The Jim Crow era in the U.S. was a time rife with racist policies and blatant murder, this was the time in which the Harlem Renaissance occurred. The intermixing of ballrooms and later bands would serve to be experiments with integration for a segregated America, in fact some of the best white musicians of the era, much like blues musicians of the past, were exposed to the vibrancy of black jazz virtuosos and fell in love. Jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Chick Webb, Bandleaders like Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman, and Cab Calloway. All of these musicians rose to differing levels of stardom but each and every one was an important part of the history of jazz and how it helped shape the nation into what it is today, something wholly different from the eurocentric Victorian nation it had been since before its separation from Britain. The Harlem Renaissance was not one unified movement of the same ideals, conflicting ideas around how political or how racially tied literary works should …show more content…
If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.” That article talks about the clashes between northern urban black Americans who wanted not to shake the waters and the southern rural black Americans who viewed their race as integral and important to their art and their existence. That concept of race, which has been and will continue to be important within an American context, was a main driving force behind the Harlem Renaissance, it created an environment where because it was right front and center of the black American experience it would naturally be reflected in the forms of expression. Whether captured in photography, written about, or sung about, it would be expressed not only to the nation but the world, that's the effect this movement had on America, it went from a national discourse to a cross-continental one. This established connections outside American soil and allowed artists who were part of the movement to travel to other parts of the world such as the aforementioned