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We're in New York City at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem.

It is midnight and the dance floor twirls

and shimmies. It's laughter, sweat, perfume, and cigarettes, all to the hot swing of Chick-Web's

orchestra. Prohibition may still be the law in America, but in here it's not hard to get a drink

as this party pushes towards dawn. This is the Harlem Renaissance in full bloom.

A young Billy Holiday is rising in the clubs.

Duke Ellington and Fats Waller are inventing new sounds,

while tapers carve out rhythms all their own.

Writers, artists, and intellectuals debate race and politics,

laying a new foundation for black American culture.

But down here, at the Savoy, it's just movement and joy. The dance floor is even integrated,

rare in Jim Crow's America. Tonight, here in Harlem, it feels as if the music will never stop.

But within a month, a short matter of weeks,

the stock market will crash and the American economy along with it.

One day, decades later, the poet Langston Hughes

would look back and write his most famous line of verse

about being black in America.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun, or fester like a sore and then run?

...