‘The New Negro: An Interpretation’
Alain LeRoy Locke, 1925
Link copied
I’ve read thisI haven’t read this
You could look at a few different moments to mark the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, the explosion of creative expression that emanated from the “Mecca” of Black cultural life between the 1910s and 1930s. But perhaps no work better articulated this moment quite like the 1925 publication of the anthology “The New Negro: An Interpretation.” The 400-plus-page collection of poetry, fiction and essays by the likes of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and others was curated by philosopher and scholar Alain LeRoy Locke. The Harlem Renaissance was “born through the midwifery of Locke,” historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. once wrote.
Many of our greatest American artists were products of the era. Take musicians such as Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller; jazz may have originated in New Orleans, but it became the soundtrack of the Harlem Renaissance and was shaped by the movement, becoming more complex and broadly popular.
Alain LeRoy Locke circa 1943, in a painting by Betsy Graves Reyneau. (Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Writers (Hughes, Hurston as well as James Baldwin’s eventual mentor, Countee Cullen) and visual artists (chiefly Aaron Douglas, the “father of African American art,” who blended cubism with West African influences) often directly challenged the prevailing racial stereotypes and perceptions of Black people by infusing their works with a sense of self-expression, humanity and racial pride.
Locke had initially guest-edited a special edition of “Survey Graphic” magazine featuring some of these writers. He was then invited to curate this expanded, special anthology that introduced some previously unknown authors to a national audience. In his seminal essay within its pages, Locke framed and contextualized what was happening. The Great Migration saw Black people leaving the expanding Jim Crow apparatus in the South to cities further north. In Harlem, these new arrivals also encountered swells of Black immigrants from French and British colonial powers, also arriving in search of economic opportunity as well as greater freedom of expression.
The Duke Ellington Orchestra performs with singer Betty Roché in the film “Reveille With Beverly” (1943). (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)Singer Bessie Smith, circa 1924. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)Fats Waller in an undated photo at the CBS studio in New York. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
In this milieu, a new Black culture and identity was being forged and finding expression through the arts. Locke saw Black people now asserting themselves as “conscious contributor[s]” to civilization, unafraid in demanding their rights and creating realistic depictions of African American life through their works.
“If in our lifetime the Negro should not be able to celebrate his full initiation into American democracy,” Locke wrote, “he can at least, on the warrant of these things, celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age.”
But some of the ideas he espoused would also lead to heated debates on whether the arts were luxurious distractions from real advancement. His contemporary W.E.B. Du Bois would argue that politics and economics should be the focus of Black collective energy, and worthwhile art should actually be propaganda. Locke argued for the importance of self-expression and the value of the arts, of the “ethics of beauty itself.”
Eventually stymied by the Great Depression, the ethos of the Harlem Renaissance would later fuel the politics of the civil rights movement and inspire the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. — Elahe Izadi
Other notable works
“The Kid,” Charlie Chaplin, 1921
