The Black Capital of the twentieth century, Harlem served as a cultural nexus of black America. It was a refuge for African Americans fleeing from oppression in the South and a new home for those seeking new opportunities. Harlem was a haven, a place of self-discovery, cultural knowledge, and political activism for African Americans, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. It fostered an artistic new age of literature, painting, music, and cinema. The neighborhood was home to African Americans of immense talent – writers such as Langston Hughes, W. E. B Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Zora Neale Hurston, musicians such as Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith, as well as painters such as Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglass, and Romare Bearden. Harlem has been envisioned as a metonym for black America by many artists and authors, who have depicted the area as one of the great epochs of contemporary black existence, giving it the same chronological weight as ‘Africa,’
‘slavery,’ and ‘liberation’ in black historical awareness. ‘[Harlem] is or promises to be a race capital,’ Alain Locke remarked. ‘Europe seething in a dozen centers with emergent nationalities, Palestine full of a renascent Judaism these are no more alive with the spirit of a racial awakening than Harlem; culturally and spiritually it focuses a people.’ Harlem would serve as both ‘scene and symbol’ in the depiction of ‘our contemporary race development,’ according to Locke. For Alain Locke, the image of Harlem, like the image of the ‘New Negro’, with which it was closely associated, was an important tool to be used in ‘rehabilitating the race in world esteem from that loss of prestige for which the fate and conditions of slavery have so largely been responsible.’ This essay will explore the importance of Harlem as a symbol for African Americans in the twentieth century, examining how it transformed into more than a city – into a state of mind without geographical boundaries.