“All God's Children Got Swing”

Some 3,000 miles from the Harlem Renaissance, the black residents of the San Francisco Bay Area are not usually depicted as active participants in this literary and cultural movement. However, research on the subject requires that we reconsider the sole focus on Harlem and New York City, as the Bay Area possessed a dynamic and fertile black cultural milieu despite its small African American population. In fact, these cultural activities began before the 1920s, the period usually considered for the Renaissance, and continued for at least a decade afterwards.