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White supporters of Negro writers and musicians turned their attention to more pressing financial matters, and gradually the effect on Harlem was ravaging.  Interracial mixing waned as Prohibition ended and Harlem nightlife moved into sleazy speakeasies and jazz moved to Fifty-second Street where fewer blacks could afford to go.  The blues gave way to swing, and key figures of the New Negro movement moved on to other challenges and opportunities often outside of Harlem and New York. 
      The end of the Renaissance was not only due to the afore mentioned events, but was also precipitated by its own participants.  Internal conflict regarding the movement's politics and mantras also lead to its decline.  In the early days of the New Negro movement W. E. B. Du Bois announced the birth of the Harlem Renaissance.  In 1934 he announced the reason for its death.  "It was because it was a transplanted and exotic thing.  It was a literature written for the benefit of white people and the behest of white readers, and starting out privately from the white point of view."(Renaissance, p.159)  Similarly, Claude McKay said of the Renaissance movement that it "was really inspired and kept alive by the interest and presence of white bohemians.  It faded out when they became tired of the new plaything." (Renaissance, p.160)  While the reasons for the end of the era of the Harlem Renaissance are debatable, the wealth of talent it gave to America and the legacy of this talent that we still enjoy today is not.

"What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
…
Or does it explode? "

--Langston Hughes

Harlem 
Jazz Notes …

Duke Ellington

Billie Holiday

Louis Armstrong

Fats Waller

Ella Fitzgerald

Bessie Smith

Ma Rainey

Ethel Waters

Gladys Bentley

Sources Used:

"Claude McKay," Contemporary Black Biography (1994 ed.), VI, 183-187.

Harrison, Joyce. "Ella Fitzgerald," Contemporary Black Biography (1995 ed.), VIII, 70-73.

"Hughes," Encyclopedia of Literature (1995 ed.), 566.

"Hurston," Encyclopedia of Literature (1995ed.), 571.

Johnson, Thomas A. "Harlem," Encyclopedia Americana (1997 International ed.), XIII, 799.

"McKay," Encyclopedia of Literature (1995 ed.), 744-745.

Mueller, Michael E. "Langston Hughes," Contemporary Black Biography (1993 ed.), IV, 128-133.

Watson, Steve. The Harlem Renaissance. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995.

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