The New Negro

"The New Negro" is an essay by Alain Locke that helped shape a new cultural movement coined the, "Harlem Renaissance." Locke contemplated the creation of black culture and race that would be based on shared experience rather than a shared oppressor (white patriarchal society). The ideas about creating common goals, founding a black racial brotherhood, and working for equality were not wholly new when Locke published his essay. Much earlier in American literature, Martin Delany published his novel, Blake, or Huts of America. In Delany's novel, the protagonist is taken as a slave, endeavors to find his family who are taken from him, incites a slave rebellion in the United States, and eventually leaves for Liberia. Blake (the protagonist) realizes in the course of the novel that blacks cannot cooperate and cohabitate effectively in the United States; his solution is to racially, "create the world anew," in Liberia (Milton).

In "The New Negro," Locke asserts that previously "the negro" has been more concept than reality, more socially-constructed myth than person. Locke asserts, "His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality. Through having had to appeal from the unjust stereotypes of his oppressors and traducers to those of his liberators, friends and benefactors he has had to subscribe to the traditional positions from which his case has been viewed. Little true social or self-understanding has or could come from such a situation," (1).

Locke describes his contemporary movement of the case of "the negro" as a "spiritual emancipation," (1). Overcoming the internal prejudice---the misunderstanding of self, position, and value then allows "the negro" to contemplate and undertake the task of searching for a collective consciousness.

Locke also describes what he identifies as the underlying reasons for this spirutal emanicipation and formation of the "new negro." Locke believes that migration toward the Northern section of the United States and increased urbanization are contributing to black social transformations. The Harlem Renaissance ended up containing many different, albeit racially black, ethnicities. Ultimately, it became a cultural awakening that based itself on Locke's notion that, "In the very process of being transplanted, the Negro is being transformed," (Locke 2). Transplantation and collaboration (in Harlem) brought the transformation and cultural growth of the Harlem Renaissance.

Works Cited

Locke, Alain. The New Negro. http://books.google.com/books?id=kuiSuqS4J38C&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22the+new+negro%22+alain+locke&source=bl&ots=gGvbGq_OGc&sig=ed1qFRNosBfLkTvyyef_TJRmUw8&hl=en&ei=yerPS8ezDIGW8QTT082gCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false Accessed 4/12/10.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_1/index.shtml Accessed 4/22/10.