the new negro alain locke essay

In The New Negro, three generations of black artists and intellectuals addressed questions raised by Du Bois two decades earlier in The Souls of Black Folk(1903). What does it mean to be both black and American? On what terms can African Americans participate in the making of a common national life in the United States without denying what is distinctive about themselves as members of a particular group? What is the relationship between culture and politics? What is the relationship among history, art, and racial identity?

Locke’s opening essay, “The New Negro,” is of enduring historical significance in this connection. His remarks on the politics of culture and the use of art for social purposes—specifically, on the exploitation of folk themes by middle-class artists as a form of racial lobbying—have stimulated decades of heated discussion and criticism. Responding to the tendency of sociologists to see black Americans primarily in light of the “Negro problem,” Locke insisted instead that “the elements of truest social portraiture are found in artistic self-expression.” So far as African Americans were culturally articulate, they were to speak for themselves.

The flowering of a new race spirit among African Americans was an example of movements of national self-determination around the world. As a large part of the peasant matrix of the American South, black Americans had made that region a gift of their folk temperament, contributing, Locke noted, a “leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance.” At the stage of cultural adolescence, the African American was now becoming a more conscious contributor to American civilization, as a younger generation moved “from the arid fields of controversy and debate to the productive fields of creative expression.” The “forced radicalism” of an emphasis on race represented a unique social experiment, an attempt to build Americanism on race values, to turn a handicap into an advantage, and to anticipate and create a new democracy in American culture. At once therapeutic and tactical, the New Negro Movement looked within and without, Locke suggested. Internally, it sought to repair a damaged group psychology. Externally, it celebrated the paradox of ethnicity, the fact that the racialism of the Harlem Renaissance intended integration, not separatism; in Locke’s words, the fullest racial self-expression was contingent upon “the fullest sharing of American culture and institutions.” From this point of view, the cultural project was inevitably a political one. Admission to first-class citizenship on honorable terms turned on the revaluation of the African American’s “cultural contributions, past and prospective.”

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