For those Americans who have sufficient cultural literacy to know about Josephine Baker, the clip we carry in our head is of a gangly...

The Charleston reigned supreme as the dance of the Roaring Twenties. There were other shorter-lived crazes, most notably the Black...

The literary lesbian output of the Queer Harlem Renaissance provides meager fare: a couple of windy, antique love poems by Angelina Weld...

Through the offices of the white scholar and collector of Harlem Renaissance texts Thomas Wirth, Fire!! was published as a textual...

In 1926 a precocious 19-year-old poet and artist, Richard Bruce Nugent, penned the first positive depiction of same-sex desire in...

In the summer of 1920, Langston Hughes was riding the train to Mexico to visit his estranged father, a bitter expatriate who hated his...

This intriguing headshot portrays a very complex young man destined to become, in spite of his physical absence, a star of the Harlem...

“ Shuffle Along was a honey of a show,” Langston Hughes wrote in his autobiography, The Big Sea . “To see Shuffle Along was the main...

Ah, the shame of it all! How could one despised minority climb out of their oppression on the backs of another despised minority?...

The Netflix adaptation of the August Wilson play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom , has been getting a lot of awards buzz this season, and...

I spent the year 1988 doing dissertation research in Tanzania. I was looking to activate four years of classroom Swahili with an...

Langston Hughes published "Fire" in his first collection of poetry The Weary Blues . Here is the poem in its entirety. Fire, Fire, Lord!...

You hardly hear anything about the role of classical music in the Harlem Renaissance, do you? All anyone talks about are the pop, blues...

It ain't all moanin' and groanin', and nobody knew that better than the first blues stars -- most of them women -- who brought their...

From 1919 when this Jamaican-born writer published a powerful set of poems in the left-wing little magazine, The Liberator, ClaudeMcKay...

On Friday, August 7, Kali O Ray, graphic designer extraordinaire and executive director of the San Francisco Black Film Festival, died...

It's been open season on Black people since this country was founded. During the 19th century, the worst of anti-Black violence was...

The steady blows of African Americans being killed with seeming impunity by white cops and racist vigilantes don't let up even during the...

On May 23, 1921, Shuffle Along opened in a ramshackle "theater" (more a performance space; there was no orchestra pit) in New York City....

By 1925, year one of the "official" Harlem Renaissance (at least as we define it), 22-year-old Countee Cullen was at the peak of his...