World War I and the New Negro Movement

2014 ◽  
pp. 15-34
Author(s):  
David F. Krugler
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement

The Sound and Fury of a Renaissance

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-71
Author(s):  
Imani Perry
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War I ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
World War ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
African American Identity ◽  
Cultural Communities

This chapter describes the New Negro Movement that flourished following World War I. In the context of the rise of political organizations like the NAACP, Garveyism, in addition to vibrant arts and cultural communities, and print culture, Lift Every Voice and Sing became both an inspiration and a touchpoint for the expression and expansion of African American identity.

Race News

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Carroll
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Press ◽  
World War ◽  
New Negro ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Imperfect Coverage ◽  
White Press

Race News examines the political and professional evolution of black journalism in the twentieth century. In particular, Fred Carroll explores the commercial black press’ contentious working relationship with the alternative black press and its thorny interactions with a repressive federal government and hostile white media to explain how shifting toleration of progressive politics reconfigured how black journalists wrote and covered the news. From World War I to World War II, leading newspapers crafted a progressive newswriting template influenced by the racial militancy of the New Negro Movement, modernist sensibilities of the Harlem Renaissance, and communist critiques of the American political economy. Such newswriting established the parameters of acceptable political discourse for millions of African Americans. This style of reportage also coincided with staggering circulation increases that established newspapers of national and international significance, including the Baltimore Afro-American, Chicago Defender, and Pittsburgh Courier. However, this newswriting template unraveled during the Cold War as publishers distanced themselves from progressive influences to protect their businesses from the anticommunism movement. Commercial publishers confronted numerous competitive challenges in the postwar period. They witnessed circulation declines as the white press began to cover the Civil Rights Movement, and a revitalized alternative black press emerged to endorse the Black Power Movement. The fitful integration of white newsrooms eventually led to the U.S. media's fairer but imperfect coverage of minority concerns.

Claude McKay’s Bad Nationalists

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-132
Author(s):  
Rich Cole
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World War ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Identity Control ◽  
Control Set ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Back To Africa

Abstract This article examines Claude McKay’s 1928 journey to Africa under colonial occupation and uncovers how these true events partly inspired his late work of expatriate fiction, Romance in Marseille. By bringing together migration studies with literary history, the article challenges and expands existing research that suggests that McKay’s writings register the impulse for a nomadic wandering away from oppressive forms of identity control set up in the wake of World War I. The article contends that Claude McKay’s renegade cast of “bad nationalist” characters registers a generative tension between the imperial national forms the author encountered in North Africa and the Black nationalist vision of Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa campaign. Reading the dialectics of bad nationalisms and Black internationalisms, the article explores how the utopian promise for Black liberation by returning back to Africa, central to the New Negro project of Black advancement, frequently becomes entangled in McKay’s transnational stowaway fiction with conflicting calls for reparations, liabilities, and shipping damages.

Africa for the Africans!

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Ewing
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Black Men ◽  
African Descent ◽  
West Indian ◽  
World War ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Mass Politics ◽  
Global Reach

This chapter examines the extent of Garveyism's global reach in the aftermath of World War I. It looks at how the spread of radical Garveyism transcended its West Indian skeleton, enlivening the dreams of black men and women throughout the Americas and Africa, projecting a dazzling interpretation of world events and scriptural destiny that built on and paid respect to rich histories of struggle while plotting a new future and a new identity—a New Negro. Radical Garveyism urgently articulated a moment in which the outlines of the postwar world were uncertain, and in which peoples of African descent sensed an opportunity to redraw them. Its dramatic reception both explained a moment of global mass politics and catalyzed new and often explosive expressions of dissent.

Jean Toomer

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Foley
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Political Unconscious ◽  
Family Secrets ◽  
New Negro Movement ◽  
Young America

The 1923 publication of Cane established Jean Toomer as a modernist master and one of the key literary figures of the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Though critics and biographers alike have praised his artistic experimentation and unflinching eyewitness portraits of Jim Crow violence, few seem to recognize how much Toomer's interest in class struggle, catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and the post-World War I radical upsurge, situate his masterwork in its immediate historical context. This book explores Toomer's political and intellectual connections with socialism, the New Negro movement, and the project of Young America. Examining his rarely scrutinized early creative and journalistic writings, as well as unpublished versions of his autobiography, the book recreates the complex and contradictory consciousness that produced Cane. The book's discussion of political repression runs parallel with a portrait of repression on a personal level. Examining family secrets heretofore unexplored in Toomer scholarship, the book traces their sporadic surfacing in Cane. Toomer's text, the book argues, exhibits a political unconscious that is at once public and private.

The New Negro and Social Democracy during the Harlem Renaissance, 1917–37

2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelius L. Bynum
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
World War ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Garment Workers ◽  
Black Racial Identity ◽  
Equal Right

This essay focuses on the conception of social justice devised by A. Philip Randolph, noted socialist, co-founder of The Messenger, and organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Frank R. Crosswaith, a general organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and one-time Messenger correspondent, in the aftermath of World War I. Weaving together a socialist critique of modern industrial society with a powerful vision of human freedom and equality, Randolph and Crosswaith articulated a distinctly egalitarian conception of social justice that asserted the equal right of all to benefit from society's advances. Arguing that genuine social justice was predicated on the open participation of all, they fashioned a program of reform that drew on black racial identity to frame their vision of class consciousness and, in so doing, planted the roots of an independent strain of black radicalism that was not intellectually beholden to whites. Although historical writing on the New Negro recognizes the importance of Randolph and to a lesser degree Crosswaith, this writing overlooks their innovative thought and its philosophical and political basis.

Crispus Attucks Meets the New Negro

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
World War I ◽  
Black History ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
World War ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
Black Authors ◽  
School Curricula

During the era of the “New Negro” after World War I, African Americans intensified their attention to Attucks and other race heroes as they made more overt efforts to incorporate African American achievements into the national historical narrative. The decades after 1920 saw an expansion of both textual and nontextual attention to black history as well as increasing complaints from black commentators about the exclusion of that history from school curricula and public life. While mainstream textbooks failed to incorporate Attucks or African Americans in general, black authors attempting to replace or supplement the white narrative apparently were frustrated by how little was actually known about Attucks. Black activism and black attention to heroes of the race intensified as World War II approached.

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