Claude McKay's Adaptation to Audience

From 1890 to 1920 the United States experienced the transposition of a vast population of Negroes from a southern feudal peasantry to a northern urban proletariat, which resulted in the delineation of racial ghettoes, or black belts, the most famous of which is New York's Harlem. This new racial experience called for a literary movement to express and interpret it, and the result was what is generally called the Harlem Renaissance, a post-war phenomenon projected on the plane of an increasingly articulate elite.