Although the movement had its origins in earlier work, the Harlem Renaissance was officially initiated in 1925 with Alain Locke's anthology entitled "The New Negro: An Interpretation." The stark title said all it needed to about this new movement and new consciousness; this was a new Negro, no longer submitting to oppression or condescension, and ready to criticize and interpret his surroundings. Locke's anthology gave black writers such as Richard Brice Nugent and Langston Hughes, as well as artists like Aaron Douglas, a soapbox from which to publish and proliferate their ideas and work. This democratization of art and literature, tied up in a very political agenda of black equality, helped form a very strong black identity in the early part of the twentieth century, an identity which would be tapped into later in the century during the Civil Rights Movement.
In 1937, "Their Eyes Were Watching God," a novel by Harlem Renaissance member Zora Neale Hurston, was published. This novel, with its depiction of a young woman trying to overcome in racial and sexual prejudice in turn-of-the-century Florida, became one of the crowning achievements of the movement and demonstrated the Harlem Renaissance as a movement not blinkered by the struggle for racial identity, but allowing an equal position for female writers like Hurston and Gwendolyn Bennet to showcase their talent. This was not unprecedented---Gertrude Stein had become one of the major players of the modernist movement some years before Hurston's literary career---but in a movement where art, expression and politics were so closely bound, this could not fail to strike a chord.
The beat poets of the 1950s and 60s took influence from the free-flowing and radical style of the Harlem Renaissance writers. The modernist art and energetic jazz music that also sprung up from the Harlem Renaissance was seen by the beat poets as a rejection of the strait-laced ways of post-war America. Repeated references to jazz, as well as examples of homages to the "Harlem style" can be found in the work of Allan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, even though the fiery polemics of the movement contrast greatly with many of the beat ideas about Zen and Buddhism.
The Harlem Renaissance created a template for future artistic movements by binding themselves up with an overriding political agenda. For the members of the Harlem Renaissance, the agenda was clear and unifying: to claim a cultural and social identity for themselves, not just as black people but as humans, no matter what prejudicial barriers they had to overcome in order to do so. This agenda concentrated the movement and became a model for those to follow. In her essay on the "New-Negro Renaissance," American academic Hortence Spiller described the members of the Reniassance as pursuing "a fairly amazing idea---an art directly tied to the fortunes of a political agenda."