in Harlem in New York city, which was at the time one of the largest cosmopolitan communities in the world. But the kinds of changes that were occurring among African Americans at Harlem were also taking place across the country. In various cities, especially in the urban North, like Washington, DC, Chicago, Illinois, even Cleveland, Ohio. so a more general term is sometimes used to describe the kinds of changes that took place, and that's the new negro renaissance. and what about du bois? Wasn't he responsible for the start of this renaissance? It's dubious. well, historians have traditionally dated the Harlem renaissance or the beginnings of the renaissance to the 1920s. but though these dates are debatable, some feel that the sudden flourishing of literature, you see in the twenties was a result of the movements that started much earlier. for instance, in 1903 de boys publication, the souls of black folks do boys. Book was one of the first works that began to explore black identity and personality, uh, with this emphasis on double consciousness of blacks, or as the boys put it, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others. in 1906, the boys LED a meeting in the town of Niagara falls of various leaders from the African American communities. And they advocated racial, social, and economic equality for African Americans. and this was the beginning of the so called Niagara movement, which spawned a number of civil rights organizations that were formed during the time. another factor was the great migration that began at the turn of the century and lasted well into the 1930s. it was a movement of more than 1 million blacks who left the rural communities in the southern US and moved to the city's, many of them in the North, like Chicago, Cleveland, or New York city. and why did they leave? There were many reasons, but for the most part, they left because they were in search of the economic dream. There was a shortage of labor in the cities, and African Americans from the south were seeking paid labor. they were also trying to escape the inherent inequities and institutional racism of the south. When you say they were seeking to get away from unfair treatment in the south was living in the North really that much different from living in the south back then? you might think it was. But those discriminatory practices existed everywhere in the US they were in the south, but in the North as well. this was also a problem, black world war one veterans faced. When they returned from fighting in the war in 1918, they had risked their lives for the country. So when they got home, they were no longer willing to accept second class citizenship. and they began to advocate equality and to become more defiant and assertive. And so this was a mood, of course, that was characteristic of the Harlem renaissance.