Why Is The Harlem Renaissance Important

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Harlem Renaissance Poets, Essay & Poems The Harlem Renaissance was a period during the 1920s when African American achievements in art, literature, and music flourished. A period of great diversity and experimentation. The WWI Great Migration saw the movement of thousands of African American from the farmlands in the south to the cities in north in order to find new opportunities and build better lives. Many made their way to the New York City neighborhood of Harlem in Manhattan, New York City which became the home of the movement. The Harlem Renaissance was important because it inspired an explosion of cultural pride and perceived as a new beginning for African Americans. Black Americans were inspired to create works rooted in their own culture instead of imitating the styles of white Americans. African Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage and to become “The New Negro” a term coined in 1925 by Alain LeRoy Locke (1885-1954), writer and patron of the arts. The following quote by Nathan Huggins (1927-1989), a prominent African American historian and author, reflects the change in attitudes that would help lay the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. “For the Afro-American in…show more content…
It took some of the greatest minds of the time to bring about freedom. The Harlem Renaissance brought notice to great works that might otherwise have been lost or never published. The results were unusual. The artists, authors, poets, and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance definitely transformed African American culture. However, American culture had an equally strong impact. For the first time, whites could not look away because the works of all these artistic African Americans were extraordinary. With the Harlem Renaissance, it gave the blacks an opportunity to express themselves through their works in order to show that even African American are capable of doing
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