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Since the mid to late eighteen hundreds Harlem has been a city of immigration and migration. Alain Locke puts it this way: “Harlem has come to mean...another statue of liberty on the landward side of New York” (Locke, “Harlem”). He continues that Harlem “stands for a folk-movement which in human significance can be compared with the pushing back of the western frontier...or the waves of immigration which have swept overseas.” Locke defines Harlem as a city of opportunity and hope for the vast number of immigrants that traveled into the city in the early part of its history. However, the Harlem Renaissance is not due to immigration; no, the Harlem Renaissance is because of the migration of the black community from the South. Harlem, stated by Locke, “has become the greatest Negro community the world has known.” Another historian comments that the name “Harlem” itself is a pseudonym for “Negro metropolis” (Johnson, “The Making of Harlem”). So what happened in this African-American community for it to be called a renaissance? There was a renaissance in Harlem that defined what an “African-American” is. This is to say that the Harlem Renaissance can be defined as the finding of an identity for the black individual as well as the black community in America through the vessels of art: including music, painting, poetry; it was about the “Negro’s thrust towards Democracy” (Locke, “Harlem”).
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