Before the Harlem Renaissance, the majority of Blacks lived in the South and were constrained by Jim Crow laws (segregation laws that separated Blacks and Whites), which disenfranchised African American citizens and separated them from Whites in virtually every aspect of public life. America in the 1920s, however, made reconciliation elusive. On the one hand, the very positive notion of a Black vision of American life that drew upon the cultural wealth of Black folklore and interpreted the African past along with the realities of Black American history and the day-to-day experience of Black life, did in fact engender images and stylistic approaches that were fresh and new (Collier, 1985). On the other hand, the separatism of American life, which required a separatist foundation to hold segregated exhibitions, the absence of repositories to collect and preserve the art, and the distortions of critics hostile to the very notion that Black people could make high art, only served to widen rather than narrow the breach (Collier, 1985). The Harlem Renaissance made an important impact on American life through impressive contributions by many artists.
Several factors laid the foundation for the Harlem Renaissance movement. A black middle class had developed following the American Civil War (1861-1865), increasing education and employment opportunities with a new sense of racial pride (Collier, 1985). During the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of black Americans moved from an economically depressed rural South to industrial cities of the North to take advantage of employment opportunities created by World War I. World War I rallied many Black Americans with patriotic appeals to democratic ideals. As more and more educated and socially conscious blacks settled in New York's neighborhood of Harlem, it developed into the political and cultural center of black America.
"In the history of New York, the significance of the name Harlem has changed from Dutch to Irish to Jewish to Negro (Johnson, 1925).
