The correct answer is African Americans were tired of unfair treatment in the South and wanted to forge a new path for themselves in Harlem.
It was a black cultural movement of the 1920s in Harlem, New York. There, in those years, poets, novelists, artists, intellectuals from different sectors and, especially, the first notorious exponents of jazz gathered. It is to be remembered that the decade before the New York Stock Exchange burst (1929) and the subsequent depression would become known as "roaring twenties", or "jazz age". The black movement in Harlem is also called "New Negro Movement" alluding to the thought-provoking book The New Negro (1925), by Alain Locke, one of the group's intellectual mentors alongside Du Bois. In this excerpt, he lists some of the precursors of Harlem Renaissance, as well as great American writers of the 19th century, in addition to others who wrote predominantly in the first half of the 20th century (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner), a great tragic hero of abolitionism (John Brown) and black writers of the Harlem Renaissance era (including James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer) or later (Richard Wright, author of the controversial novel Native Son, the first black bestseller in the United States, from 1940).