1890

1. 1890 • Black Migration

2. 1910 • NAACP is founded • W.E.B. DuBois publishes Crisis, the NAACP monthly magazine

3. 1917 • Marcus Garvey arrives in Harlem and creates the United Negro Improvement Association which urges blacks to unite and form their own nation

4. 1919 • Red Summer of Hate • Race riots that broke out in more than three dozen cities, mainly over jobs for returning WWI veterans both black and white

5. 1921 • Shuffle Along opens on Broadway • Sparks the Harlem Renaissance with music

6. 1921 • Langston Hughes writes “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and appears in The Crisis I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

7. 1923 • Joe “King” Oliver’s Creole jazz band and Louis Armstrong perform together • Duke Ellington arrives to NYC with his band the Washingtonians • The Cotton Club opens

8. The spirit of the Negro who went across the seas -- who was in battle-- is different from the spirit of the Negro before the war. He is altogether a new man, with new ideas, new hopes, new dreams, and new desires. He will not quietly accept discrimination, and we should not ask him to do so. It is a new Negro that we have with us now. . ..The war transformed these men into new creatures -- citizens of another type. 1919, The Independent