New Negro
"New Negro" is a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation. The term "New Negro" was made popular by Alain LeRoy Locke in his anthology The New Negro.
Definition
Historically, the term is present in African American discourses since 1895, but is most recognized as a central term of the Harlem Renaissance. The term has a broad relevance to the period in U.S. history known as the Post-Reconstruction, whose beginnings were marked symbolically by the notorious compromise of 1877 and whose impact upon black American lives culminated in the 1896 Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which practically obliterated the gains African Americans had made through the 14th and 15th Amendments. Henry Louis Gates Jr., who in 1988 provided a comprehensive treatment of this evolution from 1895 to 1925, notes that "blacks regained a public voice, louder and more strident than it had been even during slavery."More recently, Gates and Gene Andrew Jarrett have discussed a New Negro era of a longer duration, from 1892 through 1938, and Brent Hayes Edwards has pushed investigations of New Negro culture far beyond Harlem, noting that "the 'New Negro' movement at the same time a 'new' black internationalism." This internationalism developed in relation to informal cultural exchange among black figures in the United States, France, and the Caribbean. New Negro cultural internationalism also grew out of New Negro work in the United States's official international diplomacy.
Between 1919 and 1925
With the end of the First World War and the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, the term "New Negro" was widely publicized as a synonym for African Americans who will radically defend their interests against violence and inequality. An article in The Messenger journal published in August 1920, entitled "The New Negro - What Is He?" by The Editors, provides a clear picture of the term, in which they describe that the "New Negro" will be radical and self-defending to pursue the right to political and social equality, unlike the gentleness of the Old Negro who is satisfied with the status quo.Subsequently, in 1925, Alain Locke published the article "Enter the New Negro" and defined "New Negro" as "augury of a new democracy in American culture." Locke took the term to a new level. Locke described the negative impression blacks had of their racial values due to the long-term repression of a racist society and how it also made African Americans distort their social status, and that they all needed to take a new attitude to look at themselves. He pointed out that the thinking new Blacks committed to combat stereotypes, awaken black national consciousness and pride, as well as improve the social status of African Americans.
Origins of the term
1895
1895 was a crucial year. Du Bois, with a PhD from Harvard in hand, embarked on his long career in scholarship and civil rights, Booker T. Washington made his Atlanta Exposition speech and Frederick Douglass died after having made some of the bitterest and most despairing speeches on "race." Despite their rhetorical and ideological differences, these three leaders were speaking up during the 1890s, the decade described by African American historian Rayford Logan as the "nadir" of African American history and marked by nearly 2,000 documented lynchings.New Negroes were seen invariably as men and women of middle-class orientation who often demanded their legal rights as citizens, but almost always wanted to craft new images that would subvert and challenge old stereotypes. This can be seen in the 1895 editorial in the Cleveland Gazette and commentaries in other black newspapers. Books like A New Negro for a New Century authored by Booker T. Washington, Fannie Barrier Williams and N. B. Wood; and The New Negro, represent the concept.
The First World War
For African Americans, World War I highlighted the widening gap between U.S. rhetoric regarding "the war to make the world safe for democracy" and the reality of disenfranchised and exploited black farmers in the South or the poor and alienated residents of the Northern slums. African-American soldiers faced discrimination because the US government conceded that it would not admit African American soldiers to white training camps. To help these discriminated African American soldiers, the NAACP helped establish segregated training camps in Des Moines, Iowa, and Spingarn. However, the treatment of African American soldiers was still deplorable, and most of them were assigned to labor units after the basic training. However, in France, for example, the black soldiers experienced the kind of freedom they had never known in the U.S.When World War I began, African Americans wanted to demonstrate their patriotism to the country. However, they were turned away from the military service because the military only accepted a certain amount of African Americans. It wasn't until the war had actually started, that the military realized more people were needed, so African Americans were being drafted and accepted into the military. This was seen as a start for the "New Negro" to show that they are wanting to be equal and they are willing to go to war to prove that they are worthy enough to be equal like everyone else in the country.
African Americans dealt with discrimination in the military and was segregated from the white people and went to different training locations. The military created two different divisions solely for African Americans, which were the 92nd division and the 93rd division. The 92nd division was made of the officers and draftees. The 93rd division's helped out the French Army during the war and had a different experience than the 92nd division. The 93rd division had the most famous infantry which was the 369th Infantry and they were known as the "Harlem Hellfighters." The 369th Infantry repelled the German offensive and fought alongside the 16th Division of the French Army. They fought for 191 days, which was the longest and were the first Americans to be awarded the Croix de Guerre medal by France.
After the war ended, racial tensions began to boil over in the United States. Having experienced freedom and respect in France they had never known at home, African American soldiers were determined to fight for equal treatment but found that discrimination against blacks was just as present as it was before the war. A prime, but not isolated, example of this lingering racism is the case of African American soldier Wilbur Little. He was lynched in Blakely, Georgia upon his return from service after ignoring threats from a group of white men to never wear his uniform in public.
In addition to this racially motivated violence there were African Americans flooding into the north in huge numbers, increasing segregation in the North and the regeneration of the Ku Klux Klan, all of which contributed to the rising racial tension which resulted in the riots that affected several major cities in the "red summer" of 1919.
Because of the discrimination witnessed after World War I, the philosophy of the civil rights movement shifted from the accommodationist approach of Booker T. Washington to the militant advocacy of W.E.B. Du Bois. This shift of philosophy helped to create the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, which "promoted a renewed sense of racial pride, cultural self-expression, economic independence, and progressive politics." For many African Americans, World War I represents a transition from the time of the "Old Negro to the brave New Negro."
New Negro Movement
In 1916–17, Hubert Harrison founded the New Negro Movement. In 1917, he established the first organization and the first newspaper of the "New Negro Movement" and this movement energized Harlem and beyond with its race-conscious and class-conscious demands for political equality, an end to segregation and lynching as well as calls for armed self-defense when appropriate. Therefore, Harrison, who also edited The New Negro in 1919 and authored When Africa Awakes: The 'Inside Story' of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World in 1920, is called the "father of Harlem Radicalism."The NAACP played an important role in the awakening of the Negro Renaissance which was the cultural component of the New Negro Movement. The NAACP officials W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Jessie Redmon Fauset provided financial support, aesthetic guidance, and literature to this cultural awakening. According to the NAACP, this cultural component of the New Negro Movement provided the first display of African-American cultural self-expression.
In several essays included in the anthology The New Negro, which grew out of the 1924 special issue of Survey Graphic on Harlem, editor Alain Locke contrasted the "Old Negro" with the "New Negro" by stressing African American assertiveness and self-confidence during the years following World War I and the Great Migration. Race pride had already been part of literary and political self-expression among African Americans in the nineteenth century, as reflected in the writings of Martin Delany, Bishop Henry Turner, Frances E.W. Harper, Frederick Douglass and Pauline Hopkins. However, it found a new purpose and definition in the journalism, fiction, poetry, music, sculpture and paintings of a host of figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
The term "New Negro" inspired a wide variety of responses from its diverse participants and promoters. A militant African American editor indicated in 1920 how this "new line of thought, a new method of approach" included the possibility that "the intrinsic standard of Beauty and aesthetics does not rest in the white race" and that "a new racial love, respect and consciousness may be created." It was felt that African Americans were poised to assert their own agency in culture and politics instead of just remaining a "problem" or "formula" for others to debate about.
The New Negroes of the 1920s, the Talented Tenth, included poets, novelists and Blues singers creating their art out of Negro folk heritage and history; black political leaders fighting against corruption and for expanded opportunities for African Americans; businessmen working toward the possibilities of a "black metropolis" and Garveyites dreaming of a homeland in Africa. All of them shared in their desire to shed the image of servility and inferiority of the shuffling "Old Negro" and achieve a new image of pride and dignity.