Harlem created a growth of African-American culture which gave rise to a community exploding with art, politics, energy, and racial pride. In particular the entertainment business gave Blacks the opportunity of expressing themselves, escaping from the years of pain and discrimination in the Deep South, and of celebrating their new-gained freedom. Harlem became known as the "Night Club Capital of the World". Literature and other art forms created by African-Americans became a great part of the cultural interracial life of the 1920s. The self-confident black citizens of Harlem enjoyed the presentation of their talents to the world. What is more, Whites accepted and enjoyed the expressionism of Blacks and even came closer to this new form of culture. America had now entered the decade of a black new world.
The playwright and poet Langston Hughes wrote: "Harlem was like a great magnet for the Negro intellectual, pulling him from everywhere. Once in New York, he had to live in Harlem. Harlem was not so much a place as a state of mind, the cultural metaphor for black America itself."[1] .
Harlem was the place that gave the revolutionary African-American cultural movement a name - The Harlem Renaissance. Redefining African-American expression, Blacks were encouraged to celebrate their heritage and to become "The New Negro," a term coined in 1925 by the University Professor of Philosophy .
Alain Leroy Locke. The Harlem Renaissance embraced all art forms, including literature, music, dance, film and theatre. .
Emphasizing the Speakeasy Era particularly in the field of literature and writings, new possibilities suddenly opened up for African-Americans to reveal their expressionism and freedom of speech. Edited by Charles S. Johnson and founded by the National Urban League, the African-American cultural magazine Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life found favor with the black population. However, instead of staying among themselves, the writers of Opportunity invited white publishers to a Civic Club Dinner in order to bring black writers and white publishers together.
