Several events caused the Harlem Renaissance, a period when black arts and the black community flourished in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan in the 1920s and early 1930s, until the effects of the Great Depression impoverished the area.
In the South, by 1900, blacks saw the gains they had achieved during the Reconstruction era eroded as white Democrats increasingly took political control and used voting laws, lynching and other means of terror to disenfranchise the black population. As a result, many blacks began to think about migrating north. When World War I started, this gave a great boost to black migration, because immigration from Europe dried up (most of the men there being conscripted into the army or into the war efforts in their home countries) just at the moment factories were going into high gear in the United States to supply the war demand. Therefore, blacks found it easy during this period to migrate north because jobs were plentiful. Many showed up in Harlem, which also attracted blacks from the Caribbean. Black leaders like W.E.B Dubois encouraged black artists to move to Harlem. Naturally, as it became a cultural center, more and more artists arrived. In this period too, the famed Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem, under Clayton Powell Sr, became a center of black cultural life. And as the economy boomed after World War I across the United States, some whites invested capital in the vibrant and expanding Harlem arts scene. In a nutshell, it was the economic opportunities opened up to blacks by both the first World War and the subsequent postwar economic expansion that allowed the Harlem Renaissance to occur.
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