What Was the Harlem Renaissance?

What Was?

By: Sherri L. Smith, Who HQ

Narrated by: Tashi Thomas

In this book from the number one New York Times best-selling series, learn how this vibrant Black neighborhood in upper Manhattan became home to the leading Black writers, artists, and musicians of the 1920s and 1930s.

Travel back in time to the 1920s and 1930s to the sounds of jazz in nightclubs and the 24-hours-a-day bustle of the famous Black neighborhood of Harlem in uptown Manhattan. It was a dazzling time when there was an outpouring of the arts of African Americans - the poetry of Langston Hughes; the novels of Zora Neale Hurston; the sculptures of Augusta Savage; and that brand-new music called jazz as only Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong could play it. Author Sherri Smith traces Harlem's history all the way to its 17th-century roots, and explains how the early-20th-century Great Migration brought African Americans from the deep South to New York City and gave birth to the golden years of the Harlem Renaissance.

©2021 Sherri L. Smith and Who HQ (P)2021 Listening Library