What was the Harlem Renaissance? Inspired by the civil rights movement, it was a movement that focused on using art to influence political activism. It was a cultural and artistic movement that spread throughout Europe during the 14th to 17th centuries. It was a neighborhood in New York City’s borough of Manhattan, which has been the center of African American culture. It was an explosion of arts and culture in the African American community in the decades after World War I.

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that stretched back to the 1920s. Over time, it was known as the "New Black Movement," in honor of Alain Locke's 1925 anthology. The movement also included the new Afro-American cultural expressions across the urban areas of the Northeast and Midwest of the United States affected by the great (Afro-American) migration, of which Harlem was the largest. Although centered in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan in New York, in addition, many black writers from African and Caribbean colonies living in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance is generally considered to have arisen from about 1918 until the mid-1930s. Many of his ideas have lived for much longer. The peak of this was the "flowering of Black literature" with James Weldon Johnson, between 1924 (the year that Opportunity: A Journal of Black Life organized a party for black writers where many white editors were present) and 1929 (the year of fall of the stock market and the onset of the Great Depression).