Step onto Lenox Avenue in the mid-1920s and you are enveloped by philosophers arguing on corners, jazz spilling from windows, poets in cafes and men and women inventing modern fashion as they walk. This episode deconstructs the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement as its participants called it, arguing that it was never merely an art movement but a sophisticated political strategy for survival and civil rights in which art, music and literature were the vehicles and liberation was the destination.

We trace the Great Migration, Caribbean immigration, the return of the Harlem Hellfighters and the Red Summer of 1919 that produced Claude McKay's If We Must Die. We examine Alain Locke's 1925 anthology, W.E.B. Du Bois's talented tenth and double consciousness, and the friction between elites demanding uplifting high culture and younger a ...