The Harlem Renaissance

After World War I, the Harlem Renaissance emerged in Harlem as an African American cultural movement from 1919 to 1929, as an extraordinary collection of writers, poets, musicians, artists, and socialites converged there during the Great Migration. Driven by disenfranchisement, segregation, and an escalation of lynching and racist violence, countless African Americans fled the South in search of a new beginning. Many of the artists and performers identified with the Harlem Renaissance were bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgender. Writers including Countee Cullen, Angelina Weld Grimké, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Wallace Thurman saw themselves for the first time as part of a broad cultural movement to shape the destiny of African Americans. Artists, singers, dancers, and musicians such as Bessie Smith, Gertrude Ma Rainey, Mabel Hampton, Ethel Waters, and gender-non-conforming Gladys Bentley sought not only to perfect their craft but also to use it to better race relations and American society. In the process, these pioneers created a multifaceted American LGBT urban subculture. Popular entertainment ranged from the Cotton Club to buffet flats to enormous drag balls at Rockland Palace and the Savoy Ballroom, which accommodated 4000 people. During Prohibition, numerous black speakeasies opened in Harlem, drawing gay men and lesbians into an interracial club scene made famous around the world. The Harlem Renaissance declined with the onset of the Great Depression, but its explosion of literature, music, and dance marked a revolution in African American life that spread across the country. Another half-century passed before scholars and the general public began to acknowledge the influence of the LGBT people who defined the Harlem Renaissance era.

Chicago, Illinois · United States