Countee Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance.
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an editor, poet, essayist, novelist, and educator. Her literary work helped sculpt African-American literature in the 1920s as she focused on portraying a true image of African-American life and history. Her black fictional characters were working professionals which was an inconceivable concept to American society during this time. Her story lines related to themes of racial discrimination, "passing", and feminism.
Aaron Douglas was an American painter, illustrator, and visual arts educator. He was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He developed his art career painting murals and creating illustrations that addressed social issues around race and segregation in the United States by utilizing African-centric imagery. Douglas set the stage for young, African-American artists to enter the public-arts realm through his involvement with the Harlem Artists Guild. In 1944, he concluded his art career by founding the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught visual art classes at Fisk University until his retirement in 1966. Douglas is known as a prominent leader in modern African-American art whose work influenced artists for years to come.
Gwendolyn B. Bennett was an American artist, writer, and journalist who contributed to Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, which chronicled cultural advancements during the Harlem Renaissance. Though often overlooked, she herself made considerable accomplishments in art, poetry, and prose. She is perhaps best known for her short story "Wedding Day", which was published in the magazine Fire!! and explores how gender, race, and class dynamics shape an interracial relationship. Bennett was a dedicated and self-preserving woman, respectfully known for being a strong influencer of African-American women rights during the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout her dedication and perseverance, Bennett raised the bar when it came to women's literature and education. One of her contributions to the Harlem Renaissance was her literary acclaimed short novel Poets Evening; it helped the understanding within the African-American communities, resulting in many African Americans coming to terms with identifying and accepting themselves.
The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) is an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and African-American art and literature edited by Alain Locke, who lived in Washington, DC, and taught at Howard University during the Harlem Renaissance. As a collection of the creative efforts coming out of the burgeoning New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance, the book is considered by literary scholars and critics to be the definitive text of the movement. Part 1 of The New Negro: An Interpretation, titled "The Negro Renaissance", includes Locke's title essay "The New Negro", as well as nonfiction essays, poetry, and fiction by writers including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond.
Wallace Henry Thurman was an American novelist and screenwriter active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.
Richard Bruce Nugent, aka Richard Bruce and Bruce Nugent, was an American gay writer and painter in the Harlem Renaissance. Despite being a part of a group of many gay Harlem artists, Nugent was among the handful who were publicly out. Recognized initially for the few short stories and published paintings, Nugent had a long productive career bringing to light the creative process of gay and black culture.
Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp Johnson, better known as Georgia Douglas Johnson, was a poet and playwright. She was one of the earliest female African-American playwrights, and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
David Levering Lewis is an American historian, a Julius Silver University Professor, and professor emeritus of history at New York University. He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, for part one and part two of his biography of W. E. B. Du Bois. He is the first author to win Pulitzer Prizes for biography for two successive volumes on the same subject.
"New Negro" is a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation. The term "New Negro" was made popular by Alain LeRoy Locke in his anthology The New Negro.
Anne Bethel Spencer was an American poet, teacher, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener. She was a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, despite living in Virginia for most of her life, far from the center of the movement in New York. She met Edward Spencer while attending Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia. Following their marriage in 1901, the couple moved into a house he built at 1313 Pierce Street, where they raised a family and lived for the remainder of their lives.
Alain LeRoy Locke was an American writer, philosopher, and educator. Distinguished in 1907 as the first African American Rhodes Scholar, Locke became known as the philosophical architect—the acknowledged "Dean"—of the Harlem Renaissance. He is frequently included in listings of influential African Americans. On March 19, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed: "We're going to let our children know that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe."
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."
Malvin Gray Johnson was an American painter, born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina.
James Latimer Allen (1907–1977) was a photographer and portraitist known for his images of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s.
Arthur Paul Davis was an influential American university professor, literary scholar, and the writer and editor of several important critical texts such as The Negro Caravan, The New Cavalcade, and From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900–1960. He was African-American. Influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, Davis has inspired many African-Americans to pursue literature and the arts.
John Frederick Matheus was an American writer and a scholar who was active during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. He is well known for his short stories, and he also wrote essays, plays and poetry. His story "Fog" won first place in Opportunity magazine's literary contest in 1925 and was published that same year in Alain Locke's famous anthology The New Negro. Matheus won first prize in the Crisis magazine's contest in 1926 with his story "Swamp Moccasin". His works were influenced by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Edgar Allan Poe's tales, and the writings of Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Jeffrey Conrad Stewart is an American Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He won the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his book The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, described as "a panoramic view of the personal trials and artistic triumphs of the father of the Harlem Renaissance and the movement he inspired".
The Black Renaissance in D.C. was a social, intellectual, and cultural movement in Washington, D.C. that began in 1919 and continued into the late 1920s.
