In terms of both time and place, setting plays a key role in Song of Solomon. Although the novel spans approximately a hundred years, documenting three generations of the Dead family's history, it focuses on Milkman's life from birth to age 32. The novel begins in 1931 and ends around 1963. Thus it encompasses two major movements in African-American history: the Harlem Renaissance (1917–35) and the Civil Rights movement (1955–70s).
The year 1931 marks the pinnacle of the Harlem Renaissance, a literary movement heralded as a golden age of black art in the United States. It also marks the rise of the "New Negro," an articulate, sophisticated bourgeois class of intellectual blacks immersed in cultural and aesthetic pursuits, convinced that their literary and artistic achievements would elevate their social and political status in American society by demonstrating to whites that Negroes are not inferior human beings. Ironically, the phrase "New Negro," coined by Alain Locke (1886–1954), the first African-American Rhodes scholar, was rejected by black writers such as Langston Hughes, who believed that authentic artistic expression had its roots in the real-life experiences of "common folk." As Hughes observed, "The ordinary Negroes hadn't heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn't raised their wages any."
Similarly, 1963 also marks a milestone in black history. According to historian Lerone Bennett in Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, "It was a year of funerals and births, a year of endings and a year of beginnings, a year of hate, a year of love. It was a year of water hoses and high-powered rifles, of struggles in the streets and screams in the night, of homemade bombs and gasoline torches, of snarling dogs and widows in black. It was a year of passion, a year of despair, a year of desperate hope. It was . . . the 100th year of black emancipation and the first year of the Black Revolution." In other words, it was a year of the black Civil Rights movement.
