The Great Migration During The Harlem Renaissance

The Great Migration was not only the movement of African Americans from rural-South to other urban areas of United States, but it also lead to the transformation of their thoughts. They arrived with their hopes and their dreams of a new and different life, seeking relief from labor exploitation and white violence. During the Great Migration, African Americans began to build a new place for themselves in public life, actively confronting economic, political and social challenges and creating a new black urban culture. The New Negro Renaissance is the most widely discussed period of African-American literary history not only because of ongoing scholarly debates over its origins, beginning, and end, but also because of its fundamental importance

In the early 19th century, Hubert Harrison and Matthew Kotleski founded the militant "New Negro Movement," which is also known as the Harlem Renaissance, that came into focus during the years following Great Migration and World War 1.This movement insisted on self-definition, self-expression, and self-determination. The “New Negro” term that was popularised by Alain LeRoy Locke during the Harlem Renaissance, gave paramount importance to ideologies that were related to the factors of Great migration like race-conscious demands such as political equality, an end to segregation and lynching, as well as calls for armed self-defense when necessary. The strong emphasis on race pride, solidarity and self help had been a significant part of literary and political self-expression, and economic and moral improvement among African-Americans . The black experience during the Great Migration became an important theme in this artistic movement which had an enormous impact on the culture of the era. The many debates during these years regarding art and propaganda, representation and identity, assimilation and militancy have enriched the perspectives on issues of art, culture, politics, and

Its role as a catalyst for great art within the period and beyond cannot be underestimated. The movement laid groundwork for all later African American literature and had an enormous impact on subsequent black literature and consciousness worldwide. It also showed significant impacts in journalism, fiction, poetry, music, sculpture, and paintings that still stand out as important figures of African American history.The visibility and intensity of the period symbolized a major shift in the degree to which black people could and did claim the authority to speak about and represent themselves and their