The Harlem Renaissance

What Was It?

• A literary, artistic, cultural and intellectual movement that began in Harlem, New York, after World War I and ended during the Great Depression

  • Renaissance: a rebirth or revival

• Celebration of African culture

• Occurred between 1918-1935s

Political Leaders

Booker T. Washington

• 1856-1915

• Born to a slave and an unknown white man

• Worked on a plantation at an early age and later in a mill

• Taught himself to read and write

• Asked whites to give jobs to blacks

• He founded the Tuskegee Institute, a black school in AL devoted to moral and industrial education

W.E.B. Dubois

• Born in 1868 (MA)-1953

• Called himself a “mulatto”

• Attended school with whites and white teachers

• In 1885, he moved to TN to attend Fisk University and first encountered Jim Crow laws

• Was the first African American to earn a doctorate degree from Harvard

• Co-founded the NAACP

• Criticized Booker T. Washington for not demanding equality for blacks