The media treated itself to a field day in 2001 when former President Bill Clinton announced that he had signed a 10-year lease, at $354,000 per year, for office space in Harlem on West 125th Street. The news brought much needed hope and inspiration to those who had witnessed the United States’ most famous neighborhood struggle to survive the ravages of decayed buildings, a decreased population, dwindling employment, and the same debilitating drug traffic that crippled communities all over the country. That Clinton’s ever-so-cool Harlem shuffle lent a major boost to the community’s profile and real estate business is not to be denied. However, few things could better symbolize the in-progress twenty-first century Harlem Renaissance than the restoration of a Harlem brownstone sponsored by ESSENCE Magazine and the Abyssinian Development Corporation (ADC). As part of its year-long 35th anniversary celebration, ESSENCE Magazine entered into a partnership with the Abyssinian Development C

(from Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black ) Through the glowing-bronze reeds of Harlem midnight and the plum-rose bloom of Spanish twilight African-griot-magus waters the garden of his neon spirals here in the valley of my jazz-consoled hunger and madness. 70 x 7,000 miles we travel the naked truth of hidden beginnings and guessed-at endings, African-griot-magus inhaling demons more easily than I exhale peace of mind or clarity of soul. African-griot-magus balancing divinity like tornadoes humming on the tips of three angels’ tongues. Inside my third mind I build a planet ruled by jasmine, violets, and the shadows of voices bubbling joy. With my seventh mind I hammer a chain of wonders that hold African-griot-magus to all of his promises. With my ninth mind I resurrect my first and dance slow to the music of my soul made new. 80 x 8,000 years we sing the naked story of blue-boned Harlem midnight and plum-rose Spanish twilight. African-griot-magus h

Unless a person enjoys an association with someone who successfully integrated the Harlem Renaissance goals of artistic excellence, individual integrity, and spiritual vision into their creative agenda, it becomes easy to view the movement and its influence as a finite period restricted to a few decades. Such a perspective is less likely to hold, however, when meeting someone such as the Savannah-born and New York-raised artist Luther E. Vann. As an adolescent and young man in the 1950s and 1960s, Vann satisfied his hunger for creative expression with frequent visits to sources of knowledge and insight like the Art Students’ League, the Center for Art and Culture, and the Cinque Gallery, places where Harlem Renaissance artists had left their aesthetic marks and where some had established new roots. The Cinque Gallery in particular was not founded until 1969 by three major artists identified with the Harlem Renaissance: collagist Romare Bearden, figurative painter Ernest Crichlow, and a

With the Seemingly overnight popularity of black authors during the 1990s, many speculated that African America was well on its way toward a second Harlem Renaissance. In fact, the boom in modern computer and media technology allowed writers like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Terry McMillan to enjoy a level of “crossover” appeal that far surpassed that of any Harlem Renaissance authors. Also in the 1990s, the popular author E. Lynn Harris launched his phenomenally successful career and helped pioneer the current trend in self-publishing by doing exactly that. His self-published first novel, Invisible Life , set the stage for a whole series of Harris’ novels that featured the same characters, a form known in literary geekology as a roman-fleuve. The publication of books by black authors during the Harlem Renaissance made history because until that time major publishing houses had been largely closed to black authors and African Americans were generally not encouraged t