In the 1920s following World War I, an entire generation of Afro-Americans moved to the north of the United States, to Harlem, considered as the greatest Black city in the world. This generation, known as the Harlem renaissance, was enlightened by folk sources such as black music and black literature. Langston Hughes was one of the modernist Afro American writers of that period. Therefore poetry awakens the mood of the Harlem Renaissance, through multiple poems such as Mother to Son or even Harlem (A dream deferred), which were presenting a style of living during the first half of the twentieth century.
In that period, an important number of Afro-Americans moved to the north, transplanted from the bloody south into the promises offered by the industrial cities of the north. Harlem became the most well known African Americans city, as it represented a kind of Eden, a cultural capital where literature and art symbolized their way of life. Harlem was giving a hope of resurrection to all African Americans in the United States lay awakening the artistic and sociocultural of their community. The Harlem Renaissance was provoked by different movements such as literature, with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen or Zora Neale Hurston, music, dance, painting, church, even the Harlem population itself directed its way of life and way of thinking to progress in the American society of the twentieth century.
One of the great factors in the quick rise of the Harlem Renaissance was the literary movement with the contribution of writers such as Langston Hughes. The writers expressed their feelings: "the individual most identified with the Harlem Renaissance is Howard University Philosophy Professor Alan Locke" (Britannica) who identified "The New Negro" in his writing at the beginning of the renaissance in 1925, and introduced the concept of "Negro Renaissance"(Britannica). Everyone was surprised at a black community resurrected after years of segregation and struggle.