A term coined in the 1930s by Afro-Martinican French poet Aimé Fernand Césaire, Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Senghor, and Léon Damas of French Guiana. The movement was a reaction against the European colonization of Africa and its legacy of cultural racism. Like the Harlem Renaissance writers of the early- to mid-20th century United States, poets of the Négritude movement sought to examine and uphold the unique aspects of their African cultural roots. Langston Hughes was an early influence on Césaire and his peers.