Harlem Renaissance ushered in a first ‘Golden Age’ | READER COMMENTARY

K. Ward Cummings makes the case that Gen X Black Americans may be leading the way to the “Golden Age of African Americans” (“Black Gen X: the bridge generation ushering in the ‘Golden Age of African Americans,'” May 24). Perhaps, Cummings has overlooked the first “Golden Age.”

Think back to the period following the Great Migration from the South to the North when, from the 1910s to the 1930s, the Harlem Renaissance took place in New York City. Spearheaded by such Black leaders as W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, this was a time of remarkable artistic flourishing of Black culture encompassing music, literature, theater and the visual arts. Black artists gained control over how the Black experience was represented in American culture, and this probably set the stage for the civil rights movement.

Currently, there is a wonderful exhibition of visual arts from the time of the Harlem Renaissance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

From a historic perspective, Cummings may actually be making a case for the second “Golden Age of African Americans.”

— Frona Brown, Pikesville

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