Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural movement centered in Harlem, Manhattan, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. It encompassed African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics, and scholarship. The movement's peak years ran from approximately 1924 to 1929, ending with the stock-market crash and the onset of the Great Depression.
The Harlem Renaissance was originally known as the "New Negro Movement." The name came from The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by philosopher Alain Locke, who became known as the "Dean" of the Harlem Renaissance.
Key figures included philosopher Alain Locke, poets Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, novelist Zora Neale Hurston, painter Aaron Douglas, sculptor Augusta Savage, musician Duke Ellington, and photographer James Van Der Zee. W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and James Weldon Johnson were also central to the movement's intellectual and social dimensions.
The Harlem Renaissance ended abruptly because of the Great Depression, which began with the stock-market crash of 1929. Critics noted that the movement's progressivist worldview left its intellectuals unprepared for the economic catastrophe, having placed naive faith in culture as an agent of change independent of economic and social realities.
Music was central to the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Stride piano style blurred class lines within the Black community by making jazz accessible to wealthier African Americans who identified with the piano. The 1921 musical Shuffle Along ran for 504 Broadway performances and proved that both Black and white audiences would pay to see African Americans on Broadway.
The Harlem Renaissance helped lay the foundation for the post-World War II Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The spirit of self-determination it cultivated gave the Black community a growing sense of both Black urbanity and Black militancy. The movement also shifted the broader American image of African Americans from rural and undereducated to urban and cosmopolitan.