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.
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.
[8] 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.
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.
However, in France, for example, the black soldiers experienced the kind of freedom they had never known in the U.S.[18] When World War I began, African Americans wanted to demonstrate their patriotism to the country.
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.
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.
[24] 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.
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.
Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Jessie Redmon Fauset provided financial support, aesthetic guidance, and literature to this cultural awakening.
[31] 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.
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.
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."
[34] No one has articulated the hopes and possibilities associated with the idea and ideal of the "New Negro" more than the Harvard-trained philosophy professor Alain Locke, who later described himself as the "midwife" to aspiring young black writers of the 1920s.
[44] Such an approach implied an excessive dependence of any black hopes for political change or reform upon white men of influence and their good intentions.
Du Bois himself recognized in his response to Locke's New Negro, the concept validated at one level the rejection of the accommodationist politics and ideology represented by Booker T. Washington and his followers around the start of the 20th century when despite Washington's access to the White House and mainstream politicians, violence against African Americans had continued unabated at a disturbing level with little progress in the area of civil rights and economic opportunities.
"[51] According to Walrond, the "rank and file of Negroes are opposed to Garveyism; dissatisfied with the personal vituperation and morbid satire of Mr. Du Bois and prone to discount Major [Robert] Moton's Tuskegee as a monument of respectable reaction.
In one such essay, The Negro Literary Renaissance which was included in "Aunt Hagar's Children",[55][circular reference] Thurman sums up the situation thus: "Everyone was having a grand time.
'"[51] Again in 1929, Thurman had begun his second novel, "Infants of the Spring" (1932),[57] a satire in which he took himself and his peers to task for decadence and lack of discipline, declaring all his contemporaries except Jean Toomer as mere journeymen.
Beyond the lack of consensus on the significance of the term "New Negro" during the Harlem Renaissance, many later commentators such as Harold Cruse considered it politically naive or overly optimistic.
As late as 1938, Locke was defending his views against attacks from John P. Davis and others that his emphasis was primarily on the "psychology of the masses"[58] and not on offering a solution to the "Negro problem."
The middle-class leadership of NAACP and Urban League were deeply suspicious of the flamboyant and demagogic Marcus Garvey, who in turn saw Du Bois and others as dark-skinned whites.
Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson rejected cultural separatism and endorsed a hybridity derived from the marriage of black experience and Euro-American aesthetic forms.
In filmmaking, during the early 20th Century, it was very rare to see African Americans playing movie cast members, and if they were, they were generally portrayed to represent the Old South and/or were criminals.
In the early 1930s, historically black Howard University began receiving federal grant money for the first time in an amount that exceeded $1 million.
