What Was the Harlem Renaissance? book cover
  • Arts / Entertainment
  • Music
  • Black History
  • US History

What Was the Harlem Renaissance?

Which of these facts are true?
It was a time in the 1920s and 1930s when African American musicians, artists, and writers changed popular culture
The Black neighborhood of Harlem in New York City became the center of an exciting arts movement
Duke Ellington’s jazz classic “Take the ‘A’ Train” refers to getting to Harlem by subway


In this book from the #1 New York Times bestselling series, learn how this vibrant Black neighborhood in upper Manhattan became home to the leading Black writers, artists, and musicians of the 1920s and 1930s.

Travel back in time to the 1920s and 1930s to the sounds of jazz in nightclubs and the 24-hours-a-day bustle of the famous Black neighborhood of Harlem in uptown Manhattan. It was a dazzling time when there was an outpouring of the arts of African Americans–the poetry of Langston Hughes; the novels of Zora Neale Hurston; the sculptures of Augusta Savage and that brand-new music called jazz as only Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong could play it. Author Sherri Smith traces Harlem’s history all the way to its seventeenth-century roots, and explains how the early-twentieth-century Great Migration brought African Americans from the deep South to New York City and gave birth to the golden years of the Harlem Renaissance.

With 80 fun black-and-white illustrations and an engaging 16-page photo insert, readers will be excited to read this latest addition to Who HQ!

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