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 novel The 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 novel The New Negro. Historically, the term is present in African American discourses since 1895, but is most recognized as a central term of the Harlem Renaissance (1917-1928). 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. 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 American 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, defining that 'New Negro' will be radical and self-defending to pursue the right to political and social equality, unlike the gentleness of the Old Negro and who 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 of blacks on their racial values in long-term repression of a racist society and also made African Americans distorted their social status, and 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. 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 (but mostly men) 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 (1900) edited by Booker T. Washington, Fannie Barrier Williams and N. B. Wood or William Johnson' The New Negro (1916), represent the concept. 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.