<P> Until the end of the Civil War, the majority of African Americans had been enslaved and lived in the South . During the Reconstruction Era, the emancipated African Americans, freedmen, began to strive for civic participation, political equality and economic and cultural self - determination . Soon after the end of the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 gave rise to speeches by African - American Congressmen addressing this Bill . By 1875 sixteen African Americans had been elected and served in Congress and gave numerous speeches with their newfound civil empowerment . The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 was denounced by black Congressmen and resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, part of Reconstruction legislation by Republicans . By the late 1870s, Democratic whites managed to regain power in the South . From 1890 to 1908 they proceeded to pass legislation that disenfranchised most Negros and many poor whites, trapping them without representation . They established white supremacist regimes of Jim Crow segregation in the South and one - party block voting behind southern Democrats . The Democratic whites denied African Americans their exercise of civil and political rights by terrorizing black communities with lynch mobs and other forms of vigilante violence as well as by instituting a convict labor system that forced many thousands of African Americans back into unpaid labor in mines, on plantations, and on public works projects such as roads and levees . Convict laborers were typically subject to brutal forms of corporal punishment, overwork, and disease from unsanitary conditions . Death rates were extraordinarily high . While a small number of blacks were able to acquire land shortly after the Civil War, most were exploited as sharecroppers . As life in the South became increasingly difficult, African Americans began to migrate north in great numbers . </P> <P> Most of the African - American literary movement arose from a generation that had memories of the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the Civil War . Sometimes their parents or grandparents had been slaves . Their ancestors had sometimes benefited by paternal investment in cultural capital, including better - than - average education . Many in the Harlem Renaissance were part of the early 20th century Great Migration out of the South into the Negro neighborhoods of the North and Midwest . African Americans sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the South . Others were people of African descent from racially stratified communities in the Caribbean who came to the United States hoping for a better life . Uniting most of them was their convergence in Harlem . </P> <P> During the early portion of the 20th century, Harlem was the destination for migrants from around the country, attracting both people seeking work from the South, and an educated class who made the area a center of culture, as well as a growing "Negro" middle class . The district had originally been developed in the 19th century as an exclusive suburb for the white middle and upper middle classes; its affluent beginnings led to the development of stately houses, grand avenues, and world - class amenities such as the Polo Grounds and the Harlem Opera House . During the enormous influx of European immigrants in the late 19th century, the once exclusive district was abandoned by the white middle class, who moved farther north . </P> <P> Harlem became an African - American neighborhood in the early 1900s . In 1910, a large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was bought by various African - American realtors and a church group . Many more African Americans arrived during the First World War . Due to the war, the migration of laborers from Europe virtually ceased, while the war effort resulted in a massive demand for unskilled industrial labor . The Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans to cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and New York . </P>

What influence did the harlem renaissance have on popular culture