Excerpt 1: Located just north of Central Park, Harlem was a formerly white residential district that by the early 1920s was becoming virtually a Black city within the boroughs [neighborhoods] of Manhattan. Other boroughs of New York City were also home to people now identified with the Renaissance, but they often crossed paths in Harlem or went to special events at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Black intellectuals from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other cities (where they had their own intellectual circles, theatres, and reading groups) also met in Harlem or settled there. New York City had an extraordinarily diverse and decentered Black social world in which no one group could monopolize cultural authority. As a result, it was a particularly fertile place for cultural experimentation.

The Harlem Renaissance was a phase of a larger New Negro movement that had emerged in the early 20th century and in some ways ushered in the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The social foundations of this movement included the Great Migration of African Americans from rural to urban spaces and from South to North; dramatically rising levels of literacy; the creation of national organizations dedicated to pressing African American civil rights, “uplifting” the race, and opening socioeconomic opportunities; and developing race pride, including pan-African sensibilities and programs.

Excerpt 2: While the most celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance were men—Hughes, McKay, Cullen—Black women’s poetry was far from incidental to the movement. Women poets negotiated a number of difficulties concerning gender and tradition as they sought to extricate themselves from stereotypes of hypersexuality and primitive abandon. Attempting to claim femininity on terms denied them by the dominant society, they worked variously within and against inherited constraints concerning the treatment of love and nature as well as racial experience in poetry.

A significant proportion of poets, as well as other participants in the Harlem Renaissance, were gay or bisexual, including McKay, Cullen, Locke, Dunbar Nelson, Richard Bruce Nugent, and perhaps Hughes. References to lesbian sexuality were also well-known in blues songs by Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith...According to some critics, "the Renaissance was as gay as it was Negro." However, with the exception of Nugent, gay sexuality among the well-known writers and artists was discreet and mostly closeted.