The ‘20s: Culture, Consumption, and Crash 131fessionals with educations and others were white-collar workers. Claude
McKay, who left Jamaica and became a well-known writer, was taken aback
by what he described as America’s “intensely bitter” racism. Nevertheless,
Whites flocked to Harlem where they enjoyed entertainment from Black art-
ists as they escaped their own communities to enjoy the “exotic” excitement
of Black New York.
And they found plenty of talent to enjoy in Harlem, which became the
location of the 1920s cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance [or,
as Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke called it, the New Negro]. The
Harlem Renaissance included artists, writers, and musicians who promoted
the history and cultural accomplishments of African Americans. The artists
announced that they were of a different generation than their parents, who
often lived in subservience to Whites; the “New Negro” would rather “die
fighting” than give in to White oppression. The Harlem Renaissance indeed
had connections to the Garvey movement, as some artists expressed militancy,
independence through expression, and a rejection of stereotypes. Their works
often mixed African roots, folk traditions of the South, and the violence of
the urban ghetto. DuBois warned them that the honesty of the art could act
to reinforce prejudices against Blacks, but in any case their work often includ-
ed protest. In “If We Must Die,” Claude McKay elegantly and angrily
expressed this new Black voice: “If we must die, let it not be like hogs/Hunted
and penned in an inglorious spot/While round us bark the mad and hungry
dogs/Making their mock at our accursed lot... ./Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet
the common foe/Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave/And for
their thousand blows deal one deathblow!... /Like men we’ll face the mur-
derous, cowardly pack/Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”
The Harlem Renaissance included many of the greatest artists in America’s
history. Jazz and Blues musicians Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Cab Calloway,
Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald,
Bessie Smith, and Fats Waller became legends. Ellington even wrote some-
thing of an unofficial anthem for the community, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” which
also became a hit for Fitzgerald: “You must take the ‘A’ train/To go to Sugar
Hill ‘way up in Harlem/If you miss the ‘A’ Train/You’ll find you’ve missed the
quickest way to Harlem.” Literary figures such as Countee Cullen, Jessie
Fauset, and Zora Neal Hurston all attained fame. Perhaps no writer was as
revered or respected as the poet Langston Hughes, also a social activist, play-