It Happened in Harlem: Recommended Reading

Books for Kids

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  H Is for Harlem

  by Dinah Johnson; illustrated by April Harrison
  
  “A” is for “Apollo Theater,” “Z” is for “Zora Neale Hurston.” In between is the chance to learn the alphabet and delve into the history and culture of one of Black America’s most central, foundational geographies. 

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  Harlem's Little Blackbird: The Story of Florence Mills 

  by Renée Watson; illustrated by Christian Robinson

  From a scene-stealing performance in the iconic musical Shuffle Along to a tragically short starring run in Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds, Florence Mills was one of the Harlem Renaissance’s premier performers. Read about her childhood in the wake of slavery, her mastery of the stage, and her advocacy for a greater Black claim to life under the lights.

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  Harlem Renaissance Party 

  by Faith Ringgold

  Lonnie and his uncle jump on a plane that takes them back in time to the Harlem Renaissance. Though Lonnie had only been hoping to meet his hero, Langston Hughes, he also ends up running into a host of Black cultural luminaries, including but certainly not limited to Maya Angelou, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson.

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  Malcolm Little: The Boy Who Grew Up to Become Malcolm X 

  by Ilyasah Shabazz; illustrated by AG Ford 

  Malcolm X’s transformation from “Detroit Red” to one of America’s most influential political thinkers is well-trodden territory, but less examined is the story of the little boy who grew up to become Malcolm X. Through oil-painted illustrations and careful attention to the tragedies, joys, and mundanities of his life, his daughter tells the story before her father’s story. 

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  Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library 

  by Carole Boston Weatherford; illustrated by Eric Velasquez

  How did a little boy in Puerto Rico come to build one of the world’s most extensive collections of books, music, and art documenting the experience of the African Diaspora? Read about his life and his passions and how he came to help create the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Disponible en español.

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  There Was a Party for Langston 

  by Jason Reynolds; illustrated by Jerome Pumphrey and Jarrett Pumphrey

  With lyrical storytelling and lively illustrations, this read-along book recounts a fete held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture when its auditorium was named in Langston Hughes’s honor. His spirit and legacy are an integral part of the library, and his literary heirs made sure to celebrate his life with all the poetry and partying he might have wished for.

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  Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpré 

  by Anika Aldamuy Denise; illustrated by Paola Escobar

  Not long before Puerto Rican–born Arturo Schomburg’s private library seeded what would become the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a different Puerto Rican would make history at The New York Public Library. When Pura Belpré stepped behind the desk at the 135th Street branch, she did so as the Library's first Puerto Rican employee—soon to become its first Puerto Rican librarian. Read about her story and her indelible contributions to the Library. Disponible en español.

Books for Teens

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  145th Street

  by Walter Dean Myers
  
  Harlem is a place of endless stories, all intertwined. This collection imagines 10 of them that occur just a few blocks north of the Schomburg Center, from a block party with an undercurrent of resentment to a boxer with a big secret. 

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  Bitter Root Volume 1: Family Business 

  by David F. Walker and Chuck Brown; illustrated by Sanford Greene

  Something evil is infecting the people of 1920s Harlem. A family of monster hunters, the Sangeryes, enlist every physical and supernatural tool at their disposal to protect their community—even if they’re divided about the best tactics for doing so.

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  Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary 

  by Walter Dean Myers

  Malcolm X’s autobiography is the most famous book about him, but Walter Dean Myers offers another perspective for younger audiences, cluing readers into the ways that Malcolm’s proscribed sense of freedom sharpened his critiques of American society.

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  The Awakening of Malcolm X 

  by Ilyasah Shabazz with Tiffany D. Jackson

  Perhaps the most clarifying moment of Malcolm X’s life came when he was still Malcolm Little and incarcerated for burglary at Charlestown Prison in Massachusetts. Here, his daughter imagines in a novel how that time helped him become the figure we all know today.

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  The Dream Keeper and Other Poems

  by Langston Hughes
  
  The legacy of Langston Hughes looms large over both the Harlem Renaissance and the creation of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. This curation of 66 of his poems offers younger readers an introduction to his vast poetic catalogue.

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  Poemhood: Our Black Revival

  edited by Amber McBride, Erica Martin, and Taylor Byas
  
  This poetry collection captures the breadth of the African Diaspora’s lyrical tradition, from folk songs to the work of Harlem Renaissance luminaries such as Claude McKay.  

Books for Adults

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  Jazz

  by Toni Morrison
  
  A beauty products salesman’s hidden shame explodes in grisly tragedy at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance. His and his wife’s story doesn’t begin there, nor does it end there, but Morrison’s treatment of their narrative drops in and out of time like the genre that gives the novel its name. The last book Morrison published before she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Jazz is said to have been her favorite.

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  There Is Confusion

  by Jessie Redmon Fauset; introduction by Morgan Jerkins

  Though the Harlem Renaissance is rightfully celebrated as a period of immense Black achievement, its spoils were not distributed equally to all Black people. Published when she was already shaping the movement as literary editor of The Crisis, Fauset’s novel follows three Black children in 1920s New York as they navigate both the color line and the class divide as they pursue their dreams and try to keep their friendships intact. At the time of its publication, the book was considered a landmark portrayal of the ascendant Black middle class.

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  Home to Harlem 

  by Claude McKay

  In McKay’s debut novel, a Black soldier returns to Harlem after deserting his World War I post. Drawn back from London exile by the excitement of racial upheaval in his place of birth, Jake ends up working the docks and encounters not just the bellies of ships but of Harlem’s underworld—sex workers, musicians, and a Haitian intellectual named Ray who is as rootless and restless as he is.

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  Quicksand 

  by Nella Larsen 

  Helga Crane, a mixed-race woman with a deceased Danish mother and an absent West Indian father, strains against the racial limits imposed upon her by her family, her employers, and the polarization of black-and-white life in 1920s Harlem. Larsen’s debut novel follows Helga's search for certainty and salvation in a season of turmoil.

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  Cane

  by Jean Toomer

  Toomer channels all the rhapsodical tumult of the Harlem Renaissance into an innovative, fractal novel that plays with form and structure. Poems and prose trade places in this story of Black Southerners, Black Northerners, and the Black Southerners who made their way north during the Harlem Renaissance.

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  The Street

  by Ann Petry; introduction by Tayari Jones

  As the effervescence of the Harlem Renaissance began to fade, Black people in America found themselves facing a strange new reality. In Ann Petry's novel The Street, Lutie Johnson and son move into a tiny apartment on 116th Street and try to make their way in 1940s New York, encountering obstacles at every turn that prove the period’s progress was far from complete. This was the first novel by a Black woman to sell a million copies.

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  The Tempest Tales 

  by Walter Mosley

  Tempest, the protagonist of Mosley's 2008 novel, is gunned down in a tragic combination of police brutality and mistaken identity. Blocked from entering heaven due to his mortal misbehavior, Tempest is sent by St. Peter in a new body back to Harlem, where he will prayerfully see the error of his ways and prevent his soul from sliding into Satan’s possession. 

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  A Rage in Harlem 

  by Chester Himes

  Himes’s hard-boiled Harlem noir watches Jackson, a funeral parlor bookkeeper, raise and lose a series of small fortunes on both sides of crime in his neighborhood’s seedy shadows. Eventually, the stakes get so high that Jackson doesn’t even realize that he’s getting in too deep. The novel also introduces Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, two police detectives who would become Himes mainstays.

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  The Autobiography of Malcolm X 

  as told to Alex Haley

  Malcolm X’s story, as he told it to one of Black America’s foremost griots, offers the totemic understanding of his life, America’s post–World War II racial reckoning, and the ins and outs of one of the most transformative eras in Harlem’s history.

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  The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X 

  by Les Payne and Tamara Payne

  This Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning biography, researched in part at the Schomburg Center, picks up where Malcolm X’s autobiography leaves off. After the firebrand thinker was assassinated, a tangled network of friends, associates, contemporaries, and enemies was left exposed. Les Payne and his daughter Tamara take care to fill in as much of X’s missing history as they can, clarifying the blurry edges of the late visionary’s life.

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  The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke 

  by Jeffrey C. Stewart

  Locke was one of the central pillars of the Harlem Renaissance. Stewart’s biography, which won a Pulitzer Prize, puts as much care into explaining the context of the enigmatic writer, Howard University professor, and literary mainstay as Locke put into guiding an aesthetic movement that changed the course of the history of letters.

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  The New Negro Aesthetic: Selected Writings 

  by Alain Locke; edited and with a foreword by Jeffrey C. Stewart

  Fresh off winning a Pulitzer for his exploration of Locke’s life and work, Stewart collected some of that work to give readers direct insight into Locke’s thoughts as he published them—all while the Harlem Renaissance was unfolding.

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  When Harlem Was in Vogue 

  by David Levering Lewis

  The Harlem Renaissance had already been a well-conceived epoch by the time Lewis got around to publishing this history. But few before him had gone to such lengths to fully sketch out a blueprint of the characters and infrastructure who made the movement what it was. No piece of gossamer or gossip seemed too minuscule for Lewis’s careful eye, and our understanding of the period is all the richer for it.

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  Blues in Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes

  by Langston Hughes; edited by Danez Smith

  Before Langston Hughes became a bold-faced name of the Harlem Renaissance, he was a young, confused writer building the facets of his ethic and developing the famed perspective of his writing. Smith guides readers through each one of those facets—love, performance, labor, and politics, among others—as Hughes came to know himself and become the writer we know today.

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  Harlem Rhapsody 

  by Victoria Christopher Murray

  Jessie Redmon Fauset stepped into her vitally influential perch as literary editor of The Crisis with the aid and urging of W. E. B. Du Bois. But beyond their mutual admiration of one another’s intellects was a fainter connection between their hearts. Taking inspiration from this little-discussed affair between the two, Murray’s novel shades in the complicated feelings that they shared as they helped build the Harlem Renaissance into the towering movement that it became.

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  Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

  by Vanessa K. Valdés

  Arturo Schomburg's encyclopedic awareness of Black history and culture was borne in part of his own multifaceted position within the global currents of Blackness. Valdés traces Schomburg’s story through his identities as both a Black person in America and as someone born Black in Puerto Rico before it was even part of America. Hers is the first book-length look at his life with such an intersectional focus.