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The New Negro Movement is a term many scholars use to refer to the Harlem Renaissance; they feel that the phrase “New Negro” recognizes the shift in consciousness black writers had during the period and it recognizes that black literature proliferated at the time but did not undergo a renaissance. Several events serve as the precursors of the movement: the publication of The Souls of Black Folks (1903) by W.E.B. Du Bois, which delves into cultural history and helps define the problem of black identity and addresses the importance of black people in America; the organization of the NAACP (1909) and the National Urban League (1911); the Great Migration (beginning c. 1910) in which black people moved from the rural South to the urban North looking for employment and a better way of life; and the end of World War I (1918), which saw soldiers who had fought for foreign democracy returning home to find racism, unemployment, and poverty.

Individuals who were integral to the emergence of the New Negro included Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar, who merged oral history and literary art by focusing their work on black folk traditions. Marcus Garvey raised the level of consciousness in black America by emphasizing the importance of African traditions; and James Weldon Johnson, who wrote Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) and Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917), worked for the American diplomatic service, had a career on Broadway, earned a law degree, and taught at Fisk University. Alain Locke edited the 1925 “Harlem Number” of the Survey Graphic, which set forth the ideas and characteristics of this new generation of artist and defined the movement. In the introduction Locke indicated that there was a new spiritual outlook and that in the book “the Negro [will] speak for himself.” This self-definition was one of the characteristics of the “new” artists, whose work represented a new way of responding to the black man’s position in America. Artists in the movement called for change, but they confronted the disparity in the way in which the American system was conducted, and not the system itself.

This artistic demand for action against the political and social situation can be seen in “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay, perhaps the first important writer of the period. It is also evident in periodicals such as The Crisis (the publication of the NAACP), Opportunity (the publication of the National Urban League), and Fire!, which was edited by Wallace Thurman and designed to replace the old way of presenting black life. Writers were attempting to define black art and who should judge it in such essays as Alain Locke’s “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” and George Schuyler’s “The Negro-Art Hokum.” The literature of the period addressed urban life and its impact on the new arrivals; the question of color, passing, and responsibility; the response to oppression; identity; Africa in its romanticized view; and cultural heritage.

The New Negro Movement produced playwrights, actors, a black theater (both dramatic and musical) begun in Harlem around 1910, and serious and popular forms of music, painting, drawing, and sculpture. Many consider the end of the movement to be the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression. This did lead to difficulty for many and required relocation, often resulting in a different thrust or form in the art, but it did not lead to a cessation of creative output. In fact, Langston Hughes lived and worked until 1967, and Dorothy West, who was considered the youngest member of the movement, was active until 1998.

Helen R. Houston

Bearden’s lifelong achievements covered the range of human experiences intermingled with his own personal experiences.