The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

by Les Payne

Starting in the 1920s, as the white flight of largely European immigrants yielded to the influx of Americans from the South, central Harlem began to experience a sustained cultural renaissance that defined a new and optimistic “black aesthetic.” Writer and professor Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar, became the architect of this largely literary “spiritual awakening” when he edited the 1925 anthology The New Negro and enticed the publishing industry to explore this “exotic” new market. Noted critic H. L. Mencken declared Locke’s book of essays “a phenomenon of immense significance,” with the Negro writers presented in The New Negro taking “a fierce sort of racial pride” in a declaration of independence.5 Key writers of this intellectual movement, which became known as the Harlem Renaissance, included James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Countee Cullen. The fine-arts aspect of the movement was represented by such painters as Archibald Motley, Palmer Hayden and Aaron Douglas and the sculptors Augusta Savage and Richmond Barthe. And running parallel to the intellectual renaissance were the jazz artists who were staging their own creative, cultural movement.