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Alain Locke and the New Negro Movement Eugene C. Holmes Alain Locke and the New Negro Movement Eugene C. Holmes Negro American Literature Forum, Vol. 2, No. 3, Protest and Propaganda Literature. (Autumn, 1968), pp. 60-68. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0028-2480%28196823%292%3A3%3C60%3AALATNN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8 Negro American Literature Forum is currently published by St. Louis University. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/slu.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Wed Oct 10 14:40:29 2007 ALAlN LOCKE AND THE NEW NEGRO MOVEMENT of the new Negro middle class. But it warns,by every admission a. representation of a. re-eva.lua.tion of the Negro's pa.st and of the Negro himself by Negro intel- lectuals a,nd artists. For the rise of the New Negro Movement coincided with an ever increasing interest in Negro life and chara.cter in the twenties. American litera,ture wa.s being re- eva.luated and (speech given at 52nd Annual Meeting overhauled a,s a revolt against the gen- of the Association for the Study of teel tra.dition and the acquisitive so- Negro Life and History) ciety of the last decades of the nine- teenth century. THE NEW NEGRO MOVEMENT Charles Johnson chasa.cterized Alain Locke a,s "the Dean of this group of The rise of a genuine New Negro fledgling writers of the new and lively Movement was fostered and encoura.ged by generation of the 1920's ." Johnson one person, Alain Leroy Locke, who be- wrote, "A brilliant analyst trained in came its creative editor and its chron- philosophy, a.nd a,n esthete with a flair icler. It may be true that the term for art a,s well as letters, he gave en- Rena.issa.nce, as Sterling Brown has so coura.gement and guidance to these young perceptively pointed out, is a, misnomer writers as an older practitioner too because of the shortness of the life sure of his cra.ft to be discouraged by span of the Harlem movement. Also, the fa.ilure of full acceptance in the pub- New Negro writers were not centered only lishing media of the period."1 Johnson in Ha.rlem and nuch of the best writing referred to Alain Locke as "an important of the deca.de was not always about Har- derof history" of a "dramatic period lem, for most of the writers were not in our na.tiona1 history." Locke had Haslemites. Yet Harlem was the "show this to sa,y about these young writers window," the cashier's till, though it being launched on their careers: "They is no more "'Negro America" tha.n New York sense within their group a spiritual is America,. The New Negro had ternpora,l wea,lth which if they can properly ex- roots in the pa.st and spatial roots pound, will be ample for a new judgment elsewhere in America and the term has and re-appraisal of the race." This, va,lidity only when considered to be a then, is only a part of the backdrop of continuing tradition. what has been ca,lled the Negro Renais- It may be argued thak the so-called Negro Renaissance held the seeds of de- l~he---New Negro: Thirty --Years After- feat for a, number of reasons, among them ward, The Howa.rd University Press, 1955, being the genera,l a,nti-intellectualism 34. sance. Wha.t Charles Johnson referred he had gone to teach in 1912, Locke had to as "tha,t sudden and a,ltogether phe- been working in his way, in concert with nomena,l outburst of emotional expression many friends, to help lay to rest the unma.tched by any comparable period in mawkish and moribund dialect school of American or Negro American history." poetry. William Stanley Braithwa,ite, No one, not even the older Du Bois, Lockets friend and mentor while he was could have been better equipped to have a,t Hasva,rd; William Monroe Trotter, the been the a.rchitect of the New Negro editor; W. E, B. Du Bois, a,ll helped in Movement and ma.ker of history. Phila- hastening the demise of Negro dialect delphia,, Locke's birthplace, was the poetry. Friendly critics such a,s Louis one city where one could speak of a Untermeyer aLso helped by labeling the culture. Negro a,rtists were encouraged tra.ditiona1 dia,lect as "an affecta,tion and Negro litera,ry, musical a,nd painting to plea.se a white audience .'I And, along groups were encouraged. Young Locke wa,s with James Weldon Johnson, who ha.d awase of this personally and a1way.s kept genuine poetic talent, this critics' these artists in mind a,s reminders of coterie saw tha,t dialect poetry ha.d the awakening of Negro art in America.. neither the wit nor the beauty of folk The literary movement ha,d many of its speech, but was only a continuation of origins in Phikdelphia, but, beca,use the stock stereotypes about gentility, of socia.1, economic and politica.1 rea,- humility and buffoonery, and an eva,sion sons, it flowered in New York. For a, of all of the realities of Negro life. racial dilenzma, in Negro art, a racia,l One co~ntera~ction,however, to this solution was necessa,ry. This came in dialect poetry wa,s a conscious reverting the mid-twenties from the inspira.tion to Romanticism and neo-Romanticism which of the New Negro Movement with its cru- reflected a middle-class recognition of sa,de of folk expression in all of the Europeanized esthetic values. In some arts, the drama., pa,inting, sculpture, ways, this was a result of the rejection music and the rediscovery of the folk of the minstrel-buffoon stereotype. In origins of the Negro' s African herita,ge. addition, a,s the middle class Negro be- The ra,cia.l dile-mma. was a. distinct came better educated, there was a,n increase carryover from the same dile-mma en- in his desire to sha,re in the legacy of countered by the Negro writers of the genera,l culture, to participate in it, late nineteenth century. In most of even though in a lesser fashion. As these writers, there wa.s to be found the Sterling Brown put it, in too many in- same tendentious, pedestrian and imita,- stances "these poets were more concerned tive style a,s observed in many of the with making copies of the 'beauty' tha,t pa,inters. There wa,s the dialect poetry was the stock-in-trade of a languishing of Dunbar and his la,ter English poems tradition." These imitators were, for in which he wa,s the exponent of the the most part, only too anxious to a.void romantic tendencies which were to be de- any mention of a Negro tradition or to cried by the next genera.tion of Negro look into their own experiences as Ne- poets. There were the propaganda novels groes. The result, in their poetry, of Frances Ha,rper, Martin Delaney, Fra,nk was escapist, without vitality or under- Webb and William Wells Brown. The novels standing. of Charles Chesnutt were outstanding for Along with this counteraction there their genre, style and impact. The developed in the same period, the move- politica,l essa,ys were all to be merged ment which a,ssisted in the Negro writer's with and channelized into that renascence spiritual ema.ncipation. As Locke him- which came to be know as the New Negro self put it in his last published account Movement. (1952) of the movement: "For from 1912 on, there was brewing the movement that Locke's Early Years in 1925, explicitly became the so-ca,lled Renaissance of the New Negro. The move- As a burgeoning critic and student ment was not so much in itself a, triumph of Negro life in Philadelphia, in Boston of realism, although it had its share of and New York, act Howard University where realists, but a deliberate cessation by Negro authors of their attempts pr ima,ri ly Although the younger Locke hard not to influence majority opinion. By then, always seen eye to eye with the older Negro artists had outgrown the handicaps Du Bois on every issue concerning the of allowing didactic emphasis and prop- Negro's struggle for artistic emancipa,- agandist motives to choke their sense tion, he ha.d aslwa,ys a,dmired "The Souls of artistry.
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