New Negro
The Harlem Renaissance and the Black Cultural Revolution, 1919-1935By David Marcus Wheeler
Length6h 31m
About this audiobook
Harlem Renaissance history, Black cultural revolution, Great Migration, jazz age New York — the complete narrative of the New Negro movement 1919-1935: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
They came by the hundreds of thousands — from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, from communities where Jim Crow was not merely law but daily negotiation with violence. The ones who changed the world came to Harlem. Between the end of World War One and the Great Depression, that neighborhood in upper Manhattan became the capital of Black America and the birthplace of a cultural revolution no one had planned.
David Marcus Wheeler traces the full Harlem Renaissance arc: the Great Migration's six million people from boll-weevil fields to 125th Street rent parties; the 369th Infantry "Harlem Hellfighters," who served 191 consecutive combat days and came home to the Red Summer riots of 1919; Langston Hughes and Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro; Ellington's Cotton Club orchestra; and Marcus Garvey packing Madison Square Garden with 25,000 delegates in 1920 — before his deportation ended the UNIA's mass movement.
Inside this Harlem Renaissance history:
• The Great Migration — the Chicago Defender smuggled south, the boll weevil's agricultural catastrophe, chain networks that moved six million people north (Chapter 1)
• The Red Summer of 1919 — thirteen days of Chicago riots, 38 dead, 1,000 families burned out; Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" written in the immediate aftermath (Chapter 4)
• Hughes and Hurston — the poet of Black America and the anthropologist-novelist who collected Florida folklore; their creative peaks and rupture with Locke (Chapters 5-6)
• Jazz, Blues, and performance — Ellington's Cotton Club, Bessie Smith, the Savoy Ballroom's Lindy Hop, and the appropriation debate (Chapters 9-10, 12)
• Garvey versus Du Bois — Black nationalism against integrationism; the most consequential ideological divide in Black political history (Chapters 14-15)
• A. Philip Randolph and labor — the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, twelve years of organizing, the first Black union contract with a major corporation (Chapter 16)
• The Depression's reckoning — what the crash took away and how the Renaissance's legacy shaped the civil rights era (Chapters 21-24)
In 1920, declaring that Black culture had value and Black people were fully human was radical. The art and politics of the Harlem Renaissance carried those declarations into the mainstream — and transformed American culture permanently.
For readers of Isabel Wilkerson's THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS and David Levering Lewis's WHEN HARLEM WAS IN VOGUE.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory, Psychology
Length6 hrs 31 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJun 2, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Introduction
2Prologue: Up from the South
3PART ONE: THE WORLD THAT MADE HARLEM (1900-1919)
4Chapter 1: The Great Migration — Southern Black America Moves North
5Chapter 2: Harlem Transforms — From White Neighborhood to Black Metropolis
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6Chapter 3: World War I and Black America — The Double V Before Its Name
7Chapter 4: The Red Summer of 1919 — Race Riots and the New Militancy
8PART TWO: THE LITERATURE OF THE RENAISSANCE (1920-1935)
9Chapter 5: Langston Hughes — The Poet Laureate of Black America
10Chapter 6: Zora Neale Hurston — Folklore, Anthropology, and Black Southern Life
11Chapter 7: Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and the Modernist Tradition
12Chapter 8: The Literary Magazines — The Crisis, Opportunity, and the Print Culture
13PART THREE: MUSIC, ART, AND PERFORMANCE
14Chapter 9: Jazz Comes to Harlem — Duke Ellington and the Cotton Club
15Chapter 10: The Blues — Bessie Smith and the Female Voice of Black Music
16Chapter 11: The Visual Artists — Aaron Douglas and the Aesthetics of the Renaissance
17Chapter 12: Theater and Dance — Black Performance and the White Audience
18PART FOUR: POLITICS AND IDEOLOGY
19Chapter 13: Alain Locke and 'The New Negro' — Defining the Renaissance
20Chapter 14: Marcus Garvey — Black Nationalism, the UNIA, and the Return to Africa
21Chapter 15: W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP — Integrationist Politics in the Jazz Age
22Chapter 16: A. Philip Randolph — Labor, Socialism, and Black Economic Rights
23PART FIVE: HARLEM'S LIFE
24Chapter 17: The Rent Party — Black Social Life and the Economics of Harlem
25Chapter 18: Harlem's Women — Gender, Race, and the Renaissance's Unsung Voices
26Chapter 19: The White Fascination — Primitivism, Patronage, and Cultural Appropriation
27Chapter 20: The Church in Harlem — Religion and Community in Black New York
28PART SIX: LEGACIES
29Chapter 21: The Depression Ends the Renaissance — What the Crash Took Away
30Chapter 22: The Renaissance's Influence — Black Arts After 1935
31Chapter 23: Harlem Today — Memory, Gentrification, and the Neighborhood's Meaning
32Chapter 24: The Renaissance's Place in American Culture — Literature, Music, and Identity
33Epilogue: The Harlem That Was
34Acknowledgments
35Selected Bibliography
36About the Author
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