In the 1920s and early 1930s Harlem became the centre of an extraordinary flowering of Black writing, music, theatre and visual art. Writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Countee Cullen, and musicians such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, made the neighbourhood a reference point for the whole country.
Marcus Garvey’s movement and the many Black newspapers, churches and clubs of the neighbourhood show that the Renaissance was political as well as artistic. Historians debate its exact dates and limits; the Great Depression ended its most visible phase.