Harlem Renaissance
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50 free Harlem Renaissance trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In the 1920s a few square miles of uptown New York became the capital of Black American culture. Poets, novelists, painters, bandleaders and dancers who had arrived from the South, the Midwest and the Caribbean found each other there, and the work they made changed American writing and music for good. This quiz covers the whole scene. There are questions on the writers and the magazines that printed them, on the editors and patrons who backed them, and on the painters, sculptors and photographers who gave the era its look. A large share is about the music: the bandleaders, singers and dancers, the nightspots where they played, and the pianists who worked private apartments for tips. A few questions set the scene with the history that made it all possible and the events that brought it to a close. It is pitched for high school students revising the period, teachers who want a ready-made review, and anyone who loves early jazz or American literature. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing more than when you started.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which poet was working as a hotel busboy in Washington when he shared his verses with Vachel Lindsay?
Langston Hughes
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.
Q 02Which Harlem nightclub, run by gangster Owney Madden, hired Black entertainers but seated only white customers?
Cotton Club
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.
Q 03Which novelist, raised in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida, collected Southern folklore in Mules and Men?
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston died in 1960 and lay in an unmarked Florida grave until 1973, when admirers finally gave her a headstone.
Q 04Which mass movement of Black Southerners to Northern cities from the 1910s made Harlem a Black cultural capital?
The Great Migration
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.
Q 05Which Washington-born bandleader, nicknamed for his dapper dress and noble bearing, composed Mood Indigo?
Duke Ellington
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.
Q 06Which theater on Harlem's 125th Street began welcoming Black audiences in 1934 and became famous for Amateur Night?
The Apollo
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.
Q 07Which hymn with words by James Weldon Johnson is widely known as the Black national anthem?
Lift Every Voice and Sing
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.
Q 08Which Missouri-born dancer left New York chorus lines for Paris in 1925 and later spied for the French Resistance?
Josephine Baker
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.
Q 09Colonists from which nation founded the village of Harlem in the 1650s and named it after a city back home?
The Dutch
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.
Q 10The Harlem Hellfighters, whose band carried jazz overseas, spent World War I fighting under which nation's army?
France
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.
Q 11Which Harlem dance hall, known downtown as the Home of Happy Feet, welcomed Black and white dancers alike?
Savoy Ballroom
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.
Q 12Which Harlem poet, author of the collection Color, married W. E. B. Du Bois's daughter Yolande in 1928?
Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen and Yolande divorced in 1930, and he later taught at a New York junior high where he guided a young James Baldwin.
Q 13Which Howard University philosopher, the first Black Rhodes Scholar, is called the dean of the Harlem Renaissance?
Alain Locke
Q 21Which 1929 Nella Larsen novel about childhood friends Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry became a 2021 Netflix film?
Passing
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.
Q 22Which 1923 book by Jean Toomer blends prose sketches, poetry and drama set in rural Georgia and Washington?
Cane
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.
Q 23Which bandleader had a 1931 hit with Minnie the Moocher and sang it again in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers?
Cab Calloway
Alain Locke won the scholarship to Oxford in 1907, and no other Black American was chosen for one until 1963.
Q 14Which NAACP magazine, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1910, printed early work by Harlem Renaissance writers?
The Crisis
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.
Q 15What was the Harlem Renaissance called in its own day, after a 1925 anthology of Black writing and art?
The New Negro Movement
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.
Q 16Which Jamaican-born leader ran the UNIA from Harlem and launched the Black Star Line shipping company?
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey was convicted of mail fraud over the shipping line's stock sales in 1923 and deported to Jamaica in 1927.
Q 17Which Jamaican-born poet answered the racial violence of 1919's Red Summer with the sonnet If We Must Die?
Claude McKay
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.
Q 18Which 1937 novel, written in seven weeks in Haiti, follows Janie Crawford through three marriages?
Their Eyes Were Watching God
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.
Q 19Which singer, nicknamed Lady Day, made her first records at 18 after producer John Hammond heard her in Harlem?
Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday got the nickname from saxophonist Lester Young, and she returned the favor by calling him Prez.
Q 20Which New Orleans trumpeter came to New York to join Fletcher Henderson's band and helped popularize scat singing?
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong recorded Heebie Jeebies with his Hot Five in 1926, and its wordless vocal helped turn scat into a staple of jazz.
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.
Q 24Which singer, known as the Empress of the Blues, toured the 1920s in her own custom-built railroad car?
Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith was the highest-paid Black entertainer of her day, heading her own shows with as many as 40 performers.
Q 25Which Rutgers football All-American and Columbia Law graduate became a celebrated singer and actor in 1920s Harlem?
Paul Robeson
Paul Robeson was also valedictorian of his Rutgers class, and he played professional football in the NFL while earning his law degree.
Q 26Which 1921 Broadway musical by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle is credited with helping to spark the Harlem Renaissance?
Shuffle Along
Shuffle Along ran for 504 performances and gave early breaks to future stars such as Florence Mills and Adelaide Hall.
Q 27Which Harlem piano style of James P. Johnson and Fats Waller sends the left hand leaping between bass notes and chords?
Stride
Stride grew out of ragtime, but its players improvised on the pop songs of the day instead of sticking to composed pieces.
Q 28Which singer, later called the First Lady of Song, rose to fame fronting drummer Chick Webb's Harlem orchestra?
Ella Fitzgerald
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.
Q 29Which national disaster is most often blamed for ending the Harlem Renaissance by cutting off patrons and publishers?
The Great Depression
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.
Q 30Which constitutional amendment banned alcohol from 1920, as speakeasies and cabarets filled Harlem's 133rd Street?
The 18th
The 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st in December 1933, making it the only amendment in American history to be struck out.