<P> Interest in African - American lives also generated experimental but lasting collaborative work, such as the all - black productions of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess, and Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts . In both productions the choral conductor Eva Jessye was part of the creative team . Her choir was featured in Four Saints . The music world also found white band leaders defying racist attitudes to include the best and the brightest African - American stars of music and song in their productions . </P> <P> The African Americans used art to prove their humanity and demand for equality . The Harlem Renaissance led to more opportunities for blacks to be published by mainstream houses . Many authors began to publish novels, magazines and newspapers during this time . The new fiction attracted a great amount of attention from the nation at large . Among authors who became nationally known were Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Omar Al Amiri, Eric D. Walrond and Langston Hughes . </P> <P> The Harlem Renaissance helped lay the foundation for the post-World War II protest movement of the Civil Rights Movement . Moreover, many black artists who rose to creative maturity afterward were inspired by this literary movement . </P> <P> The Renaissance was more than a literary or artistic movement, as it possessed a certain sociological development--particularly through a new racial consciousness--through ethnic pride, as seen in the Back to Africa movement led by Marcus Garvey . At the same time, a different expression of ethnic pride, promoted by W.E.B. Du Bois, introduced the notion of the "talented tenth": the African Americans who were fortunate enough to inherit money or property or obtain a college degree during the transition from Reconstruction to the Jim Crow period of the early twentieth century . These "talented tenth" were considered the finest examples of the worth of black Americans as a response to the rampant racism of the period . (No particular leadership was assigned to the talented tenth, but they were to be emulated .) In both literature and popular discussion, complex ideas such as Du Bois's concept of "twoness" (dualism) were introduced (see The Souls of Black Folk; 1903). Du Bois explored a divided awareness of one's identity that was a unique critique of the social ramifications of racial consciousness . This exploration was later revived during the Black Pride movement of the early 1970s . </P>

What tensions and conflicts characterized the harlem renaissance