hattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. . . . In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is--or promises at least to be--a race capital."During the Harlem Renaissance, intellectual dialogue, literary and artistic creation, blues and jazz, dance and musical theater came together and flowered as never before. There were active offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. There were all black musicals, dance clubs, jazz clubs, and nightclubs that catered to whites. The leaders and stars are still known today: in intellectual discourse and book and magazine publishing, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Alain Locke; in music and dance, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Ethel Waters, and Duke Ellington; sculptors and painters Meta Warrick Fuller, Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, and Augusta Savage; novelists Jessie Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston; and poets James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, and of course, Langston Hughes. Ultimately, the Depression, unemployment, poverty, gang violence, and most of all segregation--not legal segregation but the continuing inequality between whites and blacks--changed Harlem in the 1930s, and it became a sad and dangerous place. Despite so many brilliant accomplishments, there was no fundamental change in the comparative position of the two races. Langston Hughes explained it this way: "The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negro had but few pegs to fall."...
