During the 1920s and the early 1930s, support from black workers and those who owned small businesses formed an African-American cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. This cultural movement also gained support from black intellectuals. The innovative novel Cane (1923) by Jean Toomer voiced the common theme of the Harlem Renaissance in its identification with the life-styles of the black poor. Although Toomer and the poet Countee Cullen were members of the black elite, they and other black writers combined European literary technique with African-American themes. The most popular and prolific of the black writers of the 1920s was the poet Langston Hughes, whose works showed strong identification with the black working class.

As in literature, black activities in theater reflected a desire to display African-American cultural distinctiveness to the public. Several musical comedies produced in the 1920s by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle allowed black performers to prove their talents.

African-American music was also deeply affected by the social currents of the 1920s. Previously confined to the South, jazz and blues began to be played in northern cities during World War I and soon became established in the rapidly growing northern black communities. Louis Armstrong went from New Orleans to Chicago in 1922 to play with King Oliver's jazz band, and Jelly Roll Morton began arranging the previously spontaneous jazz pieces during the mid-1920s, preparing the way for big band leaders such as Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson.

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