The New Negro: When He’s Hit, He Hits Back! (Post WW1 Black Militance)

[cole phelps]

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5127/

In the years immediately following World War I, tens of thousands of southern blacks and returning black soldiers flocked to the nation’s Northern cities looking for good jobs and a measure of respect and security. Many white Americans, fearful of competition for scarce jobs and housing, responded by attacking black citizens in a spate of urban race riots. In urban African-American enclaves, the 1920s were marked by a flowering of cultural expressions and a proliferation of black self-help organizations that accompanied the era of the “New Negro.” Many black leaders, including religious figures, embraced racial pride and militancy. This 1921 article by Rollin Lynde Hartt, a white Congregational minister and journalist, captured well what was “new” in the New Negro: an aggressive willingness to defend black communities against white racist attacks and a desire to celebrate the accomplishments of African-American communities in the North.

The other evening five hundred Knights of the Ku Klux Klan marched in procession thru Jacksonville, Florida—a “band of determined men,” who “would brook no interference.” Fifteen southern states now have Ku Klux organizations—their emblem, the “flaming cross”; their device, “We Stand for Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy, Patriotism”; their advertisement, a shield bearing skull and cross-bones. Specimens of that advertisement, clipped from southern papers, are shown to visitors at the headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York City.
Southerners recall that during Reconstruction the South owed much to the Ku Klux, Northerners, however unsympathetic, find that it accomplished its purposes. Can it accomplish its purposes today, or is it perhaps destined to end by defeating them if not actually bringing about the very situation it aims to forestall? There are friends of the South who, having studied the evolution of the new negro, harbor serious misgivings. No mere fanciful bugaboo is the new negro. He exists. More than once I have met him. He differs radically from the timorous, docile negro of the past. Said a new negro, “Cap’n, you mark my words; the next time white folks pick on colored folks, something’s going to drop—dead white folks.” Within a week came race riots in Chicago, where negroes fought back with surprising audacity.
Another new negro, home from overseas said, “We were the first American regiment on the Rhine—Colonel Hayward’s, the Fighting Fifteenth; we fought for democracy, and we’re going to keep on fighting for democracy till we get our rights here at home. The black worm has turned.”
I said, “There is a high mortality among turning worms. We’ve got you people eight to one.”
He answered, “Don’t I know it? Thousands of us must die; but we’ll die fighting. Mow us down—slaughter us! It’s better than this.”

I remembered seeing a negro magazine shortly after the Chicago riots; a war-goddess on its cover brandished aloft her sword. “They who would be free,” ran the legend, “must themselves strike the blow.” I remembered a telegram from a negro editor, “Henceforward, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.” Here, in this colored veteran, was the same spirit—the spirit, that is, of the new negro. Hit, he hits back. In a succession of race riots, he has proved it. “When they taught the colored boys to fight,” says a negro paper, “they started something they won’t be able to stop.”

This is apparently no transient mood. The evolution of the new negro has been in progress since 1916, when southern negroes began to move North. That huge, leaderless exodus—a million strong, according to Herbert J. Seligmann, author of “The Negro Faces America”—stronger by far, according to some authorities—meant that for the first time in history the negro had taken his affairs into his own hands. Until then, things had been done to the negro, with the negro, and for the negro, but never by the negro. At last, he showed initiative and self-reliance. Despite the lure of big wages “up North,” it required no little courage. If the vanguard was exploited, the exploitation continued and still continues. In an article on “The High Cost of Being a Negro,” the Chicago Whip declares, “In Chicago, Kansas City, New York and Detroit, where negroes are working, they have to pay twice the rent, and in neighborhood clothing and grocery stores recent investigations show that for the same goods
the negro has to pay a color tax sometimes as high as 50 per cent. Thus the net earnings, if any at all, are 50 per cent less than those of the white workers.” Yet the exodus from Dixie goes on. Few—astonishingly few—return.

 

[cole phelps]

“One reason for the migrations to the North,” says Dr. Hawk, a colored clergyman, “is that the negroes want independence. Planters give them two or three acres for themselves and furnish the plants and seeds and they pay with a certain per cent of their crop, but they have always been in debt for things they are compelled to buy at certain stores. Since the war, wages have been so high that they could free themselves from debt and go North. . . . The going of a negro causes great unrest among other negroes. . . . The exodus is not only among the poor or floating class; lynching has a lot to do with it.”

When the movement was just beginning, a white Southerner wrote in the Tifton Gazette: “The white people have only themselves to blame. They have allowed negroes to be lynched, five at a time, on no stronger ground than suspicion; they have allowed whole sections to be depopulated of them; they have allowed them to be white-capped and whipped and their homes burned, with only the weakest effort to apprehend or punish those guilty—when any effort was made at all.”

“The exodus is a great mark of progress,” thinks Dr. Hawk; “negroes are saying, ‘We can do this thing ourselves.’” They had not been doing it long when a new and still more tremendous influence came into play. America declared war. Negroes by scores of thousands joined the colors. Nor was that all. On the fourteenth of March, President Wilson “put the devil into the negro’s head,” as a southern newspaper phrases it, by receiving a deputation of colored clergy at the White House and making a speech thus reported in the negro press the country over:
"I have always known that the negro has been unjustly and unfairly dealt with; your people have exhibited a degree of loyalty and patriotism that should command the admiration of the whole nation. In the present conflict your race has rallied to the nation’s call, and if there has been any evidence of slackerism manifested by negroes, the same has not reached Washington.
Great principles of righteousness are won by hard fighting and they are attained by slow degrees. With thousands of your sons in the camps and in France, out of this conflict you must expect nothing less than the enjoyment of full citizenship rights—the same as are enjoyed by every other citizen."
How—as a matter of precise, historic fact—did the negro acquit himself in France? Accounts by white men vary. Accounts by black men don’t. Exclaims a negro paper, “Are you aware that a negro was the first American to receive the Croix de Guerre with palm and gold star? That three negro regiments and several battalions and companies were cited and had their flags decorated for valorous conduct? That negroes placed for the first time in artillery and signal corps won high distinction? That negroes in the early part of the war held 20 per cent of all territory assigned to Americans? That the negro army was the healthiest on record? That out of 45,000 negroes engaged in battle only nine were taken prisoners? That the negroes established a record for continuous service in the trenches—191 days?” "Under similar circumstances," comments the New York Crisis, “we would fight again. But, by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if, now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.” "Back again, to be lynched, bombed, and riot-frenzied and segregated!" cries the Chicago Whip. “The black man fought to make the

world safe for democracy; he now demands that America be made safe for black Americans.”
In other words, the negro thinks as in identical circumstances a Caucasian would think. Having learned initiative, having heard from his President the promise of “freedom,” and having served his country on the battlefield, he is determined henceforth to act as in the circumstances a Caucasian would act. For once—to that extent—black is white.

 

[cole phelps]

You have now with you a new negro,” declared the editor of the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch in addressing a white audience. “This new negro, who stands today released in spirit, finds himself physically bound and shackled by laws and customs that were made for slaves.” Is he then seeking “social equality”? “What we want is social justice,” the speaker went on to say; “none of my race is dreaming of ‘social equality.’” "The negro is satisfied to confine his social aspirations within his own race," affirms the Hot Springs (Arkansas) Echo, “but he does want such political and economic rights as are guaranteed to every law-abiding citizen.” Putting the case still more explicitly, the Houston (Texas) Informer says: “What the colored man demands is ‘social equity.’ He wants the same rights of society that other men and races enjoy; but he does not ask the association and companionship of men or women of other races.”
Once in the world, Mr. Dooley could remark to Mr. Hennessy, “Th' nayger has manny fine qualities—he is joyous, light-hearted, and aisily lynched.” The new negro has determined to change all that. Says the Kansas City Call: “The white man will learn in time that he has in this new type of negro a foeman worthy of his steel. If we are driven to defend our lives, our homes, our rights, let us do it man-fashion. How better can we die than in defending our lives, our homes, our rights from the attacks of white men obsessed with the idea that this world was made for Caesar and his queens?”


I once heard Booker Washington say, “the negro can afford to be wronged; the white man can’t afford to wrong him.” Patience was the watchword—then. It is seldom the watchword now. Entirely typical of widespread negro sentiment today is this from the Crisis:
“For three centuries we have suffered and cowered. No race ever gave passive resistance and submission to evil longer, more piteous trial. Today we raise the terrible weapon of self-defense. When the murderer comes, he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed. When the mob moves, we propose to meet it with bricks and clubs and guns. If the United States is to be a land of law, we would live humbly and peaceably in it; if it is to be a land of mobs and lynchers, we might as well die today as tomorrow.”
So, likewise, the New York Age: “Every day we are told to keep quiet. Only a fool will keep quiet when he is being robbed of his birthright. Only a coward will lie down and whine under the lash if he too can give back the lash. America hates, lynches and enslaves us, not because we are black, but because we are weak. A strong, united negro race will not be mistreated. It is always strength over weakness, might over right.” Meanwhile a colored preacher writer in the Cleveland Gazette: “don’t start anything, but when something is started make it hot for them and finish it.”
These quotations and most of the foregoing excerpts are taken from “The Voice of the Negro,” a brilliant compilation by Robert T. Kerlin, professor of English at

the Virginia Military Institute. Other sources yield information as to certain vagaries attending the evolution of the new negro. A “left wing” confesses: “We would be glad to see a Bolshevik government substituted in the South for your Bourbon, reactionary, vote-stolen, misrepresentative Democratic régime. Negroes perform most of the service in the South. Under the Soviet system, their right to vote would be based upon their service and not upon race or color.” Another faction has its dream of world empire. One day last summer Marcus Garvey, in green and purple robes, presided at a gigantic mass meeting of negroes in Madison Square Garden; object, the federation of 400,000,000 negroes (the figures are his) to abolish the government of blacks by whites the world over.
Such tendencies, tho by no means broadly typical of the new negro, at least bespeak a great restlessness, a deep and perhaps gravely ominous determination to find, somehow, somewhere, a way out. The race has come to itself. It is learning to unite. It is no longer afraid. All thru its press throbs the spirit of self-reliance and of daring, and its press not only reflects the mood and temper of the new negro, it creates them. The Ku Klux Klan will perhaps show acumen if, before taking active measures, it begins a careful, patient study of that press.
“
The colored people are going to their own papers in these days for the news and for their guidance in thinking,” says Professor Kerlin. "These papers are coming to them from a score of northern cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland; they are coming to them from the great border cities—Baltimore, Washington, Cincinnati, St. Louis; they are coming to them from every southern city. Wherever in all the land there is a considerable negro population there is a negro newspaper. Little Rock has four, Louisville five, Indianapolis six, New York City ten; the state of Georgia has nine, Mississippi nineteen, Illinois eleven, California seven. To these must be added the publications of churches, societies and schools. And all classes of these contain articles on racial strife, outcries against wrongs and persecutions.


“The negro seems to have newly discovered his fourth estate. Mighty as the pulpit has been with him, the press now seems to be foremost. His newspaper is the voice of the negro. We have too frequently heard foolish vaunts about ‘knowing the negro,’ the context of such boasting invariably convicting the speaker of dangerous conceit and the harsh spirit of suppression; those who would honestly seek to know him must read his papers.”
Observe. These are the words of a distinguished southerner. But the negro problem long ago ceased to be merely a southern problem. It is national, and there are indications that the Ku Klux problem will be so too.


New York City.
Source: Rollin Lynde Hartt, “The New Negro. When He’s Hit, He Hits Back!” Independent, 15 January 1921, 59–60, 76.

 

[Klyk21]

That's why I say we should capitalize on the "new black" moniker and use the term correctly. New blacks aren't c00ns (as some here have said), they're about that action. Very funny how most of the things that occurred in this article, could very well happen today. Take out of your mind the time and place and you can definitely see whites doing 90% of this shyt. Only reason they scared now is because we have the guns. White man's kryptonite is a black man with a gun.

edit: Sooo many quotables in this article man! But this one stands out and it very relevant

America hates, lynches and enslaves us, not because we are black, but because we are weak. A strong, united negro race will not be mistreated. It is always strength over weakness, might over right

 

[cole phelps]

New negro poem
If We Must Die

By Claude McKay 1889–1948 Claude McKay
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

 

[cole phelps]

The African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB) was a radical U.S. black liberation organization established in 1919 in New York City by journalist Cyril Briggs. The group was established as a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret society. The group's socialist orientation caught the attention of the fledgling American communist movement and soon evolved into a propaganda arm of the Communist Party of America. The group was terminated in the early 1920s

Background
During the second decade of the 20th century, a socialist movement for the liberation of American blacks began to develop in the Harlem section of New York City.[1] The movement included a substantial number of immigrants from the British West Indies and other islands from the Caribbean region, who, having been raised and educated as part of a racial majority population in their homelands, had found themselves thrust into the position of an oppressed racial minority in America.[1] As products of the unequal system of colonialism, many of these newcomers to America were predisposed to hostility towards capitalism and the notion of empire-building.[1]
One of these transplants from the Caribbean was Cyril Briggs, born in 1888 on the island of Nevis, who immigrated to Harlem in the summer of 1905.[2] In 1912, Briggs was hired as a journalist by one of the black community's leading newspapers, the New York Amsterdam News. He worked there throughout the years of the First World War.[2] Inspired by the rhetoric of "national self-determination" espoused by President Woodrow Wilson, in September 1918 Briggs launched a monthly publication called The Crusader, to promote the idea of "repatriation" of blacks to a decolonized Africa, a concept similar to the contemporary notion among some European Jews of Zionism and "return" to Palestine.[3]
The Crusader was started by George Wells Parker, a black businessman from Omaha, Nebraska, as the official organ of the Hamitic League of the World, a pan-African nationalist group.[3] Parker published articles in the journal proclaiming that Africa was the cradle of civilization and arguing the superiority of the black race. He contributed financially to the publication, which was essentially a vehicle for his views.[4]
In February 1919, Briggs began to change his ideas, and his new thinking was expressed in articles in the Crusader. He began to draw parallels between the plight of black workers in the United States and impoverished working class whites, who were mostly recent immigrants or their descendants from Europe.[5] Over ensuing months, Briggs began to consider the system of capitalism as the villain, and he argued in favor of a common cause and common action by workers of all races.[5]
The Crusader eventually reached a total readership of 36,000 persons, mostly in Harlem.[6]

Establishment of the organization
The summer of 1919 in America was a time of racial rioting and violence, remembered retrospectively by historians as the "Red Summer." Returning soldiers from European battlefields, including blacks with heightened expectations of freedom and equality and whites seeking a return to civilian employment and the status quo ante bellum, and new immigrant black workers from the rural South formed a volatile mixture which erupted in mob violence in Chicago, Omaha, and cities throughout the Midwest and South.
In response to these attacks, The Crusader advocated armed self-defense. Politically, Briggs drew comparisons between government attacks on white and black radicals. He identified capitalism as the underlying cause of oppression of poor people of all races. While endorsing a Marxist analysis, The Crusader advocated a separate organization of African-Americans to defend against racist attacks in the United States, and likened this to Africans' combating colonialism abroad.
In September 1919, The Crusader announced the formation of a new organization called the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), to serve as a self-defense organization for blacks threatened by race riots and lynchings.
Not long afterwards, Briggs began to forge connections with pioneer black American Communists such as the Surinam-born Otto Huiswoud and Jamaican poet and writer Claude McKay.[7] These in turn connected Briggs and his publication with native-born white Communists including Robert Minor and Rose Pastor Stokes, who took a strong interest in the so-called "Negro Question."[7] Briggs would join the Communist Party himself in 1921.[7]

Conflicts with Marcus Garvey and the Bureau of Investigation
The ABB attempted to organize from inside the UNIA-ACL and advocated a policy of critical support for its leader, Marcus Garvey. ABB leaders Briggs and Claude McKay participated in the UNIA's 1920 and 1921 international conferences in New York. At the second conference, McKay arranged for Rose Pastor Stokes, a white leader of the Communist Party, to address the assembly.
The ABB became highly critical of Garvey following the apparent failure of the Black Star Line and Garvey's July 1921 Atlanta meeting with Grand Kleagle Clarke of the Ku Klux Klan. In June 1922, The Crusader announced that it had become the official organ of the African Blood Brotherhood. Arguing that the UNIA was doomed unless it developed new leadership, the magazine sought to convert the UNIA's membership to the ABB. In seeking to replace the UNIA, the ABB competed with Randolph's socialist publication The Messenger, which had called for Garvey's expulsion from the United States. In return, Garvey called for his followers to disrupt meetings of these oppositional groups.
In addition to the dispute with Garvey, Briggs and the ABB were targeted for investigation by police and federal law enforcement agencies. Historian Theodore Kornweibel reports that the government began manipulating radical organizations in conjunction with legal prosecution under the pretence of disrupting opposition to World War I. Following the end of the war, a government campaign against communists, anarchists, and other radicals was instituted at the direction of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (himself the victim of two anarchist bomb attacks) in what came to be called the First Red Scare. Government agents were secretly planted in the UNIA, ABB and The Messenger. These agents provided intelligence to the Bureau of Investigation while in some case sabotaging meetings, and acting as agents provocateurs.
The ABB enjoyed a period of notoriety following the Tulsa Riot of 1921. Tulsa had an ABB chapter and news reports credited the organization with inspiring resistance to racist attacks.

 

[cole phelps]

Fusion with the Communist Party
The Crusader ceased publication in February 1922, following Garvey's indictment for mail fraud. Briggs continued to operate the Crusader News Service, providing news material to affiliated publications of the American black press. As cooperation with the Communist Party increased, the ABB ceased to recruit separately.
The leadership of the Communist International, while largely ignorant about the particulars of the situation of blacks in the United States, did understand the importance of ethnic and other non-class forms of oppression, and pushed the early CP to pay more attention to blacks in the U.S.[citation needed] Before this intervention by the Comintern, the party had largely ignored blacks, and thus was not particularly attractive to black radicals like Briggs. Instead, it was the Bolshevik Revolution that attracted their attention.
Poet and ABB member Claude McKay has previously been active in the Left Communist Workers Socialist Federation in London and subsequently visited the Soviet Union several times in the mid-1920s, writing about conferences of the Communist International for African-American audiences. McKay's book, The Negroes in America (published in Russian in 1924 but not in the U.S. until 1979) argued, against the official Communist position of the time, that the oppression of black people in the U.S. was not reducible to economic oppression, but was unique. He argued against the color blindness that the Communists had inherited from the Socialist Party.
McKay made argued vociferously for national self-determination in support of national independence for oppressed peoples, which to him meant an independent African-American government separate and apart from that of the United States. Subsequently, in the aftermath of the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928, the CPUSA adopted a policy of national self-determination for African-Americans living in the Black Belt of the American South. The policy was neglected after the Popular Front period began in 1935, but was not formally replaced until 1959.
As the Communist Party developed, it regularized its structure along the lines called for by the Communist International (Comintern). Semi-independent organizations such as the African Blood Brotherhood with its divergent Afro-Marxist political theories were anathema to the Comintern and its Soviet leaders, who believed all communist and Marxist-Leninist organizations should be unified in a single communist party and platform in each nation under Moscow's overall direction and control. In the early 1920s the African Blood Brotherhood was dissolved, with its members merged into the Workers Party of America and later into the American Negro Labor Congress. Many early ABB members, however, went on to be key CP cadres for decades.

 

[cole phelps]

http://www.thecoli.com/threads/the-red-summer-of-1919-the-year-blacks-fought-back.190896/

 

[cole phelps]

The New Negro Renaissance

When Langston Hughes left his native Midwest to attend Columbia University in 1921, he was excited about his new school's location in the Harlem community. Hughes had already heard about a place that was the "Negro capital of the world," and he knew that if ever he wanted to be a writer, his career would have to begin in Harlem. Hughes would become one of the major figures in the New Negro Renaissance—or Harlem Renaissance, as it is familiarly known. After his arrival, he would never call anyplace else home, and in many ways Hughes typifies what the Renaissance meant and what it allowed. Today his residence at 20 East 127th Street continues to attract young writers committed to producing the kind of art that made Hughes famous.
The Renaissance was many things to many people, but it is best described as a cultural phenomenon in which the high level of black artistic and cultural production demanded and received mainstream recognition, where racial solidarity was equated with social progress, and where the idea of blackness became a commodity in its own right. As a result, the New Negro Renaissance is the most widely discussed period of African-American literary history not only because of ongoing scholarly debates over its origins, beginning, and end, but also because of its fundamental importance to twentieth-century thought and culture. The Renaissance coincided with the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the Lost Generation, and its impact was keenly felt on an individual and collective level within the African-American community as well as on America's robust cultural industries, music, film, theater—all of which fully benefited from the creativity and newly discovered contributions of African Americans.

It remains the period to which we attribute the development, if not the birth, of every major artistic and literary form that we now associate with African-American life and culture. During the Renaissance African-American visual art came of age, and the list of names is a who's who in the field of modern black painting, sculpture, printmaking, and photography. Artists such as Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Hale Woodruff, Lois Mailou Jones, Meta Warrick Fuller, Palmer Hayden, Richmond Barthé, Dox Thrash, Augusta Savage, Sargent Claude Johnson, Laura Wheeler Waring, Beauford Delaney, and James VanDerZee all belong to the period. Blacks appeared in films and on Broadway in popular musicals, frequently playing on stereotype and exaggeration, as in "Shuffle Along," "c00ntown," "Darktown Follies," and "Blackbirds," but the first black filmmakers also emerged at this time, men like Oscar Micheaux, who produced more than thirty films, most of them between 1919 and 1935, during the height of the Renaissance.
The visibility and intensity of the period symbolized a major shift in the degree to which black people could and did claim the authority to speak about and represent themselves and their experience. Black business leaders like Madame C. J. Walker and others, owners of funeral homes, insurance companies, and newspapers helped to create a new black business base, just as organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and The Crisis magazine, the National Urban League, Garveyism, and the African Blood Brotherhood all made the needs and concerns of African-American migrants and black emigrants from other parts of the Diaspora known to all.

 

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The Great Migration
By 1910 as a result of the Great Migration, the largest in U.S. history, African Americans and others started to arrive in large numbers in urban areas from many parts of the rural South. New York absorbed the largest numbers, but they also settled in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, the Washington-Baltimore corridor, and other major cities that became identifiably black, often because racial discrimination restricted them to certain areas dubbed "ghettos." They came with their hopes and their dreams of a new and different life, seeking relief from labor exploitation and white violence. This applied even to those who had managed to get an education or who had served in the armed services, where their patriotism and valor abroad did not translate into employment opportunities upon returning home from war. Some came as the latest wave of immigrants from the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, to a country that appealed to their sense of dignity and worth, where their work ethic would help them advance. None could escape the race consciousness that bound together a people sharing a history of oppression.

Thrust between two world wars, inspired by an economic boom, and surrounded by an atmosphere of artistic revolt, blacks became a collective, critical mass whose culture and spirit were quickly recognized for newness and difference . . . and for financial rewards. Those who came did not represent a blank slate, for they brought with them dynamic cultural forms that could now find full expression. Although they were forced to adapt during their enslavement, there was a visible link to their African heritage, one that had sustained them through far more difficult times. It was left to the young artists who joined this mass exodus from the South and those who supported them to build upon this foundation of creativity and expressive culture, which quickly gained access to mainstream networks of distribution, albeit controlled by others. The art was unique because it was drawn directly from a communal lifestyle, the rituals, folk, oral, and musical customs of Africa, which held the memory and often the form of the original. It was unique also because it had developed for the most part in isolation, apart from the mainstream, transforming and adapting the very culture that sought to suppress it.

These New Negro Renaissance art forms were innovative, experimental, and intentional: the most recognized black leaders believed this production would permit a people to transcend racial difference, that their excellence in the artistic domain would ensure their acceptance into the human race in no uncertain terms. They would, or so they thought, finally receive the full benefits of America's promised democracy. One of their wisest was perhaps more realistic. The art, like the vision that inspired it, would exhibit a characteristic double consciousness, said the venerable W. E. Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk. He knew their hopes and dreams might not be fulfilled, that they might forever be those "two unreconciled strivings…two warring souls…in one dark body."

 

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Mixing Various Traditions
Various failed expectations notwithstanding, the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance remain highly significant and figure prominently in subsequent developments. Most important, perhaps, it is possible to highlight ways in which artists, intellectuals, and socially conscious individuals used their newfound authority to mark a shift in a highly diversified field of artistic expression. The best example may be in literature, where both African-American and Caribbean-born transplants exhibited extraordinary talent. Novels published after 1910 show their authors drawing on three distinct traditions, including British Romanticism, American experimentalism, and black folk (vernacular) culture.
The results of this union varied widely in terms of theme, stylistic innovation, and meaning. Poets could embrace the conventional styles of genteel poetry, as Countee Cullen did for Color, Copper Sun, Caroling Dusk, and The Ballad of the Brown Girl; or as Georgia Douglas Johnson did in The Heart of a Woman and Bronze. Although Jamaican-born Claude McKay wrote traditional Romantic poetry in Harlem Shadow, he did not abandon his connection to the African-American experience, a point he made clear in "If We Must Die," his best-known poem. Still others sought to retain a strong presence of a black folk tradition, a tradition that was itself undergoing transformation from its southern rural roots into an urban vernacular. Langston Hughes, the most prolific Renaissance writer, led the way by applying these forms to formal written expression. His early reputation for poetic radicalism in form and content rests on his first volume, The Weary Blues, which appeared at the height of the Renaissance, in 1926. Hughes borrowed the blues matrix to create a new aesthetic and became the "Negro Poet Laureate." He always remained in touch with the "low down folk," whose experiences were at the heart of his poetry and prose. One of his most memorable characters is Mrs. Alberta K. Johnson, the brutally honest Harlem tenant in the landlord poems, among other Harlem familiars. Most important, there

was Jesse B. Semple, his most successful creation, a legendary everyman through whom Hughes could address a wide range of concerns in his Chicago's Daily Defender newspaper column. Though never critically acclaimed during his own lifetime, Hughes was perhaps the most representative writer to emerge from the New Negro Renaissance because of his work in and beyond the period and his sustained commitment to an art for the people.
Many Renaissance writers felt some ambivalence about the use of the black vernacular as well as an obligation to maintain the separation between high and low art, an issue that continues to be debated. How to confront questions of race generally had to be more nuanced and subtle as well. James Weldon Johnson, who became known for his fictional and ironic Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, transformed Negro dialect sermons into a volume of poetry, God's Trombones, demonstrating that the features of black oral performance could be adapted to standard English poetry. Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, both leaders in black folklore, found ways to make art reflect their academic research. Brown produced a poetry volume entitled Southern Road, and Hurston sought to transmit the traditions of southern black folk, traditions she believed were in danger of being lost. Hurston's novels Their Eyes Were Watching God,


and Moses, Man of the Mountain are in the tradition of the folk novel, saturated with black folk speech and oral practices, but call our attention to the sharp distinction between what was viewed as high and low culture. Similarly, Haitian-born Jacques Roumain made the lives of toiling laborers and peasants of Haiti, known through his novel Masters of the Dew. Attitudes toward southern black rural culture, which many believed was too closely associated with the "low culture" of slavery, were complex indeed. As a result, Hurston would have to wait for nearly seventy years before receiving the critical acclaim she well deserved.

 

[cole phelps]

Short Stories and Theater
The short story allowed Renaissance writers to display the regional diversity of the period. Marita Bonner and Dorothy West were among the most astute observers of African American life, making significant contributions to the form. Although Bonner began writing plays as a regular member of Georgia Douglas Johnson's S Street Salon in Washington, D.C., she is known primarily for the stories she wrote after moving to Chicago in 1926, stories later collected as Fry Street & Environs. Frye Street is the name Bonner gave the imaginary Chicago locale where her characters experienced social and emotional disintegration, reconstruction, and community solidarity in their efforts to survive in a new urban environment.
Similarly, Dorothy West chose her native Boston to explore the social and racial environment in her stories and later in The Living Is Easy, a novel about color consciousness that was published in 1948, long after the Renaissance was thought to be over. West continued to write short stories well into her eighties, since it had been the form that earned her a prestigious award in the 1920s when she lived in Harlem. Women are her focus, their lives and challenges, which she described with a high degree of skill and nuance. West was very much aware of the role that the Renaissance played for her generation. She founded and edited New Challenge (1937–38), a magazine that she hoped would "revive the spirit of the Renaissance," as she stated in the inaugural issue.

Less talked about as a product of the New Negro Renaissance is drama, which had to take a backseat to the vastly popular black musicals, written by white authors and performed by all-black casts. Serious black drama had to compete for a place in this commercial environment that continued as a highly lucrative form of white entertainment—and black employment—during the period. Having grown so accustomed to black comedic and/or musical stage performances, white audiences did not find it easy—nor did American theater—to acknowledge black life as subjects for serious drama. Nevertheless, Renaissance playwrights existed: Katherine Davis Tillman, Helene Johnson, Willis Richardson, and Randolph Edmonds were among the many who would wait until the creation of the



Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project in the mid-1930s to find an audience. Other more established Renaissance writers—Arna Bontemps, Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman, and Langston Hughes—saw their plays, written earlier, produced through the support of the WPA as well.
However, off-Broadway, regional theater, and the theater and drama departments at historically black colleges all provided solid venues for black theater, which was one of the important ways in which the New Negro Renaissance extended itself after it all but disappeared from the main centers of urban America.

 

[cole phelps]

The Music
Developments in black music were somewhat more successful because of the high demand for black talented performers like Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ethel Waters, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rainey. New York nightclubs regularly featured black musicians, whose innovations in jazz represented America's first original music form. Black women vocalists also found success as the music industry quickly discovered the commercial advantages of race music, a phenomenon that turned out to be a double-edged sword. White record owners actively recruited women performers, many desperate to sing the new blues music, straight from the South. They recorded their songs and were then paid little to go on tour promoting the music that was now on vinyl, a new technology that radicalized music production. Women especially were subjected to the worst conditions as they traveled to the South, where segregation in public accommodations prevented them from enjoying any of the benefits afforded entertainers.


Nor was black music limited to secular music forms, for the Renaissance saw a range of black musical performance; the classical music of Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, and Marian Anderson was introduced to the world during the era. A new urban sensibility also demanded a new sound; it came in the form of gospel music that began to emerge from the storefronts serving as worship centers for newly arriving blacks. These were typical of the kinds of adjustments that were made in a community experiencing the disruptions of migration, where space was at a premium but the need for community was no less great.
While the New Negro Renaissance was not a single phenomenon or located in a single location, it had its most visible expression in Harlem. It is considered by many as the "golden age" of black art because of level of cultural production that was achieved. Its role as a catalyst for great art within the period and beyond cannot be overestimated

 

[MikelArteta]

 

[DPresidential]

New negro poem
If We Must Die

By Claude McKay 1889–1948 Claude McKay
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

New Negro equal New Black