But there is no clear evidence that the Harlem Renaissance started exactly at this time because there are scholars who see a poem by W.E.B. Du Bois, "Song of Smoke", as the first magnificent piece of this movement, and "Song of Smoke" was written in 1899. There is another point which would date the Harlem Renaissance in earlier times. Claude McKay` s poetry of 1917 presents some of the most important pieces of the Harlem Renaissance as well. And John Hope Franklin even claimed that the Harlem Renaissance lasted until 1960 with only a little negligible interruptions. Sterling Brown, a participant of the Renaissance, even denied the Renaissance being a literary movement.
Cary Wintz attempted to explain this statement.
The Harlem Renaissance was basically a psychology - a state of mind or an attitude - shared by a number of black writers and intellectuals who centered their activities around Harlem in the late 1920s and the 1930s. .
The writers had no common bond of political or radical ideology - what made them stick together was their sense of community, a feeling that they were all part of the same endeavor. And I think the creativity of writing a poem, story or musical comes exactly from this state of mind. To invent something new or just the feeling of being part of something special makes the lives of people like Aaron Douglas or Langston Hughes so interesting and creative. Some people conceptualize the Harlem Renaissance as a group of young writers "orbiting around" an older group of black intellectuals who were established in the NAACP, Urban League or black journals. These older men were for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke or James Weldon Johnson. Aaron Douglas or Gwendolyn Bennett belong to the group of younger writers at this time. In general, Harlem / New York, was the focal point of the Renaissance - everyone associated something on his own with Harlem. Most writers spent at least some time in Harlem, others like Langston Hughes or Claude McKay, described the New York ghetto life in their short stories; it simply provided a various number of setting for their stories.
