THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE emerges after a period of slavery in which black people had to suffer the atrocities of their masters.

The first thing that slaves produced were slaves narratives. Many years after the Harlem Renaissance came.

Dubois and Booker T. Washington are considered the main fathers of the Harlem Renaissance. Critics do not agree about the birth of H.R. Traditionally, Negro writing started with the Renaissance. Black music becomes international, groups of writers joined forming a cultural movement and tried to articulate a black self-conscience.

There were several reasons for the emergence of Harlem Renaissance.

In all these years up to the 1930´s there is a great activity in Harlem that becomes the first Negro city in the world. H.R does not only refer to literature but also sculpture, music, arts,...These is a movement supported by an elite of intellectual black people. The Harlem Renaissance disappears because of economic reasons ( Crack 1929).

Important authors of these period are Jean Toomer, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston

What was the Harlem Renaissance?

From 1920 until about 1930 an unprecedented outburst of creative activity among African-Americans occurred in all fields of art. Beginning as a series of literary discussions in the lower Manhattan (Greenwich Village) and upper Manhattan (Harlem) sections of New York City, this African-American cultural movement became known as "The New Negro Movement" and later as the Harlem Renaissance. More than a literary movement and more than a social revolt against racism, the Harlem Renaissance exalted the unique culture of African-Americans and redefined African-American expression. African-Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage and to become "The New Negro," a term coined in 1925 by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke.

One of the factors contributing to the rise of the Harlem Renaissance was the great migration of African-Americans to northern cities (such as New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.) between 1919 and 1926. In his influential book The New Negro (1925), Locke described the northward migration of blacks as "something like a spiritual emancipation." Black urban migration, combined with trends in American society as a whole toward experimentation during the 1920s, and the rise of radical black intellectuals - including Locke, Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis magazine - all contributed to the particular styles and unprecedented success of black artists during the Harlem Renaissance period.