What conditions led to the Harlem Renaissance?

A major element which led to the Harlem Renaissance was
the Great Migration during and shortly after World War I when large numbers of Black
Americans moved to the North.Between 1910-1920, the Southeast lost 323,000 blacks; five
percent of the native black population. By the end of 1920, 13% of the black population
had moved north. Between 1910 and 1930, over one million blacks moved North. With this
blacks slowly but surely gained political leverage by concentrating in large cities in
states with many electoral votes. In the North they could speak and act more freely than
in the North. Along with political activity came a spirit of protest that was expressed
in a literary and artistic movement which became known as the Harlem
Renaissance. The first significant writer of the time was Claude McKay, a
Jamaican immigrant, who wrote a collection of poems known as Harlem
Shadows. Among the poems were works such as "If We Must Die," and "To the
White Fiends." Other writers included: Langston Hughes, Zoral Neale Hurston, and James
Weldon Johnson who portrayed the black mecca in Black Manhattan. Johnson is perhaps best
known as the author of "Lift Every Voice."

A
substantial element was a movement known as Negro Nationalism, largely the work of
Marcus Garvey, which exalted black cultural expression. All of this, or course, was part
of the great upheaval of the Roaring Twenties when all previous standards were questions
and the New Woman appeared as well as the "New Negro" to use the phrase of the
time.