The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.
Philip A. Payton Jr. founded the Afro-American Realty Company in 1903, which sought to fight housing discrimination and encourage Black migration into Harlem.
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The multi-talented Adelaide Hall and Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson in the musical comedy Brown Buddies on Broadway, 1930
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African Americans, also known as Black Americans or Afro-Americans, are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. African Americans constitute the third largest racial or ethnic group in the U.S. after White Americans and Hispanic and Latino Americans. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States.
Slaves processing tobacco in 17th-century Virginia, illustration from 1670
The first slave auction at New Amsterdam in 1655; illustration from 1895 by Howard Pyle
Reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1769
Crispus Attucks, the first "martyr" of the American Revolution. He was of Native American and African American descent.