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 artists documenting gritty reality. We explore Harlem stride piano, Shuffle Along on Broadway, Aaron Douglas’s geometric Egyptian-inflected paintings, James Van Der Zee’s dignified portraits, Langston Hughes’s jazz poetry and 1926 manifesto, Josephine Baker’s banana skirt, the whites-only Cotton Club, the Home to Harlem controversy, the drag balls at Hamilton Lodge, Gladys Bentley’s Clam House, the radical blues of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, and the collapse that followed the 1929 crash.

• How wartime industry, Jim Crow terror and a betrayed generation of veterans made Harlem a pressure cooker
• Respectability politics in the 1920s: the impossible burden placed on poets and painters
• Stride piano as a hybrid of the parlor instrument and Southern jazz polyrhythms
• The paradox of white patronage and the commodification of Black culture severed from Black humanity
• Why the queer and blues underground was scrubbed from the textbooks and what the movement left for the civil rights era