What happens when creativity becomes resistance? The Harlem Renaissance story
‘What happens when a Black community decides to rewrite the story the world tells about them?’
The Harlem Renaissance was a Black community-led cultural revolution that changed the US and sent echoes across the world.
In this short video choreographer, dancer and activist Valerie Ebuwa tells the story of how this cultural movement came into being – as African Americans fled the oppression of the US south to find new opportunities in the North – and how it flourished in Harlem, New York.
Ebuwa highlights some of the prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including the writer James Baldwin, poet Langston Hughes, musicians Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, and singer and dancer Florence Mills.
And she looks at how this creative happening in a corner of New York influenced similar Black consciousness movements in other countries, and how its legacy lived on throughout the rest of the 20th century and beyond.
‘In the early 1920s, Harlem wasn’t just another neighborhood in New York city. It was alive. Loud. Brilliant. A place where artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers were imagining new futures, and redefining what it meant to be Black in America.’
Valerie Ebuwa
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