NARRATOR: The Harlem Renaissance is one of the most iconic cultural periods in African-American history. Throughout the decade of the 1920s, Black writing, art, and music flourished, ushering in a Cultural Revolution that rocked the United States.

FARAH GRIFFIN: One of the most important factors that accounted for the rise of what we know of as the Harlem Renaissance is the migration of Black peoples from the South to urban centers like Harlem.

ISABEL WILKERSON: The Jim Crow era begins after reconstruction and every Southern African-American had to think about what should we do. Should we go or should we stay? For many of these people it was a matter of life and death, literally. Sometimes in the most repressive times we create the most extraordinary art.

NARRATOR: Amidst the fervor of the Great Migration, bold exciting forms of Black music evolved, along with venues to listen and dance to this music. Blues and jazz clubs became a central part of life in Harlem where artists such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Bessie and Mamie Smith, rose to prominence.

- (SINGING) Began to cry. He went away and never even said good bye.

NARRATOR: The era also saw the burgeoning of literary work by and about African-Americans, which the writer Alain Locke compiled into an anthology. He called it the New Negro, and its name came to define a movement.

FARAH GRIFFIN: The Harlem Renaissance is a facet of a larger movement that we think of as the New Negro, movement where you have a new generation of Black people by this point, two generations out of slavery, using the arts as a way to help people gain broader civil and political rights.

- Some of the framers of what became the Renaissance make the argument that the artistic worth of the people has to be proven by the worth of the art and literature they produced. Especially for people that historically over centuries have been defined as without culture, without history, and without any record of achievement.

ISABEL WILKERSON: The Harlem Renaissance is the flowering of creativity that had been suppressed for centuries. People that had the sense that things were opening up and finally, finally, finally we can be the people that we imagine ourselves to be.

[MUSIC PLAYING]