Music, literature, art, theatre, dance, fashion… Between the turn of the 1920s and the mid-1930s, the Harlem Renaissance had it all. It was an outpouring of African-American artistic endeavour, a golden age where black culture would make an indelible impression both nationally and internationally - and all from a certain neighbourhood in upper Manhattan.
In 1925, the influential writer Alain Locke compiled an anthology of AfricanAmerican writings entitled . The book was simultaneously a statement of intent and a reflection of Harlem's cultural output. In one of his contributions to its pages, Locke emphasised how this renaissance,artists “the realisation of the unwisdom of allowing social discrimination to segregate [them] mentally”.
