50 Fun Facts About Harlem Renaissance

Which poet was working as a hotel busboy in Washington when he shared his verses with Vachel Lindsay?

Langston Hughes so impressed the older poet that Lindsay announced he had discovered a new Black poet. His first book, The Weary Blues, followed in 1926.

Which Harlem nightclub, run by gangster Owney Madden, hired Black entertainers but seated only white customers?

Cotton Club owner Madden was a bootlegger who took over boxer Jack Johnson's Club Deluxe, renamed it and used it to sell his own beer to wealthy downtown crowds.

Which novelist, raised in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, collected Southern folklore in Mules and Men?

Zora Neale Hurston died in 1960 and lay in an unmarked Florida grave until 1973, when admirers finally gave her a headstone.

Which mass movement of Black Southerners to Northern cities from the 1910s made Harlem a Black cultural capital?

The Great Migration carried about six million Black Americans out of the rural South between 1910 and 1970, and Harlem's writers and musicians were often newcomers themselves.

Which Washington-born bandleader, nicknamed for his dapper dress and noble bearing, composed Mood Indigo?

Duke Ellington got the nickname from boyhood friends, then wrote or co-wrote more than a thousand pieces, the largest recorded personal legacy in jazz.

Which theater on Harlem's 125th Street began welcoming Black audiences in 1934 and became famous for Amateur Night?

The Apollo gave its contestants a lucky charm: a stump from Harlem's old Tree of Hope, which performers traditionally rub before they go on.

Which hymn with words by James Weldon Johnson is widely known as the Black national anthem?

Lift Every Voice and Sing was first performed by 500 schoolchildren in Jacksonville in 1900 to mark Abraham Lincoln's birthday; the poet's brother Rosamond wrote the music.

Which Missouri-born dancer left New York chorus lines for Paris in 1925 and later spied for the French Resistance?

Josephine Baker became the first Black woman honored in France's Panthéon in 2021, almost a century after her Paris debut in La Revue nègre.

Colonists from which nation founded the village of Harlem in the 1650s and named it after a city back home?

The Dutch named the village after Haarlem, and by the late 19th century it was a mostly Jewish and Italian district, before Black families arrived in large numbers.

The Harlem Hellfighters, whose band carried jazz overseas, spent World War I fighting under which nation's army?

France took in the Harlem Hellfighters because the US Army kept Black and white units segregated. They spent 191 days in front-line trenches, more than any other American unit.

Which Harlem dance hall, known downtown as the Home of Happy Feet, welcomed Black and white dancers alike?

Savoy Ballroom regulars made the Lindy Hop famous, and the hall kept a no-discrimination policy at a time when rival rooms turned Black customers away.

Which Harlem poet, author of the collection Color, married W. E. B. Du Bois's daughter Yolande in 1928?

Countee Cullen and Yolande divorced in 1930, and he later taught at a New York junior high where he guided a young James Baldwin.

Which Howard University philosopher, the first Black Rhodes Scholar, is called the dean of the Harlem Renaissance?

Alain Locke won the scholarship to Oxford in 1907, and no other Black American was chosen for one until 1963.

Which NAACP magazine, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1910, printed early work by Harlem Renaissance writers?

The Crisis grew from 1,000 copies a month in its first year to more than 100,000 readers by 1918, and novelist Jessie Fauset ran its literary pages.

What was the Harlem Renaissance called in its own day, after a 1925 anthology of Black writing and art?

The New Negro Movement took its name from a book of fiction, poetry and essays that set out to replace old stereotypes with new visions of Black identity.

Which Jamaican-born leader ran the UNIA from Harlem and launched the Black Star Line shipping company?

Marcus Garvey was convicted of mail fraud over the shipping line's stock sales in 1923 and deported to Jamaica in 1927.

Which Jamaican-born poet answered the racial violence of 1919's Red Summer with the sonnet If We Must Die?

Claude McKay later wrote Home to Harlem, a 1928 best-seller whose frank nightlife scenes W. E. B. Du Bois said left him wanting a bath.

Which 1937 novel, written in seven weeks in Haiti, follows Janie Crawford through three marriages?

Their Eyes Were Watching God was condemned in a 1937 review by novelist Richard Wright, then rediscovered when Black Studies programs spread in the 1970s.

Which singer, nicknamed Lady Day, made her first records at 18 after producer John Hammond heard her in Harlem?

Billie Holiday got the nickname from saxophonist Lester Young, and she returned the favor by calling him Prez.

Which New Orleans trumpeter came to New York to join Fletcher Henderson's band and helped popularize scat singing?

Louis Armstrong recorded Heebie Jeebies with his Hot Five in 1926, and its wordless vocal helped turn scat into a staple of jazz.

Which 1929 Nella Larsen novel about childhood friends Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry became a 2021 Netflix film?

Passing drew on the 1925 Rhinelander case, in which a wealthy white New Yorker sued to annul his marriage after claiming his wife had hidden her Black ancestry.

Which 1923 book by Jean Toomer blends prose sketches, poetry and drama set in rural Georgia and Washington?

Cane grew from sketches Toomer began on a train from Georgia to Washington in 1921, and the finished book travels from the South to the North and back again.

Which bandleader had a 1931 hit with Minnie the Moocher and sang it again in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers?

Cab Calloway also performed the song for a 1932 Betty Boop cartoon named after it, and the record entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.

Which singer, known as the Empress of the Blues, toured the 1920s in her own custom-built railroad car?

Bessie Smith was the highest-paid Black entertainer of her day, heading her own shows with as many as 40 performers.

Which Rutgers football All-American and Columbia Law graduate became a celebrated singer and actor in 1920s Harlem?

Paul Robeson was also valedictorian of his Rutgers class, and he played professional football in the NFL while earning his law degree.

Which 1921 Broadway musical by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle is credited with helping to spark the Harlem Renaissance?

Shuffle Along ran for 504 performances and gave early breaks to future stars such as Florence Mills and Adelaide Hall.

Which Harlem piano style of James P. Johnson and Fats Waller sends the left hand leaping between bass notes and chords?

Stride grew out of ragtime, but its players improvised on the pop songs of the day instead of sticking to composed pieces.

Which singer, later called the First Lady of Song, rose to fame fronting drummer Chick Webb's Harlem orchestra?

Ella Fitzgerald got by in 1933 and 1934 partly by singing on Harlem streets, then turned the nursery rhyme A-Tisket, A-Tasket into a huge 1938 hit.

Which national disaster is most often blamed for ending the Harlem Renaissance by cutting off patrons and publishers?

The Great Depression hit Harlem hard after the 1929 crash, and one historian wrote that the district's 1935 riot showed the era's optimism was dead.

Which constitutional amendment banned alcohol from 1920, as speakeasies and cabarets filled Harlem's 133rd Street?

The 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st in December 1933, making it the only amendment in American history to be struck out.

Which Puerto Rican-born collector's books and papers became the core of the Harlem research library named for him?

Arturo Schomburg was told by a grade-school teacher that Black people had no history or heroes, and he spent his life collecting the proof that the teacher was wrong.

Which Topeka-born painter of silhouetted figures in Harlem murals later founded the art department at Fisk University?

Aaron Douglas used concentric circles of subtly graded color to pull the viewer's eye toward one part of a painting.

Which Harlem sculptor made The Harp, a 16-foot plaster work shown at the 1939 New York World's Fair?

Augusta Savage could not afford to cast the hugely popular piece in bronze or to store it, so it was destroyed when the fair closed.

Which Harlem house gatherings of the 1920s featured cutting contests between pianists and a collection from guests?

Rent parties let tenants hire a musician and take up a collection for the month's housing costs, and the Oxford English Dictionary links the word skiffle to them.

Which term did W. E. B. Du Bois make famous in a 1903 essay about a college-educated Black leadership class?

The Talented Tenth was coined by white Northern philanthropists, not by Du Bois, who borrowed the phrase as the title of his essay.

Which 20-year-old director staged an all-Black Macbeth set in the Caribbean at Harlem's Lafayette Theatre in 1936?

Orson Welles swapped Scottish witchcraft for Haitian vodou, which earned the production its nickname, the Voodoo Macbeth.

Which three colors make up the Pan-African flag that the UNIA adopted at Madison Square Garden in 1920?

Red, black and green became the UNIA's flag partly as a reply to a racist hit song of about 1900 that mocked Black Americans for having no flag.

Which tap dancer, nicknamed Bojangles, was famous for his stair dance and for films with Shirley Temple?

Bill Robinson tried and failed to patent the stair dance, and despite huge earnings he died penniless in 1949, his funeral paid for by Ed Sullivan.

Which 1920s dance craze took off after a James P. Johnson tune in the 1923 Broadway show Runnin' Wild?

The Charleston is named after the harbor city in South Carolina, and the tune that launched it became one of the biggest hits of the decade.

The word renaissance, as in Harlem Renaissance, comes from an Old French word that literally means what?

Rebirth is the literal meaning, and English first used the word around 1840 for Europe's great revival of classical art and learning.

What did wealthy patron Charlotte Osgood Mason insist that the Harlem writers she funded call her?

Godmother was the title she demanded, and it came with strings: she built intricate, controlling relationships with the writers and artists she paid.

Which hair-care heiress turned a floor of her Harlem townhouse into the Dark Tower, a salon for writers and artists?

A'Lelia Walker was the only surviving child of Madam C. J. Walker, and the family's Hudson River mansion, Villa Lewaro, was named for her.

Which Harlem record label, founded by Harry Pace in 1921, was the first widely distributed one run by African Americans?

Black Swan borrowed the stage nickname of a 19th-century opera star, and its recording manager was a young Fletcher Henderson.

Which composer's Afro-American Symphony was the first by a Black American to be performed by a leading US orchestra?

William Grant Still built the piece on blues progressions and even scored a part for tenor banjo, and the Rochester Philharmonic gave the premiere in 1931.

Which pioneering filmmaker made Within Our Gates in 1920, often read as a reply to The Birth of a Nation?

Oscar Micheaux was a South Dakota homesteader before he made more than 44 films, and this one is the oldest known surviving film by a Black American director.

Which photographer opened Harlem's Guarantee Photo Studio and became known for posed portraits of Black New Yorkers?

James Van Der Zee worked mostly in the studio, posing his sitters with props, backdrops and costumes in a late Victorian manner.

Which white novelist, later Gertrude Stein's literary executor, was a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance?

Carl Van Vechten gave up writing at 50 to photograph notable people in his apartment studio, and he was credited with a surge of white interest in Harlem nightlife.

Which 1927 book by James Weldon Johnson turns seven Black folk sermons into poems without using dialect spelling?

God's Trombones came together fast: one of its seven poems, a funeral sermon, was written in a single afternoon on Thanksgiving Day 1926.

Which Harlem congregation, led by Adam Clayton Powell Sr., had grown to 13,000 members by 1930?

Abyssinian Baptist took its name from the old word for Ethiopia, after Ethiopian seamen joined an 1808 walk-out over segregated seating at another church.

Which 1920 Eugene O'Neill play gave Charles Gilpin the lead role of a former Pullman porter on a Caribbean island?

The Emperor Jones made Gilpin the first Black person to receive the Drama League's annual award for service to American theatre.