New Negro

New Negro is a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation. The term "New Negro" was made popular by Alain LeRoy Locke.

The term had been used in African American discourses since 1895 and the concept associated with the term evolved over the years to become critical to the African American scene during the first three decades of the twentieth century, receiving most attention during the peak years of the Harlem Renaissance (1917-1928). The term has a broad relevance to the period in U.S. history known as the Post-Reconstruction, whose beginnings were marked symbolically by the notorious compromise of 1877 and whose impact upon black American lives culminated in the 1896 Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which practically obliterated the gains African Americans had made through the 14th and 15th Amendments. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who in 1988 provided a comprehensive treatment of this evolution from 1895 to 1925, notes that "blacks regained a public voice, louder and more strident than it had been even during slavery."

More recently, Gates and Gene Andrew Jarrett have discussed a New Negro era of a longer duration, from 1892 through 1938, and Brent Hayes Edwards has pushed investigations of New Negro culture far beyond Harlem, noting that "the 'New Negro' movement [was] at the same time a 'new' black internationalism." This internationalism developed in relation to informal cultural exchange among black figures in the United States, France, and the Caribbean. New Negro cultural internationalism also grew out of New Negro work in the United States's official international diplomacy.

1895 is a crucial year. Du Bois, with a PhD from Harvard in hand, embarks on his long career in scholarship and civil rights, Booker T. Washington makes his Atlanta Exposition speech and Frederick Douglass dies after having made some of the bitterest and most despairing speeches on "race." Despite their rhetorical and ideological differences, these three leaders were speaking up during the 1890s, the decade described by African American historian Rayford Logan as the "nadir" of African American history and marked by nearly 2,000 documented lynchings.

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