How the Harlem Renaissance helped forge a new sense of Black identity
Response to the Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance didn’t stop in Harlem: The cultural upswell took hold across the north and in the west. In Chicago, for example, Black luminaries held public art exhibitions and gathered a groundbreaking collection of materials on Black history housed at the city’s public library. Kansas City, Missouri became an influential center for jazz and blues.
(Discover the history of Tennessee’s forgotten music empire—Chattanooga.)
The movement’s influence spread throughout white culture, too. It turned Harlem into a popular destination for white pleasure-seekers who frequented speakeasies and “black-and-tan saloons.” Known as “slumming,” the Prohibition Era practice brought white patrons into contact with Black cultural expression—art and music they considered exotic, dangerous, and titillating.
Ironically, instead of participating in the Black nightlife they had come to see, notes historian Chad Heap, many curious whites never got farther than establishments like the Cotton Club, a Southern plantation-themed nightclub that catered specifically to white clientele.
For Black residents—Americans who experienced art and thought centered on the Black experience for the first time during the era—Harlem was anything but a tourist destination. For them, it celebrated cultural possibility, upholding Black people who had been so denigrated by mainstream white society as complex figures with real lives.
