By Don Valentine
The New Negro James Edward McCall
“He scans the world with calm and fearless eyes,
Conscious within of powers long since forgot;
At every step, new man-made barriers rise
To bar his progress—but he heeds them not.
He stands erect, though the tempests round him crash…”
One of the results of the northern “Great Migration” was the development of the “New Negro.” When World War One ended it brought home thousands of Black men who had sampled the nectar of freedom abroad. The National Archives estimated that over 380,000 Black men served in the Army. Shockingly, they weren’t called “Boy.” They were called “Sir”, and treated with respect, class. New dignity is intoxicating and it only exacerbates the angst of being treated like 3/5ths of a person. This resentment started bubbling up, first in our art, songs, poems, and in every part of Black culture.
Harlem became a bastion of bourgeois thought, and the epicenter for “The New Negro”. In the ‘20s and ‘30s America witnessed an amalgamation of the Renaissance’s cultural instruments with the writings and cry of the more independent acolytes of Booker T. Washington. These tools merged to create the “New Negro Movement.” It promoted a sense of racial pride, cultural self-expression, economic independence, and progressive politics. An editorial in the Black newspaper the Cleveland Gazette wrote, “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.”
Dr. Alain Locke, who obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard
and was the first Black Rhodes Scholar, is credited for the “New Negro” moniker. In 1925 he published the article “Enter the New Negro” and wrote, “The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing happens spiritually in the life-attitudes and self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education and his new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise and greater certainty of knowing what it is all about. From this comes the promise and warrant of a new leadership.” To learn more read, The New Negro by Dr. Alain Locke, A Real Negro Girl by Laurie A. Woodard or Color by Countee Cullen.
“Ebony Moments,” a new supplement to the weekly “LBH” series, features an iconic photo of a Black history moment with a concise 25–50-word caption. “E-M” should run separately from “LBH.”
