What Was the Harlem Renaissance?

Ages 8 to 12, Grades 3 to 7

Discover how this vibrant Black neighborhood in upper Manhattan became home to the leading Black writers, artists, and musicians of the 1920s and 1930s.

Travel back in time to the 1920s and 1930s to the sounds of jazz in nightclubs and the 24-hours-a-day bustle of the famous Black neighborhood of Harlem in uptown Manhattan. It was a dazzling time when there was an outpouring of the arts of African Americans—the poetry of Langston Hughes; the novels of Zora Neale Hurston; the sculptures of Augusta Savage and that brand-new music called jazz as only Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong could play it. Author Sherri Smith traces Harlem’s history all the way to its seventeenth-century roots, and explains how the early-twentieth-century Great Migration brought African Americans from the deep South to New York City and gave birth to the golden years of the Harlem Renaissance.

With 80 fun black-and-white illustrations and an engaging 16-page photo insert, readers will be excited to read this latest addition to Who HQ!

Series Overview: A natural expansion of the exceptional Who Was? series, What Was? focuses on compelling historical events, great battles, protests, and discoveries.

About the Author

Sherri L. Smith is the author of Who Were the Tuskegee Airmen? and What Is the Civil Rights Movement? She currently lives in Los Angeles, California.

Author Residence: Los Angeles, CA