ABSTRACT
During the “Harlem Renaissance” period—roughly 1920–1940—while African Americans in Minneapolis and St. Paul and elsewhere in the Mississippi Riverbordering state of Minnesota took courage and cheer and inspiration from the artistic and literary activities centered in Harlem, they also increasingly found their colleagues from the East Coast too parochial, too unconcerned with the impact of art on society, too urban-centered, and too pessimistic for Upper Midwest taste. If Alain Locke, “Mr. New Negro” himself after his editing of the ground-breaking anthology of that name, could by the end of the 1930s decry the tendencies of the Harlem-centered 1920s, how much more would that be the case for artists and art-devourers even further from New York City than Locke’s Howard University in Washington, DC, and by then even deeper into the Depression than the city-folk out east. Thus when we speak of the “Harlem Renaissance” just a few miles west of the Mississippi, we find a surge of activity and consciousness occurring especially in the 1930s, coincident with the WPA programs of the New Deal.
