Did African-American literature during the Harlem Renaissance have an effect on Americas society?
Certainly; a profound effect. It is fashionable to speak more of correlations than cause-and-effect, but when you’re talking about the flourishing of African-American literature, art, music, dance, and social commentary in the 1920s, you’re talking about people who actively changed the conditions of life in America for blacks and whites alike. Urban migration by rural blacks and a national trend toward seeking new ways of self-expression and new explanations of social phenomena precipitated the renaissance, first called “The New ***** Movement”. Poets like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen and prose writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larson changed the shape of black identity and perceptions of blacks in society, even as the emergence of black culture was sending waves through the general culture. There were events spurred by these writings, or spurred by the same emerging consciousness that made them possible. In 1919, the 369th Regiment marched up Fifth Avenu
