The Harlem Renaissance was a massive cultural movement that swept the black community from 1919 until the mid-1930s in the United States. This movement saw incredible amounts of music, literature, poetry and theater emerge from the African-American community, particularly in Harlem, New York. While the United States had seen trickles of African-American contributions to culture in the previous decades after slavery, this opened the floodgates. This paper will address the roots of the renaissance, particularly seeking to understand the structural conditions that existed, allowing the African-American community to flourish and thrive in this period culturally.
Preliminary investigation shows the rising economic prosperity may have played a major role in this situation. The black community was clearly economically depressed during the Reconstruction Period, and some government programs were established to alleviate this issue. In the early 1910s, the community began to massively migrate into the large cities, fulfilling a need for unskilled labor in the lead-up (and during) the First World War. This not only gave black men and women job opportunities, but also created densely packed urban areas filled with young African-American people, in the much more socially open and accepting North instead of the rural and conservative South.
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"Economic Prosperity of the Roaring Twenties and the Harlem Renaissance".
This paper will examine this newfound economic prosperity and seek to understand its role. The primary form of investigation will be through examination of the lives of prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance. By examining their biographies, the research will determine the role of the economic prosperity brought on by the Roaring Twenties. Care will be taken to select a large enough sample of personalities, as well as to ensure they are representative of the renaissance as a whole. Finally, other mechanisms will be considered, including mass migration and general relaxation of cultural norms. These alternative hypotheses will be researched in the same manner and compared to the primary hypthosis.
