A century on, the Harlem Renaissance is still being argued over

In the spring of 1925, a thirty-one-year-old Howard University philosophy professor named Alain Locke opened a 407-page anthology and, almost by himself, gave the Harlem Renaissance its name. He called the book The New Negro. Its cover was rough ochre cloth; its spine promised a "previous" and a "current" generation. Inside, Locke assembled poetry by Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, fiction by Jean Toomer and Rudolph Fisher, essays by W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson, and a now-canonical introduction arguing that the "older Negro" of plantation memory had given way to something sharper, more self-possessed, and ready to argue with America on its own terms. One century later, the argument is still not finished.

The anthology landed at the moment Black urbanization was remaking the country's demographic map. Between roughly 1916 and 1930, the wartime and postwar migration carried hundreds of thousands of African Americans out of the rural South and into northern industrial cities; the largest single node of that movement was Harlem itself. Out of that concentration came a publishing boom, a jazz and blues explosion, a visual-art circle around the Harlem Art Workshop, and a running debate over what Black art was for: high or popular, propaganda or autonomous, urban or vernacular, integrationist or separatist. The Harlem Renaissance was both a body of work and a quarrel about its meaning, and the quarrel is what has kept the period in the literary conversation long after the figures who animated it have passed on.

Locke, Du Bois, and the quarrel over audience

Locke's framing in The New Negro was deliberately literary-critical. He wanted the movement to be judged on aesthetic terms, by writers who happened to be Black rather than by a separate standard. Du Bois, by contrast, was already famous for his contention, articulated in "The Criteria of Negro Art" and elsewhere, that all art is propaganda, that Black artists had a particular responsibility to the race, and that the long apprenticeship of self-expression was inseparable from the long apprenticeship of civic standing. The two views are routinely bundled today, but they were not the same view then, and the friction between them is part of the texture of the period. The Harlem Renaissance is in part the record of an argument between a critic who wanted the work to be free of racial obligation and an editor who insisted the work could not afford to be.

The fiction of Zora Neale Hurston complicates the picture further. Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937, near the tail end of what we now call the Harlem Renaissance, and it was met with a savaging that has since become a case study in the politics of Black literary reputation. Richard Wright's 1937 review in the Marxist quarterly New Challenge dismissed the novel's "minstrel technique" and "fundamental, triumphant Yoruba" sensibility; Black literary circles in Harlem read the book as a betrayal, and Hurston died in obscurity in 1960. The rehabilitation came later, from Black feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s, led by Alice Walker's 1975 essay on the "vernacular" Hurston, and from a generation of critics who argued that Hurston had been punished for writing Black Southern speech onto the page without apology. Their Eyes Were Watching God is now widely treated as one of the great American novels of the twentieth century, which is itself an argument about who gets to revise the canon.

The political inheritance

What the centennial is really arguing over is not whether the writers were good. The writers were good. The argument is over inheritance: which strain of Black intellectual and political life has the strongest claim on the period, and which has been under-credited.

The integrationist reading, with Du Bois at its head, treats the Harlem Renaissance as the cultural wing of the early-twentieth-century civil-rights struggle, a movement whose art aimed at persuading a white audience to recognise Black humanity. The nationalist reading, which leans on Marcus Garvey's contemporaneous Universal Negro Improvement Association, the back-to-Africa campaigns, and the iconography of the period, treats the same writers as the seedbed of later Black-power politics, an inheritance that emphasises self-determination over persuasion. The folkloric reading, anchored by Hurston and by writers like Sterling Brown, treats the movement as a recovery of vernacular Black culture, an inheritance that prizes the rural South, the rural Caribbean, and the diasporic frame. None of these readings cancels the others, but each one tilts the period in a different direction, and the centennial is the moment when institutions are quietly choosing which tilt to canonise.

Why the argument keeps reopening

Two structural facts keep the debate alive. First, the period's writers were unusually articulate about the period itself. Locke's introduction, Du Bois's essays, Hughes's memoir The Big Sea, Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road are all meta-commentary; the writers argued about what they were doing while they were doing it, and they left the arguments on the page. Second, the political stakes of the present keep rising into the archive. Every generation re-reads the Harlem Renaissance through the lens of the race question of its own moment, and 2026 has its own.

The result is that the centennial is less a celebration than a reopening of pleadings. New editions of Locke's anthology sit on the same display tables as critical re-readings of Hurston, Hughes, and Toomer, and as fresh debates about who the movement belonged to and who it excluded, including working-class writers, Black queer writers, and the women whose labour in editing, publishing, and patronage has often been written out of the standard story.

What the centennial is for

The honest case for the centennial is not that the period needs defending. The honest case is that the period is useful. The Harlem Renaissance offers a working model of what it looks like when a community, freshly urban, suddenly produces the institutional infrastructure to publish, review, and circulate its own work, and what it costs when that infrastructure is uneven and the disagreements inside it are sharp. The writers argued with each other in public and they wrote magnificently anyway. That is a useful thing to point at in 2026, when the institutions that produce and distribute culture are again being asked who they are for and who gets to decide.

The argument will not finish. A century on, that is the point.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Harlem Renaissance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Renaissance
• Wikipedia, The New Negro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Negro
• Wikipedia, Their Eyes Were Watching God. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Their_Eyes_Were_Watching_God

Desk note: Monexus treats the Harlem Renaissance centennial as a literature story first, with the political inheritance held in the foreground rather than relegated to a sidebar. We lead with primary-source reading, Locke, Du Bois, Hurston, Hughes, and use the new essay at Counterpunch as a contemporary vantage rather than as the framing device.