In the 1920s, thousands of African Americans left the rural South for cities in the North in a movement called "The Great Migration."  Their arrival in New York City marked a period called "The Harlem Renaissance."  In this video segment from A Walk Through Harlem, we learn that only 30 years earlier many of these descendants of slaves had worked as poor sharecroppers. Although slavery had ended, many blacks were still uneducated. Their shift to the urban North was an attempt to escape the violence and oppression they experienced in the South. They created a new voice for themselves during the Harlem Renaissance, which was a social, artistic and cultural movement.