Unit 4: Academic and Literary Vocabulary and Vocabulary from Readings

Although the phrase “New Negro” dates to the late nineteenth century, it was not until the 1920s that this label gained currency as a description for middle-class African Americans who advocated a new sense of militancy and racial pride.

Indeed, Alain Locke, an African-American philosopher, critic, and editor, titles his Harlem Renaissance literary anthology The New Negro (1925) in order to signal these powerful currents of black artistic consciousness, renewed civil rights advocacy, and racial solidarity.

Above all, “New Negroes” attempted to assert their own agency and participate fully in American culture, while resisting white America's attempts to cast them as a “problem” that somehow needed to be solved.

The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toil, a chance for the improvement of conditions.

Proscription and prejudice have thrown these dissimilar elements into a common area of contact and interaction.

It is—or promises at least to be—a race capital. That is why our comparison is taken with those nascent centers of folk-expression and self-determination which are playing a creative part in the world today.

If any have a song to sing
That’s different from the rest,
Oh let them sing
Before the urgency of Youth's behest!

We claim no part with racial dearth;
We want to sing the songs of birth!