" The New Negro anthology by Locke in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was officially launched for the white educated elite to see. Negro writers would liberate the race, at long last, from the demons of Redemption through art and culture, as Victoria Matthews had suggested some thirty years before. There was only one small problem with this: No people, in all of human history, has ever been liberated by the creation of art. None. "

― Henry Louis Gates Jr. , Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow