At the turn of the 19th century, America had a lot going on. The era of westward expansion was coming to a close, industrialization and urbanization intensified, and immigration from European countries flooded cities with new cultures, businesses, languages, and people. But despite the nation’s progress, great divides and problems still persisted. Echoes of slavery—like sharecropping, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan—oppressed the former slaves and their children. Wealth inequality between white and Black people continued to expand. Additionally, segregation and racism existed at the core of the country’s legal and political systems.

In the second half of the 1910s, a slew of issues struck the country at once. World War I brought the world into the modern age of horrific warfare and atrocity, the Spanish Flu pandemic killed more people than any pandemic in centuries, and the mass migration of African Americans from the South to the North in search of work and a better life led to white backlash in the form of riots and violence.

In this world grew the Harlem Renaissance, a movement centered around the Harlem neighborhood in New York City. This movement saw the rise of Black culture in America through poetry, fiction, art, and music.