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The Harlem Renaissance has sometimes been interpreted largely in terms of race. Analyses, however, are incomplete without an understanding of the important fact that the vast majority of black Americans, including Harlemites, were working people. Indeed, the lives of working black Americans provided much of the subject matter for the authors, poets, painters, and photographers of the Harlem Renaissance. It was this focus as much as anything that distinguished early authors of the renaissance, such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Jean Toomer, from their black predecessors. Particularly significant for their art was the great movement of blacks from the South to the North that was happening during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Much of what the authors observed and wrote about concerned the difficult transition of rural agricultural folk into an urban working class.