Excerpt from The Harlem Renaissance Library of Congress
The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a period of great cultural activity and innovation among
African American artists and writers, one that saw new artists and landmark works appear in the fields of literature, dance, art,
and music. The participants were all fiercely individualistic talents, and not all of them
saw themselves as being part of a movement. But in time writers such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, painters like
Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden; and musicians and composers such as Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith became widely
known as members of the Harlem Renaissance.
Much of the foundation of the Harlem Renaissance was laid by earlier generations of African American educators, students, and
intellectuals. In the decades following the Civil War, many racial barriers to education were removed, and African Americans took
advantage of the new educational opportunities in great numbers. Dozens of African
American colleges and universities were founded, and African American professors and other intellectuals took increasingly
public roles. By the early 1900s, intellectual leaders like W. E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson were writing, lecturing, and
being published in journals such as Crisis and The Messenger
At the same time, African Americans were moving in huge numbers from the South to northern industrial cities, like New York,
where
they could find work and escape some of the institutionalized discrimination and mistreatment caused by the South's Jim Crow
laws. Innovative young African American writers, painters, and musicians began gathering in a number of neighborhoods in
Manhattan, including Harlem and Greenwich Village, working together and developing new ideas, and in the years after World
War I they gained national attention
How does this list of people involved in the Harlem Renaissance support the description of the movement given earlier in the
passage?
A)
The list of names gives concrete examples of some of the people who were
a part of the movement.
B)
The list of names serves as a group of scholars who decided what the
Harlem Renaissance really was.
The list of names defines the only categories of art that qualified someone
for inclusion in the movement.
D)
The list of names serves as a group of previous artists against whom the
Harlem Renaissance was a reaction.
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