Post-World War I Harlem was the undisputed center of a complex cultural movement out of which emerged a proliferation of black intellectuals, writers, musicians, actors, and visual artists. Variously called the Harlem Renaissance, the Negro Renaissance, and the New Negro Movement, it was an artistic flowering that coincided with socio-political expressions of black pride—the rise of the "New Negro" and Garveyism—in much the same way as the Black Arts and Black Power Movements emerged simultaneously in the 1960s. Although scholars posit differing views on when it began and ended, most agree that the movement was at its height between the dawning of the Jazz Age in 1919 and the stock market crash in 1929.

Harlem, the area James Weldon Johnson dubbed the Black "culture capital," was appropriately the center of this outpouring of black creativity, in part because it held one of the largest settlements of...