“The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual, social, and artistic explosion centered in Harlem, New York, spanning the 1920s. At the time, it was known as the “New Negro Movement”, named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by the Great Migration,[1] of which Harlem was the largest.

Nevertheless, with the Harlem Renaissance came a sense of acceptance for African American writers; as Langston Hughes put it, with Harlem came the courage “to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.”[18] Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro was considered the cornerstone of this cultural revolution.[19] The anthology featured several African American writers and poets, from the well-known, such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay, to the lesser-known, like the poet Anne Spencer.[20]”