Among the phenomena that set the Twenties roaring was a startling irruption of creative activity by black Americans that was immediately and forever labeled the Harlem Renaissance. It was produced by an odd conjunction of social forces. The bohemians of white America, their values unmoored by the carnage of World War I, sought spiritual invigoration in the “exotic,” in the American-tamed aborigine so brilliantly depicted in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones. (“One heard it said that the Negroes had retained a direct virility that the whites had lost,” the critic Malcolm Cowley reminisced in Exile’s Return.)

Leaders of black America envisioned cultural achievement as a vehicle for civil rights: “Nothing,” proclaimed James Weldon Johnson, the executive secretary of the NAACP, “will do more to change the mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through his production of literature and art.” Suddenly, the major civil rights organizations—the National Urban League and the NAACP—were devoting their journals to poetry and fiction; wealthy white patrons were writing checks to support black sculptors, painters and classical singers; Broadway productions depicting Harlem scenes (such as Shuffle Along, which introduced Eubie Blake’s hit song “I’m Just Wild About Harry”) created such a flood of white traffic to black nightclubs that The American Mercury published an article entitled “The Caucasian Storms Harlem.” When the money dried up in the Great Depression, so did the art.

As an event in history,