Prior to and during World War I, African American demographics underwent a major shift, with over a million black people migrating north. Filled with hope of more jobs and less racial oppression, many black Southerners saw cities such as New York andChicago as the land of their deliverance, although this was not always true in practice. Instead, blacks largely found it difficult to settle in and, after the war, tended not to benefit economically from the "Roaring Twenties," finding themselves segregated to poor racial ghettos such as Harlem inNew York City. The Ku Klux Klan remained active, actually increasing in membership during these years, and segregation was widespread.

What the newly arrived blacks in New York did find, however, between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression, was an unprecedented flowering of black art and culture later coined the "Harlem...