The Loop That Made Two Movements
The Great Migration & the Harlem Renaissance
Between 1910–1970, approximately 6 million Black Americans migrated from the rural South to Northern cities — one of the largest internal migrations in US history. In Harlem, the concentration of Black intellectual, artistic, and political life produced an explosion: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay.
In 1925, philosopher Alain Locke edited The New Negro — a landmark anthology declaring a new Black self-consciousness and cultural renaissance.
The Nardal Sisters: The Transatlantic Relay
Paulette Nardal and Jeanne Nardal were sisters from Martinique studying in Paris in the late 1920s. They were the first Black women to enroll at the Sorbonne. In their apartment on the Rue Hébert, they hosted a literary salon — La Clamart — that brought together Black students from across the French empire (Senegal, Antilles, Guiana) and African American writers.
Paulette translated Langston Hughes and Alain Locke into French, circulating them through the salon. She wrote the theoretical articles that gave the emerging movement its framework. When Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) arrived in Paris, they absorbed this work — and launched Negritude.
The history books credit Césaire and Senghor as Negritude's founders. The Nardal sisters — who did the translation and intellectual labor first — were largely erased from that history. This course restores them.
Claude McKay: 'If We Must Die' (1919)
Written in response to the Red Summer of 1919 — when white mobs attacked Black communities in 26 US cities — McKay's sonnet became a global rallying cry. Winston Churchill read it to Parliament during World War II (without acknowledging it was by a Black Jamaican responding to American racial terror). It traveled to Africa, the Caribbean, and France — one poem threading three continents.
