When Harlem Was in Vogue

Historian David Levering Lewis chronicles the Harlem Renaissance, the African American arts and letters movement that flourished in New York's Harlem neighborhood from roughly 1919 to 1935. Lewis argues that this cultural flowering was not a spontaneous outpouring of creativity but a deliberate strategy engineered by a small group of mostly college-educated, affluent African Americans who believed that demonstrated artistic excellence could win the civil rights denied to their people, a tactic Lewis encapsulates as "Civil Rights by Copyright."

The book opens with the February 1919 victory parade of the 369th Infantry Regiment, known as the "Hell Fighters," marching up Fifth Avenue to Harlem after 191 days in French trenches. Lewis introduces W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who had urged African Americans to support the war effort, convinced that sacrifice would earn postwar citizenship rights. Du Bois's concept of the "Talented Tenth," an elite minority that would guide the race through education and character, frames the movement's leadership philosophy. Racial violence erupted as early as 1917, when a riot in East Saint Louis killed nearly 200 African Americans and 13 African American soldiers were executed after a clash with white civilians in Houston. The "Red Summer" of 1919 then brought race riots to more than two dozen cities, including Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Jamaican poet Claude McKay published "If We Must Die," and a militant "New Negro" rhetoric of resistance spread through the African American press.

Lewis traces Harlem's transformation from a white neighborhood into what James Weldon Johnson, a senior NAACP official, called the "Negro Capital of the World." Real estate speculators and prosperous churches drove the neighborhood's racial transition, bringing African American residents and capital uptown from midtown Manhattan. Meanwhile, Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant, electrified working-class Harlem with his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its message of African redemption and racial pride. His Black Star Line Steamship Corporation, though a propaganda triumph, became a business disaster, and his 1923 arrest for mail fraud began his downfall. As Garvey's influence waned, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, a University of Chicago-trained sociologist, moved to New York to edit Opportunity magazine for the National Urban League, a civil rights and social service organization. Johnson recognized that with paths to the ballot box and labor unions blocked, the door to publishing houses and concert halls was ajar.

Lewis profiles the four major literary figures who gave the movement its creative substance. McKay published Harlem Shadows (1922) and became the most famous poet in African America before departing for the Soviet Union and a long European exile. Jean Toomer, the racially ambiguous grandson of a Reconstruction-era Louisiana politician, produced Cane (1923), a prose oratorio inspired by a brief immersion in rural Georgia, but then turned to G. I. Gurdjieff's spiritual-philosophical teachings and never produced comparable work again. Countee Cullen, the adopted son of a Harlem minister, became the community's poet laureate with his volume Color (1925). Langston Hughes, whose unhappy childhood and populist sensibility set him apart, published "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" in The Crisis (1921) and spent years at sea and in Europe before returning to Harlem in November 1924.

The formal launch of the Renaissance came at a Civic Club dinner on March 21, 1924, orchestrated by Charles S. Johnson and attended by prominent white editors and publishers. The Survey Graphic offered to devote an entire issue to the new talent, and Alain Locke, a Harvard-educated Howard University philosopher and the first African American Rhodes scholar, was asked to assemble the material. Lewis catalogs the varieties of white patronage: earnest humanitarians, fascinated salon figures like Carl Van Vechten, Lost Generation writers, business liberals, and Jewish supporters including Julius Rosenwald, who built thousands of schools for African Americans. Locke's expanded anthology, The New Negro (1925), became a foundational text.

Lewis identifies six key personalities who sustained the Renaissance. Jessie Fauset, literary editor of The Crisis, discovered and first published Toomer and Hughes and wrote novels depicting cultured African Americans. Charles S. Johnson worked behind the scenes, recruiting talent and building networks. Walter White, the NAACP's blond, blue-eyed assistant secretary, networked tirelessly with publishers and white celebrities. Casper Holstein, a Virgin Islands-born illegal lottery boss, financed Opportunity prizes. James Weldon Johnson, the NAACP executive secretary, articulated the foundational belief that artistic production would change mental attitudes and raise the race's status. Locke served as aesthetic disciplinarian, channeling the patronage of Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white benefactor who demanded that her African American protégés call her "Godmother" and remain faithful to "primitive" artistic expression.

The mid-twenties brought consolidation and controversy. Van Vechten's novel Nigger Heaven (August 1926) became a bestseller and ignited fierce debate: James Weldon Johnson endorsed it, while Du Bois called it "a blow in the face." Hughes published his manifesto "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" in The Nation, declaring the younger artists' intention to draw inspiration from common folk rather than the bourgeoisie. The writer and editor Wallace Thurman, recently arrived from California, launched the radical quarterly Fire!! (November 1926), which scandalized the establishment but failed after a single issue.

By the late twenties, institutional supports weakened as the Renaissance reached its social zenith. Charles S. Johnson suspended the Opportunity contests in 1927 after funding ended and departed for Fisk University in 1928. McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) became the first novel by a Harlem writer to reach the bestseller list. The marriage of Yolande Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois's daughter, and Cullen collapsed within months. Novelist Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929) explored the anguish of mixed-race identity and intraracial color prejudice, respectively. Beneath the glittering surface, organized crime invaded Harlem's illegal numbers-lottery operations, chain stores refused to hire African Americans, and religious cults proliferated among the dispossessed.

The Depression devastated Harlem: Median family income dropped 43.6 percent between 1929 and 1932. James Weldon Johnson resigned from the NAACP; Fauset withdrew from literary life; other key figures departed. Racism intensified: the actor and singer Paul Robeson was denied service at London's Savoy Hotel grill room, and African American Gold Star Mothers, whose sons had died in the war, were forced onto a separate vessel to France. Hughes's rupture with Charlotte Mason followed his growing political radicalization, and his dispute with Zora Neale Hurston, a writer and folklorist, over their collaborative folk comedy Mule Bone destroyed their friendship. A'Lelia Walker, a socialite and salon hostess, died suddenly in August 1931, her funeral marking the passing of an era.

The movement's final years saw a leftward political turn. In 1932, 22 young African Americans, including Hughes, sailed for Moscow to make a film about racial exploitation; the project was cancelled for diplomatic reasons. Du Bois advocated voluntary segregation in early 1934, provoking his departure from the NAACP. Father Divine's religious movement and Sufi Abdul Hamid's boycotts of discriminatory white businesses captured the energies of ordinary Harlemites. Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) was the last novel of the Renaissance. Rudolph Fisher, a physician-novelist, and Thurman both died within days of each other in late December 1934. Lewis concludes that the Renaissance's architects deceived themselves into thinking that art could win civil rights in a rigidly racist society. On March 19, 1935, the Harlem Riot swept down Lenox Avenue as 10,000 residents destroyed $2 million in white-owned property, marking the definitive end of the era.