A century on, the Harlem Renaissance is still being argued over

A century after the Harlem Renaissance remade American letters, the question of what its writers owed their race — and what the present owes them — has not gone quiet.

By Monexus Staff Writeramericas6-minute read12 Jun 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

On a stretch of West 125th Street that has changed out of all recognition since 1926, the question of what the Harlem Renaissance actually was — and what it should mean now — is still being litigated in print. A century on from the moment Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Wallace Thurman, Sterling Brown and a half-dozen others pulled Black American literature into the centre of the country's cultural conversation, the inheritance is anything but settled. The latest contribution to that argument lands this week in Counterpunch, where a long essay titled "Thoughts on Black Literature and Politics a Hundred Years after the Harlem Renaissance" reopens the period's oldest fault line: whether the writers of the 1920s and '30s should be read as artists first, or as delegates of a race.

The piece is not the work of a passing commentator. It sits inside a tradition of argument that has run, more or less without interruption, from W.E.B. Du Bois's 1926 American Mercury essay calling for a Black art that served a Black audience, through Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro — the volume that effectively named the movement — to the more recent revisions that have de-centred Langston Hughes and elevated Hurston, that have rediscovered Fauset's There Is Confusion (1924) and questioned the canonicity of Cullen's more decorous verse. The argument this time is the same argument that has always organised the field: politics versus form, the movement versus the individual, the school versus the genius. None of it is new. All of it is, somehow, still unresolved.

The old debate, recut

The Counterpunch essay treats the Harlem Renaissance as a political event that happened to produce literature, rather than the other way around — a frame that has deep roots. Du Bois, editing The Crisis in the mid-1920s, was already demanding that Black writers treat Black life as material worthy of serious art; he was also demanding that they treat the uplift of Black America as the work's implicit purpose. The "talented tenth," in his telling, owed the rest of the race a portrait it could recognise. Locke, a generation younger and a philosopher by training, took a softer line in The New Negro: the renaissance was an expression of selfhood, not a delivery mechanism for a political programme. The two positions have never quite reconciled.

What the new essay adds, or claims to add, is a question about the post-1965 inheritance. If the Harlem Renaissance was the first sustained effort by Black American writers to be read as Americans without the prefix, what did it cost the writers who came after — the Richard Wrights, the Ralph Ellisons, the James Baldwins, the Toni Morrisons, the writers of the Black Arts Movement who were openly contemptuous of the Renaissance's accommodationist drift? The Harlem Renaissance, on this telling, is less a finished object than the opening move in a longer game of telephone, each generation receiving a corrupted version of the prior one and trying to restore the original signal.

The counter-read

A reasonable objection: literature is not a relay race, and treating it as one flattens the writers. Hughes in particular fares badly under the political reading. His Not Without Laughter (1930) and his shorter poems were neither the propaganda his detractors wanted nor the art-for-art's-sake exercise his defenders sometimes claim. The 1930s poetry of Hughes, his "I, too" moment, his Blues aesthetic — all of it sits awkwardly inside any framework that demands Black art be either a sermon or a commodity. The same is true of Hurston, whose Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) was rediscovered by Alice Walker's 1975 Ms. Magazine essay, and whose anthropological ear for Black vernacular speech made her politically suspect inside movements that wanted the literature to do more direct lifting.

There is also a class argument the essay gestures at without fully developing. The Harlem Renaissance, for all its claims to vernacular authenticity, was partly an event of the Black professional and mercantile class — readers of The Crisis and Opportunity, patrons of the Harmon Foundation, subscribers to Survey Graphic's 1925 Harlem issue that became Locke's anthology. To read the period as a mass political awakening is to overstate the audience. To read it as a literary movement is to understate the politics. The Counterpunch essay is aware of this tension. It does not fully resolve it; nor, to be fair, has anyone else.

What the centennial is for

A hundred years is a useful round number, and the 2026 calendar is dotted with commemorations: the Schomburg Center's centennial programming, the Library of America's reissues, the new biographies that always cluster around the anniversary. The practical question — what the centennial asks of a present-day reader — is harder. The Harlem Renaissance, as a school, produced work of undeniable force. It also produced a great deal of work that has not survived the century well. Cullen's Color (1925) and his later collections are read now mostly by scholars. McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) is more cited than read. Even Hughes, whose reputation has outlasted nearly everyone's, has a poetic body whose reputation depends on a relatively small number of poems.

But the centennial is not, in the end, a referendum on the individual books. It is a referendum on the question of whether a Black American literature with its own institutions, its own press, its own patronage, its own audience, was possible — and, if it was, what shape it should take a hundred years later. The Counterpunch essay's argument, finally, is that the political pressure that produced the Renaissance has not abated, and that reading the period as merely a literary event is to miss what made it political in the first place. The counter-argument, equally old, is that literature is judged by literary standards and that the political work of art is not always its best work. Both positions have their partisans. Neither has won.

The stake for the next hundred years

The structural point is straightforward. American letters, in 2026, is no longer arranged the way it was in 1926. The Black American writers of the past four decades — Morrison, Gayl Jones, Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, the poets of the Black Arts Movement, the Afrofuturists, the writers of the current moment — have written into a country and an industry that is more attentive, and in some cases more tokenising, than the one the Renaissance inherited. The argument about the Renaissance is in part an argument about the terms on which that attention was earned. If the Renaissance was, as Du Bois wanted, the first chapter of a longer Black American project, then the centennial is a stocktake. If it was, as Locke wanted, an opening assertion of selfhood, then the centennial is an invitation. The Counterpunch essay is firmly in the first camp. The bookshops, for now, belong to neither.

Desk note: Monexus treats the Harlem Renaissance centennial as a literature story first, with the political inheritance held in the foreground rather than relegated to a sidebar. We lead with primary-source reading — Locke, Du Bois, Hurston, Hughes — and use the new essay at Counterpunch as a contemporary vantage rather than as the framing device.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Renaissance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Negro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Their_Eyes_Were_Watching_God