How to Teach a Harlem Renaissance Unit: Lesson Plans, Discussion Questions, & Activities
There is so much incredible art to explore from the Harlem Renaissance that it might seem overwhelming to do the movement justice.
This fabulous period in history is often taught as a side note to the Roaring Twenties or briefly paired with Gatsby, but there’s so much to teach—from music to fashion to essays to poetry to fiction to fascinating debates around what it meant to be a Black artist at the beginning of the 20th century.
When I first started creating my unit, I felt overwhelmed trying to build a cohesive unit that didn’t just feel like a shallow nod to diversity.
The Harlem Renaissance was more than just fabulous parties—it was a time in history in which artists were struggling against systematic forms of oppression while also trying to define what Black art could and should be. It’s important to appreciate the beauty and creativity of the movement, but also to dig deep on the bigger questions.
That turned out to be the real challenge of creating the unit—not just finding meaningful texts, but organizing them into a natural progression. The final process that I settled on moves from accessible and personal texts into larger conversations about the historical roots of the movement, the artistic traditions that shaped the art, and the major issues and debates of the Harlem Renaissance.
If you’d like to use the full sequence of texts, discussions, music, historical context, and writing activities, you can check out my full Harlem Renaissance unit here.
Read on for more details about how I organize my Harlem Renaissance unit so that students experience the movement as more than a checklist of famous names.
Start With Identity
As with most of my units, I like to start off with some low-key plans. We open with Zora Neale Hurston’s “How it Feels to be Colored Me” and Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” two texts that introduce many of the major themes of the unit while also grounding students in universal questions of identity and self-expression.
With Hurston’s essay, students begin by experimenting with their own figurative language before examining how Hurston uses metaphor to express larger ideas about race and identity. Then, as we move into Hughes’ poem, we expand those conversations around identity and artistic expression through freewrites, close reading, and whole-class discussion that help students start connecting the texts and the essential questions of the unit. These lessons are fun and easy, but they also work to edge students into the bigger ideas and debates to come later.
Build the Vibes
Before students start tackling the more difficult historical and political ideas, I like to give them some space to absorb some of the atmosphere and emotional energy of the movement. Day three is what students would probably call a “chill day.” We spend class listening to artists like Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, and Fats Waller while students write and share informal reactions about the emotions, memories, and ideas the music evokes.
It’s a simple lesson, but it helps students start experiencing the Harlem Renaissance not just as a literature unit, but as a larger cultural movement with its own artistic energy and atmosphere. After all, can you truly appreciate a Langston Hughes poem if you don’t know what jazz sounds like?
Give Students Historical Context
After the softer opening to the unit, we start going a bit deeper by exploring the Great Migration. Without the Great Migration, there would have been no Harlem Renaissance, and I’ve found that students really need some historical context before they can fully understand the literature and debates that emerge later in the unit.
My favorite way to quickly cover that history is through Isabel Wilkerson’s TED Talk “The Great Migration and the power of a single decision.” Wilkerson, the author of The Warmth of Other Suns, does an incredible job helping students understand this enormous historical shift in a way that still feels accessible and engaging. Students again begin class with freewrites before answering comprehension questions on the talk and discussing it together as a class.
Dig Into the Arguments and Debates
There are a lot of big questions to explore when you examine the art of this time. What did it mean to be an African American artist at the beginning of the 20th century? What were the different expectations for a “Negro Artist,” and how did various artists accept and rebel against those limitations? How were artists affected by what W.E.B. DuBois described as the “double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”? What was life like for African Americans while “the Negro was in vogue”?
Days five and six are where the unit starts becoming much more intellectually challenging. By this point, students already have some historical context and familiarity with the themes of identity and artistic expression, so they are ready to begin exploring the actual debates and disagreements within the Harlem Renaissance itself.
We open with freewrites about identity, social pressure, and self-expression before students work through excerpts from W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, George S. Schuyler’s “The Negro-Art Hokum,” and Langston Hughes’ response essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Without the right amount of scaffolding, these texts would be complete non-starters for many teens, so students spend a lot of time paraphrasing passages and unpacking difficult ideas before jumping into larger discussion.
This is usually the point where students stop seeing the Harlem Renaissance as just a collection of famous names and begin understanding it as an active conversation full of disagreement, tension, and competing ideas. Students won’t find easy answers in these discussions, but that’s part of what makes this section of the unit so meaningful.
Keep Returning to the Question of the American Dream
Once students have built some confidence working through more challenging texts, we broaden the conversation into issues of belonging, inequality, and the American Dream. Langston Hughes works especially well for this because his poetry is accessible enough for students while still supporting complex discussion. Through poems like “I, Too,” “Let America Be America Again,” and “Harlem,” students begin exploring what it means to claim a place in a country that has not always welcomed you.
Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” pushes those discussions even further. Written after the horrific events of the Red Summer of 1919, the poem opens up discussions around questions like “What is the best way for people to maintain their dignity in the face of racism, oppression, and brutality?” After learning about the historical context, students examine how McKay both uses and challenges traditional poetic forms to express ideas about resistance, survival, and dignity. Without understanding that historical context, students will never fully grasp the force behind McKay’s declaration: “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”
We also loop back to the earlier debates of the unit by having students react to Langston Hughes’ criticism of poets like McKay, whose work he dismissed as “tricks with rhymes.” That moment usually pushes students to start thinking more deeply about the larger tensions running throughout the Harlem Renaissance while again reminding them that these writers were not working in isolation but rather in a constant dialogue.
Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” and Helene Johnson’s “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” bring students back to many of the central questions running throughout the unit: What does it mean to hide parts of yourself in order to survive? What does it mean to pursue success and dignity in a society that does not fully accept you? And who actually gets access to the American Dream?
Expand Beyond Literature
After several days of solid poetry analysis, it’s a good time to change things up again. Students begin working through two of the most unique sources of the unit, Gordon Parks’ photo essay “Harlem Gang Leader” and Levi C. Hubert’s satirical piece “The Whites Invade Harlem.”
What I especially like about this section of the unit is that it gives students the chance to keep analyzing, but through much less traditional sources. When we examine the photo essay, for example, we also look at what editors left out and why. And when we read the satirical essay, we explore how satire can be both funny and powerful at the same time. Students begin building their own interpretations about how Harlem—and the people living there—were represented both from inside and outside the community.
Move Into Longer and More Challenging Fiction
As they reach the end of the unit, students are ready for two of the most rewarding texts of the unit, both by Zora Neale Hurston. “John Redding Goes to Sea” was Hurston’s first published story; it follows a young man who dreams of traveling beyond the horizon but continually finds himself trapped by the limitations of his small town and circumstances. Like the tiny wooden boats he plays with as a child, John keeps getting caught in the weeds before he can ever fully set sail.
What makes this story fit so naturally here is that it pulls together so many of the ideas students have been exploring throughout the unit: dreams deferred, identity, freedom, race, place, and the tension between longing for something larger and being unable to reach it. Because Hurston’s dialect can initially intimidate students, we spend time slowly working through key passages together before moving into deeper analysis of setting, point of view, symbolism, and characterization.
We continue that deeper literary analysis with Hurston’s “Sweat,” a story that students often initially read as a fairly straightforward tale of an abusive husband and a hardworking wife finally reaching her breaking point. To help students fully appreciate the story’s richness, we connect the text to African American spirituals, biblical allusions, and even recordings of Hurston herself singing songs she collected during her anthropological research in the South during the Great Depression. The deeper students dig into those influences, the more the story opens into conversations about oppression, suffering, endurance, and the complicated ways people fight back against pain.
End With Student Ownership and Synthesis
By the final week of the unit, students have spent so much time discussing the literature, history, music, and debates of the Harlem Renaissance that they’re ready to begin exploring parts of the movement more independently. For their final presentations, students choose from artists and art forms mentioned in Hughes’ essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” including figures like Aaron Douglas, Bessie Smith, Jean Toomer, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, along with broader topics like jazz and spirituals.
Then, the final few days of the unit shift almost completely away from introducing new material and toward synthesis. Students participate in a graded discussion (aka a Socratic seminar) while I observe and stay mostly hands-off; they bring their own passages, questions, and ideas and go where the discussion leads them. Then, they finish the unit with an in-class comparative essay connecting their own chosen texts and ideas from throughout the month.
By the end of the unit, students are no longer just analyzing isolated poems and stories. They are tracing patterns, arguments, and ideas across the Harlem Renaissance as a whole.
I hope I’ve convinced you not to make The Harlem Renaissance a side-note! Schedule out a few weeks, explore as many texts as you can, and really dig deep.
And if you’d rather spend your time enjoying the art, ideas, and history with your classes than organizing weeks of materials from scratch, you can take a look at my full unit here.