Watch: The artists of the Harlem Renaissance had a controversial champion

Harlem in the 1920s pulsed with an incredible array of black talent, and one balding white critic was obsessed. Carl Van Vechten thought it was his mission to tell the rest of the world about the genius he saw in Harlem, and in that sense he was a champion of luminaries like Ethel Waters, Langston Hughes and Augusta Savage. But Van Vechten was a highly controversial advocate, and his photographs and involvement with Harlem culture ignited a debate about white appropriation of black culture that still burning strong.