4.8 The Harlem Renaissance

Marcus Garvey

Charistmatic leader who organized a black nationalist movement in Harlem during the 1920s. Garvey promoted economic and cultural independence for African Americans

Jazz

American musical form developed by African Americans, based on improvisation and blending blues, ragtime, and European-based popular music

Louis Armstrong

a jazz trumpeter and one of the most influential artists in the jazz history. He was also a bandleader, singer and comedian during his career.

Bessie Smith

Blues vocalist who was known as the "Empress of the Blues." Smith sang with some of the great jazz musicians of the time, including Louis Armstrong

Harlem Renaissance

A period in the 1920s when African-American achievements in art and music and literature flourished

Claude McKay

Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose influential work during and after the Harlem Renaissance sought to define a distinctive black identity

Langston Hughes

Influential poet and author who thought of his work as a means to communiate the black experience in the United States

Zora Neale Hurston

a writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance who was trained as an anthropologist and went on to teach for a number of years. One of her more influential works was Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1935.