The Harlem Renaissance

Harlem is a district in northern Manhattan that by the 1920s had become the largest Black urban community in the United States. The movement was a deliberate project as much as a scene: the idea was that artistic achievement would change the country's view of Black Americans. It worked unevenly, and the internal debates — whether art should serve the cause or stand free, and how far white patronage shaped it — are still live. Hurston's work was forgotten for decades and rediscovered by Alice Walker in the 1970s, one of the clearest examples of how a canon is made and remade.