126. Read the following passage, then answer the question below.

In the decades after the First World War, hundreds of thousands of Black Americans moved from the rural South to northern cities, seeking jobs and an escape from legal segregation. Many settled in Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City that soon became the largest Black urban community in the country. Out of this concentration of talent and ambition emerged what is now called the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of literature, music, and visual art that flourished through the 1920s and into the next decade.

Writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston turned toward everyday Black life, using the rhythms of blues and spoken dialect as raw material for poetry and fiction. Hughes argued in a famous 1926 essay that artists should express themselves freely, whether or not critics approved. Musicians like Duke Ellington, who led the house band at the Cotton Club, and Louis Armstrong brought jazz to a national audience, while painters such as Aaron Douglas combined African motifs with modern geometric styles.

The movement was not without tension. Many of the clubs where jazz flourished were owned by white proprietors and admitted mostly white customers. Some Black intellectuals, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, hoped that art would help win equal rights by showing the world Black achievement, while others objected that such a purpose burdened artists and encouraged them to avoid unflattering subjects. Hurston, in particular, drew criticism for portraying her characters' speech without apology.

The Great Depression sharply reduced the money that supported artists, and by the mid-1930s the movement had faded. Its influence, however, did not. The Renaissance helped establish that Black culture was a central, not marginal, part of American culture, and later generations of writers and activists, including those of the 1960s civil rights era, drew confidence from the example.

What can be inferred about the audience at the Cotton Club?