1920s Jazz Age & The HaRlem Renaissance

The Roaring Twenties was a period in American history of dramatic social, economic and political change, especially for African Americans. The 1920s ushered in the Jazz Age, and Jazz bands led by musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and others played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Club in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago; radio stations and phonograph records carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. 

The 1920s saw the Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of Black culture—poetry and literature, and jazz and blues music – the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. By 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the South had moved north, and Harlem was one of the most popular destinations for these families. The Harlem neighborhood in New York City became a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century; and the 1910s through the mid-1930s is considered a golden age in African American literature, music, stage performance and art. It gave these artists pride in and control over how the Black experience was represented in American culture and set the stage for the civil rights movement.