 The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson preferred to call the Harlem Renaissance, took place between 1924—when "" hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance—and 1929, the year of the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression.The Harlem Renaissance is considered to have been a rebirth of the African-American arts.Until the end of the Civil War, the majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived in the South.