The New Negro

The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million African-Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1910 and 1970. It gave the African Americans an opportunity to attend decent schools, make a living, vote, and make music and art. This born free generation of African Americans believed they were entitled to the rights of American citizenship. In the national culture, African Americans were still largely invisible. When and where they

did appear, cruel, demeaning stereotype distorted their humanity all too often. This was still the time of segregation, humiliation, anti-black riots, and lynching, when many Americans saw black people as inferior, alien race. In the twentieth century they were able to combat racial oppression more effectively, they publicized their own ideas about the race. African Americans allies began to influence American culture and politics as never before. The symbol of these better-educated, more militant, and more powerful African Americans was the “New Negro”.

In 1917, when congress declared war on Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed it a war to make the world safe for democracy. African Americans greeted his words with skepticism. Wilson, had segregated the federal service and had remained silent about lynching. Blacks were divided on whether to support the war effort, given the history of racial discrimination in American society, in the armed forces. They thought of their manifestly undemocratic experiences of

disfranchisement, lynching and segregation and all we saw in the previous chapter.

The draft forced African Americans from their ambivalence. Most backed the United States and hoped that the military service would improve the situation of the race as a whole. In June 1917, hundreds of thousands of black men found themselves in the United States Army whether or not they supported the war’s aims. Malvin Gray Johnson summed them up in his wary 1934 “Negro Soldier”.

As in the civil war, a conflict over black officers quickly surfaced. Originally the War Department did not plan to train any black men as officers. This decision sparked an angry uproar among African Americans and their allies. After a spirited struggle, the NAACP succeeded in persuading the secretary of war to extend officer training to college-educated black man. But the Army stood firm on segregated training. “Negro” and “officer” remained distant and separate concepts. 😠👊

Spanning the 1920s to the mid-1930s, the Harlem Renaissance was a literary, artistic, and intellectual

movement that kindled a new black cultural identity. Its essence was summed up by critic and teacher

Alain Locke in 1926 when he declared that through art, “Negro life is seizing its first chances for group expression and self-determination.” Harlem became the center of a “spiritual coming of age” in which Locke’s “New Negro” transformed “social disillusionment to race pride.” Chiefly literary, the Renaissance included the visual arts but excluded jazz, despite its parallel emergence as a black art form.

The patrons of the Harlem Renaissance had hoped that the Great Migration out of the South, black participation in the First World War, and the race-proud art of the New Negro would end racial discrimination and violence. That did not happen, however African Americans gained a sense of themselves as members of an international community of people of African descent, whether through

military service in France, attention to W.E.B. Du Bois's Pan-African Congresses, or membership in Marcus Garvey’s UNIA. The hard times of the 1930s increased the number of lynching. Yet the Harlem renaissance permanently weakened the hold of the demeaning stereotype by publicizing black people’s own notions about themselves. In time the Great Migration's voters revolutionized the Democratic Party and made the black Americans a political force once again.

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