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And it was Mr. Hughes who m_*t ? life face to face ? in Harlem,
When, tor years, I had been seeking Life in places gentler-speaking,
Until I came to this vile street And lound Life stepping on mv feel!
There was beauty there, too ? the physical, swaggering, don't-care bsauty which made Countee Cullen assume that ? Who lies with his nut-brown maiden.... He lies, and his love lies there ?; and the beauty beyond beauty of the many for whom, in Langston Hughes's unforgettable picture, Life ? ain?t been no crystal stair. ?
This rising awareness was variously reflected in a historic number of the Survey Graphic (March, 1925) edited by Alain Locke, a professor of philosophy and sophisticated aesthete who knew that Negro creativity was the only guide to ? the internal world of the Negro mind. ? Out of this symposium there came, nine months later, a sumptuous volume, The New Negro-, and with it Dr. Locke was firmly established as the leader of the Movement.
Charles S. Johnson, whose sensitivity to trends raised him to the heights in American sociology, nourished it as editor of Opportunity, and so did W. E. B. Du Bois, then and happily still the doyen of Negro scholars, as editor of The Crisis. His role w'as, in fact, germinating, for in a series of outstanding books and critical papers he had revealed the importance of the Negro in the Americas and in the world. The Movement was also fortunate in finding many white friends. Carl Van Vechten identified himself with it wholly. Apart from adding to its gaieties, no man worked more energetically in promoting Negro personalities and causes. He still does so.
In this situation the more alert artists ot yesterday responded by adding skillful and intensely felt documentation of people and places, hut none expressed the prevailing mood so freshly as Aaron Douglas
?	the first painter of the Renaissance and the only Negro painter included in The New Negro. Before long he was joined by Archibald Motley, already known for portraits in which epochs lived; and between them they painted, symbolically and representationally, the ideas, motivations, people, events and scenes of the Negro 1920?s and its aftermath.
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