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The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of African-American social thought and culture based in the African-American community forming in Harlem in New York City (USA). This period, beginning with 1920 and extending roughly to 1940, was expressed through every cultural medium—visual art, dance, music, theatre, literature, poetry, history and politics. Instead of using direct political means, African-American artists, writers, and musicians employed culture to work for goals of civil rights and equality. For the first time, African-American paintings, writings, and jazz became absorbed into mainstream culture and crossed racial lines, creating a lasting legacy. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after an anthology of notable African-American works entitled The New Negro and published by philosopher Alain LeRoy Locke in 1925.

The Harlem Renaissance emerged during turbulent political times for the world, for the United States, and for black Americans. World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution had left the world in turmoil and provided stimulus for the anti-colonial movements that would take root throughout the third world. In the United States two decades of progressive reform had ended in the often vicious reaction of 1919 -- the red scare, the race riots, and the isolationism -- which led to the political retrenchment of the twenties under generally conservative Republican administrations. Frustrated by a general lack of racial progress under the progressives, stunned by racial violence during and following the war, but armed with new civil rights organizations, blacks confronted the decade with new determination. The twenties would witness the beginning of a long, legal struggle against political disenfranchisement in the South, and a reevaluation of traditional black political alignments in the North. At the same time feminists, flush with victory in their long struggle for suffrage, faced more subtle and less dramatic obstacles to their quest for equality. Finally, the ghettoization of American cities, the persistence of poverty in the midst of prosperity, and the disproportionate involvement of blacks in both of these processes challenged perceptions about the effectiveness of the American system. While the Harlem Renaissance was not a political movement, its participants were affected by the political world around them and reacted in varying ways to their political environment.

The most obvious way that black writers addressed political issues was through political and protest writings. Claude McKay, for example, expressed his anger toward the race riots of 1919 in his sonnet, "If We Must Die," and urged blacks to meet violence with violence, defying the odds and gaining dignity in their struggle: "Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!" James Weldon Johnson, in poems like "Fifty Years," Langston Hughes, especially in his radical poetry of the early 1930s, and Arna Bontemps in "A" Black Man Talks of Reaping" are only a few examples of writers protesting in their literature. However, such writing was only a small and, on the whole, minor aspect of the Renaissance. While virtually every writer involved in the movement produced one or two protest pieces, only two, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, made protest a significant element in their work, and even for them protest was never the exclusive or even the major characteristic of their writing. Fortunately, for the breadth and quality of black writing during the Renaissance, the early efforts of people like James Weldon Johnson to focus the talents of the young writers on protest poetry never really bore fruit.

If protest poetry was eschewed as a major literary form during the Renaissance, this did not mean that black writers were blind to the political environment in which they operated. It did mean, though, that most chose to address their political concerns in a more subtle, less direct manner. Race-consciousness was a constant theme, and the bold expression of racial pride was nearly universal in the black writing of this period.

In addition, a number of individuals associated with the Renaissance assumed that black literature could be an important weapon in the struggle for civil rights. As we have seen, James Weldon Johnson was convinced that a successful literary movement would undermine prejudice, win respect for black intellectual and artistic achievements, and consequently promote the cause of equal rights. Other black intellectuals shared his view; some, like W. E. B. Du Bois, used these arguments as a justification for their efforts to censor literary expression, deflect black writers away from ghetto realism, and create instead a literature of propaganda that would focus on the life and achievements of the black middle class. Du Bois's failure to win over most black writers to his point of view illustrates that most Renaissance writers gave priority to their art and to their artistic freedom -- but it does not mean that all of them ignored the political potential of their literature or that they had no commitment to the civil rights efforts of black organizations. Likewise, the refusal of most black writers to subvert their art to a political cause does not mean that the movement itself was totally apolitical or that all black writers were equally uninterested in politics and political literature.

One link between the Harlem Renaissance and politics can be found in the response of major civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League to the political issues of the 1920s and early 1930s. Interestingly, both organizations were very cautious politically, and maintained an essentially non-partisan position during this period. . . 

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