Harlem Renaissance: Black Cultural Resistance and Intellectual Flourishing

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s produced a flowering of Black literature, art, music, and intellectual life that challenged white supremacist narratives of Black inferiority. Writers Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer; artists Aaron Douglas; musicians Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong created a body of work asserting Black humanity, dignity, and creative genius. Hughes's 1926 essay 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' declared cultural independence from white validation and the right to create on Black terms.