Excerpt of "Criteria of Negro Art" by W. E. B. Du Bois: Reprinted with permission of Dr. David Graham Du Bois and the W. E. B. Du Bois Foundation. From The Portable Renaissance Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis (New York: Penguin Books, 1994). Originally in Crisis, October 1926.

"The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes: Reprinted with the permission of the Harold Ober Associates, Inc., on behalf of the Estate of Langston Hughes.

Excerpt of "How it Feels to be Colored Me" by Zora Neale Hurston: Reprinted with the permission of the Zora Neale Hurston Trust.

"If We Must Die" by Claude McKay: Courtesy of the Literary Representative for the Works of Claude McKay, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Excerpt of Negro Life in New York's Harlem by Wallace Thurman: Excerpted from Wallace Thurman's Negro Life in New York’s Harlem (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1928).