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Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and the Harlem Renaissance
Between the two world wars, an African-American movement established itself in New York's Harlem district that was not only the nucleus of the later civil rights movement, but is considered by many to be the most important US cultural movement of the 20th century: The Harlem Renaissance.
The Harlem Renaissance explored the hitherto suppressed and despised African American culture, brought it confidently into the limelight and developed it meteorically. The anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, known primarily as a poet, were among the most important protagonists of the movement. Their works are now school material in the USA and, like the movement in general, have remained astonishingly modern. How else would the lyricist Amanda Gorman have referred to Langston Hughes' iconic poem "I, Too" from 1926 at Joe Biden's inauguration?