What do different artists tell us about the way African Americans viewed themselves

during the 1920's?

At that time there was the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem's Renaissance was the African-American cultural movement of the late 1920s, early 1930s, and was born in the Harlem area of New York City. Known by different names - New Black Movement, New Black Renaissance and Black Renaissance - the movement emerged towards the end of the First World War, in 1918, flourished in the late half of the 1920s and lost strength in the first half of the 1930s.

The Harlem revival represented the first time that influential publishers and critics took African-American literature seriously and that African-American arts and literature attracted the nation's attention in a significant way. Although it was mainly a literary movement, there were also manifestations in music, theater, the arts in general and African-American politics.

The Harlem revival came amid the social and intellectual upheaval that exploded in the African-American community in the early 20th century. Several factors contributed to create the foundations of the movement. At the turn of the 19th century, after the North American Civil War, a black middle class developed, favored by increased opportunities for education and employment. During and after the First World War, a phenomenon known as the Great Migration occurred: hundreds of thousands of black Americans left the southern United States, rural and in economic depression, to seek, in the industrial cities of the North, better options for work.