Boys sculpting a horse at the Harlem Community Art Center, 1937. The center was organized by the Federal Art Project and lasted from 1937 to 1942. It led to the formation of the Harlem Arts Alliance and became an exemplar for other such centers.

Artists who taught or studied at the center included Augusta Savage, Romare Bearden, William Henry Johnson, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Claude McKay, and Richard Wright.

To put this in perspective, the last time an American subgroup migrated at these rates was the Great Migration, in which roughly 6 million Southern Black people fled Jim Crow violence and repression. This occurred over a period of decades, in the face of political repression, systematic violence, and legal apartheid.

In its fastest decade, the 1940s, 1.5 million left the South—against a Southern Black population of roughly 10 million. Black America fled Jim Crow at about 1.5% a year, at a time when baseline inter-state mobility was higher than it was today.