3.11 The New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance

The idea of the 'New Negro' began in the late 1800s and took many forms. It meant a Black person who refused to accept second-class status, defined their own identity and stood up for themselves politically, even in the face of the nadir's violence (3.5, 3.6). Leaders as different as Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey (3.18) claimed the term.

A central goal was creating a Black aesthetic: a style of art rooted in Black experience and culture, rather than in white expectations. Black artists' achievements in music, art and literature served as counternarratives, stories that challenged the stereotypes white society spread about Black people. Many of these works reflected the Great Migration (3.16), as Southern migrants brought their culture to Northern and Midwestern cities.

The New Negro movement included several political and cultural movements. The most famous is the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of Black literature, art and ideas centered in Harlem, New York, in the 1920s and 1930s. It changed American culture.

Writers included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen and Jean Toomer. The painter Aaron Douglas blended African-inspired forms with modern design. Blues and jazz, carried north by migrants, filled Harlem's clubs and spread across the country (3.14).

Alain Locke, a philosopher and in 1907 the first African American Rhodes Scholar, edited The New Negro: An Interpretation, an anthology of essays, stories, poems and art. In his writing, Locke argued that a younger generation of Black Americans was shedding old stereotypes and self-doubt and defining itself through art and culture. He encouraged young Black artists to express themselves freely and not to carry the burden of representing the entire race in every work.

In 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain', published in The Nation in 1926, Langston Hughes described the 'racial mountain' as the pressure, including from some middle-class Black Americans, to imitate white culture and look down on Black culture. He argued that young Black artists should express their own lives and culture, including jazz, the blues and the lives of ordinary working people, without fear or shame, whether white or Black audiences approved or not. The essay became a manifesto for artistic freedom and racial pride.