The Harlem Renaissance (1917–1935)
The flowering of African American literature, music, theater, and art centered in Harlem, New York, made possible by the Great Migration. Writers, musicians, and intellectuals asserted a new Black cultural identity while debating its purpose — amid the segregation of the Jim Crow era.
Timeline
The Silent Protest Parade
After a white mob killed dozens of Black residents in East St. Louis, the NAACP organized a silent march down Fifth Avenue of roughly 10,000 African Americans, led by children in white and women in black. Organized with W.E.B. Du Bois's involvement, it was one of the first mass civil rights demonstrations in U.S. history and signaled a new assertiveness among Black New Yorkers.
Location: New York City, USA
The Harlem Hellfighters Come Home
The 369th Infantry Regiment, a Black National Guard unit barred from serving under U.S. command and instead attached to the French army, returned from 191 days of front-line duty in World War I as one of the most decorated American regiments. Denied a place in the official victory parade in Paris, they received their own welcome home up Fifth Avenue to Harlem, where hundreds of thousands turned out.
Location: New York City, USA
Shuffle Along Opens on Broadway
The Black-written and Black-performed musical "Shuffle Along," with music by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, became an unexpected Broadway hit, running for over 500 performances. It launched the careers of Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, and Florence Mills, put Harlem on the entertainment map, and inspired a wave of Black-produced theater and nightclub openings along and near Seventh Avenue.
Location: New York City, USA
The Cotton Club Opens
The Cotton Club opened in a former clubhouse once owned by boxer Jack Johnson, under gangster Owney Madden, in a building at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue. It became Harlem's most famous nightclub, presenting Black entertainers to whites-only audiences under Jim Crow conventions — a paradox that both built stars and embodied the era's segregation. Duke Ellington's orchestra became its house band.
Location: New York City, USA
The New Negro Anthology Is Published
Philosopher Alain Locke published "The New Negro," an anthology assembling the era's leading Black writers, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen. Growing out of a special Harlem issue of Survey Graphic magazine edited largely by Locke and Jessie Fauset, the book declared that a generation had discarded stereotypes and demanded recognition as a self-defined people.
Location: New York City, USA
Langston Hughes Publishes "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"
In an essay in The Nation, 24-year-old Langston Hughes rejected the pressure on Black artists to emulate white standards, writing that the Black artist should express "our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame." The essay crystallized a running debate between younger writers, who embraced working-class Black culture and jazz aesthetics, and older figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who argued art should serve racial uplift.
Location: New York City, USA
Duke Ellington's Cotton Club Broadcasts
Duke Ellington's orchestra began its residency at the Cotton Club, with his music branded "jungle music" by club promoters even as he composed increasingly sophisticated suites. Weekly radio broadcasts carried Ellington's sound from Harlem into homes across America, making him a national figure and one of the era's most influential composers.
Location: New York City, USA
The Wall Street Crash Ends the Party
The stock market collapse ended the prosperity that had financed Harlem's nightclubs, publishing ventures, and white patronage of Black artists. Charitable foundations cut the fellowships that had supported writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, magazine markets for Black writing shrank, and the neighborhood's economy — already strained, since many Harlemites had been excluded from the boom — deteriorated further as the Great Depression deepened.
Location: New York City, USA
The Apollo Theater Opens to Black Audiences
The Apollo Theater, which had earlier excluded Black patrons, reopened under new management serving Harlem's African American community with its celebrated amateur nights. Launching its famous Amateur Hour that same year, it became the premier stage for Black performing artists — from Ella Fitzgerald, who won the first Amateur Night, to the swing-era bands that carried the Renaissance's musical legacy forward.
Location: New York City, USA
The Harlem Riot Ends the Era
Rumors that police had killed a Black teenager arrested for shoplifting — the boy had in fact been released — triggered a riot in which three people died and hundreds of stores were damaged. A commission headed by E. Franklin Frazier documented the underlying causes: unemployment, police discrimination, and the exclusion of Black residents from Harlem's retail economy. Historians generally mark the riot as the end of the Harlem Renaissance proper, though its writers and musicians had already transformed American culture.
Location: New York City, USA