Harlem Becomes Center of Black Radical Political Thought and Cultural Production

By 1919, Harlem, New York had become the center of Black American intellectual, cultural, and political life, concentrated by the Great Migration and by New York's somewhat less restrictive racial environment. The NAACP's headquarters, A. Philip Randolph's Messenger, Marcus Garvey's Negro World, and W.E.B. Du Bois's Crisis all operated from New York. Harlem hosted political debates, cultural events, and organizing that would define the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The concentration of Black talent, capital, and institutions created conditions for the most significant flowering of Black American culture since Reconstruction.