Chapter 7: Swing and Big Bands
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that emerged in the aftermath of World War I and the Great Migration, which brought large numbers of African Americans from the South to urban centers such as Harlem, New York. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Harlem became a thriving center of African American artistic, literary, and musical expression, sparking a renaissance of creativity and cultural pride. The movement celebrated Black identity and challenged dominant racial stereotypes through poetry, prose, visual art, performance, and especially music. Intellectuals such as Alain Locke, whose influential anthology The New Negro (1925) called for artistic independence and cultural self-expression, helped shape the movement’s vision of racial pride and social uplift.
Driven by a desire for dignity, creative excellence, and autonomy, the Harlem Renaissance produced a rich body of work that redefined African American cultural identity. Writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay used their literary voices to explore themes of heritage, resilience, and everyday life. Visual artists including Aaron Douglas blended African motifs with modernist aesthetics to create a new visual language for Black identity. Collectively, these artists and thinkers pushed back against racist caricatures and asserted the complexity and vitality of the Black experience. Although the movement declined with the onset of the Great Depression, its influence endured, laying the cultural foundation for future artistic innovation and civil rights advocacy.
Within this vibrant atmosphere, Duke Ellington rose to prominence as one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most influential figures. As the resident bandleader at the Cotton Club, Ellington provided the soundtrack of the era, performing nightly for radio audiences across the country—even though the club itself enforced a whites-only policy. His sophisticated compositions and groundbreaking use of tone color elevated jazz to a new artistic level and challenged prevailing assumptions about African American music. Ellington’s collaborations with Black writers and artists positioned him not only as a pioneering musician but also as a central cultural voice within a movement determined to assert the value, depth, and humanity of Black life in America.