This collection from the Essential Lens series highlights the art and politics of the Harlem Renaissance. Between 1910 and 1930, the African American population increased by about forty percent in northern states as a result of the Great Migration. African Americans, who had until that time resided mostly in the southern United States, were not only fleeing violence that occurred in the South, but were also being recruited for industrial jobs that were offered in northern cities. Because jobs were concentrated in urban areas, which had also attracted millions of new or recent European immigrants, tensions rose as people competed for employment and housing.