Nigger Heaven, published in 1926, for example was an attraction to whites as well to black people in America, who wanted to know something about life in the ghetto.
Harlem was a center for a black community shifted there from the south only a few years ago. Writers of the Renaissance were in the vanguard of the attempt to come to terms with black urbanization; they lived it, reflected on it, and through their art endeavored to resolve some of the problems arising from it.
Another point we should consider is the fact that there were not only black writers in Harlem, Carl van Vechten, who published Nigger Heaven, was a white writer and he was very famous, too. But I will not concentrate on the fact that white writers took part in this movement, too, I will focus on the black writers in this period.
The steady loss of orientation of the social and political position of African Americans in America and the growing exodus of blacks from their homes in the south to the northern cities are issues that the Harlem writers tried to work through in their stories and poems.
Another step backwards in the history of human rights for blacks was reached, when the erosion of the rights they had achieved under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the Reconstruction Acts were denied by the southern government.
Amendments to the Constitution .
Article XIV ( adopted in 1868).
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. . ; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the.
equal protection of the laws.
Article XV ( adopted in 1870 ).
Section 1. The rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any other State on the account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.