1. Identify a creator from the twentieth or twenty-first century who you think made an important contribution to art and culture in the form of cultural works that impacted society.
2. Describe one of the cultural works they created and the medium. Mediums can include dance, literature, sculpture, visual arts, architecture, music, performance, and so forth.
3. What questions about human culture does this work prompt?
4. What big questions do you think influenced the cultural work you selected? Consider addressing how this connects with the larger human need to express.

African Americans had hoped to be free of the racial discrimination they had endured in the South. They discovered, however, that they were not always welcome because of the color of their skin. So, they settled in housing that was segregated from white residents. They created bustling black metropolises —cities within cities. One of the most famous African American communities established during the 1920s was in Harlem at the tip of Manhattan in New York City.

Other cities saw similar developments, but New York City was the cultural capital of the United States at the time. It was a publishing and writing center. It was home to most of the nation’s significant museums and galleries. It was the site of major music venues.

An estimated 100,000 African Americans moved into Harlem in the 1920s. Many of the newcom-Harlem’s ers were educated, and Harlem became a gathering place for black writers, artists, musicians, and performers. Their shared cultural community led to the Harlem Renaissance.

One of the first outcomes of the Harlem Renaissance was a demand for political action. African Americans wanted improvements in economic and educational opportunities. For example, black soldiers had fought honorably during the war. They had hoped to return to a United States that was ready to accept them and their contributions. But racist attitudes supported by Jim Crow laws resulted in outbreaks of violence. Black Americans’ hopes for better treatment were dashed.

Other priorities for African Americans were gaining legal protection and ending lynching. Many black organizations were headquartered in New York. Those groups included the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the National Urban League, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They fought to end racial discrimination in all kinds of ways. They raised public awareness for their causes. They started magazines. They organized rallies and marches.

Although the political beliefs of the groups differed, they shared one conviction: It was time for the emergence of what African American writer and philosopher Alain L. Locke called the “New Negro.” African Americans were called upon to no longer submit quietly to the status quo.

A number of African American leaders, including W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Arthur Schomburg, reflected on how cultural activity might help the black community improve its situation. Du Bois and Jessie Fauset, editors of the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine, encouraged conversations. They suggested that creativity in the arts might contribute to a better understanding of the African American experience.

Poet Langston Hughes made an important point in the debate. His essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” was published in The Nation in 1926. Hughes endorsed the idea that the arts could have a positive role to play in the betterment of the black community. He insisted, however, that the work black artists produced had to embrace the whole African American culture and should not mimic white standards, styles, and expectations. “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” wrote Hughes.

Young African American writers took up Hughes’s challenge. Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Jean Toomer, and Nella Larsen all made enormous contributions. And the Harlem Renaissance included more than just strong black literary voices. Painting, sculpture, music, theater, and dance were affected, too. Painter Aaron Douglas. Sculptor Richmond Barthe. Bandleader Duke Ellington. Actor Paul Robeson. Playwright Willis Richardson. Composer R. Nathaniel Dett. Dancer Florence Mills. All those individuals contributed to Harlem’s Renaissance. They met Hughes’s call to create great work while being fully comfortable in their identities as black people. In doing so, they showed the world the heights to which African Americans could reach.

The Harlem Renaissance mostly had run its course by the mid-1930s, although some historians argue that the movement continued in other cities, especially Chicago, Illinois. The Great Depression resulted in the loss of many jobs. That economic crisis ended much of the philanthropy and other support that had allowed black artists to experiment with their crafts.

Hughes had challenged African Americans to celebrate the “New Negro” in their work. Responding to that call, the community of black artists living in Harlem in the 1920s helped fuel Harlem’s renaissance. And that strong supportive community brought the cultural achievements of African Americans to the larger public’s attention.

The Roaring 20s are sometimes referred to as the “Jazz Age.” Like that decade, jazz is difficult to pin down. The musical style was totally unlike anything before it. It grew out of sounds that had existed for centuries. Its inspiration came primarily from the music, feelings, and history of black people in America.

Jazz is a highly personal music form. It focuses on individual interpretation and rhythm rather than traditional musical composition. Musicians vary the beat, the rhythm, and the volume. The freedom to experiment with the music while playing it—known as improvisation—is a main ingredient of jazz.

In the early 1900s, the sounds of the blues, ragtime, French dance music, Spanish Caribbean rhythms, slave spirituals and work songs, opera, and the singing of street vendors all mingled in New Orleans, Louisiana. New Orleans created a place for jazz to grow.

The heyday of the jazz era in New Orleans began to fade in 1917. Some out-of-work musicians headed north to Chicago, Illinois. Other musicians made their way to New York and its Harlem Renaissance. A truly American art form, jazz added to the energy that pulsed through Harlem during the 1920s.”