The New Negro Movement (1919-1936) #BlackExcellence

[cole phelps]

history time coli

From wiki: 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.

Background:
For African-Americans, World War I highlighted the widening gap between U.S. rhetoric regarding "the war to make the world safe for democracy," and the reality of disenfranchised and exploited black farmers in the South or the poor and alienated residents of the northern slums. In France, for example, black soldiers experienced the kind of freedom they had never known in the U.S.

After the war ended, racial tensions began to boil over in the United States. Having experienced freedom and respect in France they had never known at home, African-American soldiers returned to find that discrimination against blacks was just as present as it was before the war. In addition to racially motivated violence, African-Americans were flooding into the North in huge numbers, increasing segregation in the North and the regeneration of the Ku Klux Klan. This contributed to the rising racial tension which resulted in the riots that affected several major cities in the "red summer" of 1919. Many disillusioned African-American veterans became more conscious racially, politically, and socially, and this helped to shape a new spirit of militancy that found expression.

Pics From the red summer riots:

link to the thread
http://www.thecoli.com/threads/the-red-summer-of-1919-the-forgotten-race-war.190896/

 

[cole phelps]

The Harlem renaissance

In 1916-17, Hubert Harrison and Negro league baseball star Matthew Kotleski founded the militant "New Negro Movement," which is also known as Harlem Renaissance . This movement energized Harlem and beyond with its race-conscious and class-conscious demands for political equality, an end to segregation and lynching, as well as calls for armed self-defense when appropriate.

In several essays included in the anthology The New Negro (1925), which grew out of the 1924 special issue of Survey Graphic on Harlem, editor Alain Locke contrasted the "Old Negro" with the "New Negro" by stressing African-American assertiveness and self-confidence during the years following World War I and the Great Migration. Race pride had already been part of literary and political self-expression among African-Americans in the 19th century. However, it found a new purpose and definition in the journalism, fiction, poetry, music, sculpture, and paintings of many figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

No one better articulated the hopes and possibilities associated with the idea and ideal of the "New Negro" than the Harvard-trained philosophy professor Alain Locke, who later described himself as the "midwife" to aspiring young black writers of the 1920s. According to Locke, The New Negro, whose publication by Albert and Charles Boni in December 1925 symbolized the culmination of the first stage of the New Negro Renaissance in literature, was put together "to document the New Negro culturally and socially - to register the transformations of the inner and outer life of the Negro in America that have so significantly taken place in the last few years." Highlighting its national and international scope, Locke compared the New Negro movement with the "nascent movements of folk expression and self determination" that were taking place internationally.

There is no doubt that despite the difficult challenges of race and class in the 1920s, a new spirit of hope and pride marked black activity and expression in all areas. All Harlem Renaissance participants, regardless of their generational or ideological orientation in aesthetics or politics, shared at some level this sense of possibility. The middle-class leadership of NAACP and Urban League were deeply suspicious of the flamboyant and demagogic Marcus Garvey, who in turn saw Du Bois and others as dark-skinned whites. Yet all of them subscribed to some form of Pan-Africanism.

The New Negro movement insisted on self-definition, self-expression, and self-determination, a striving after what Locke called "spiritual emancipation." The many debates during the Harlem Renaissance years regarding art and propaganda, representation and identity, assimilation versus militancy, and parochialism versus globalism, have enriched the perspectives on issues of art, culture, politics, and ideology that have emerged on the African-American scene since the 1930s.

 

[observe]

Ban this cac

He made a thread a few weeks ago about race riots and photos of blacks getting beat up and killed..

 

[cole phelps]

 

[cole phelps]

Ban this cac

He made a thread a few weeks ago about race riots and photos of blacks getting beat up and killed..

Duh I was showing historical race riots some people didn't know about plus im not a cac genius!!!

 

[cole phelps]

 

[Chill]

Appreciate the history lesson.

 

[cole phelps]

Appreciate the history lesson.

thanks more to come.

 

[QuintessentialBM]

About time for another "New Negro" movement........

 

[Jone2three45]

About time for another "New Negro" movement........

It's long overdue.

 

[cole phelps]

It's long overdue.

Its never to late my friend.

 

[cole phelps]

About time for another "New Negro" movement........

how do you think we should get a new movement started?

 

[cole phelps]

Key people

Oscar Devereaux Micheaux (January 2, 1884 – March 25, 1951) was an American author, film director and independent producer of more than 44 films. Although the short-lived Lincoln Motion Picture Company produced some films, he is regarded as the first major African-American feature filmmaker, the most successful African-American filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century[1] and the most prominent producer of race films.[2] He produced both silent films and "talkies" after the industry changed to incorporate speaking actors.

Significant films

Micheaux’s first novel The Conquest was adapted to film and re-titled, The Homesteader.[5] This film, which met with critical and commercial success, was first produced in 1918. It revolves around a man named Jean Baptiste, called the Homesteader, who falls in love with many white women but resists marrying one out of his loyalty to his race - people of ethnic African descent who were classified as black in the society. Baptiste sacrifices love to be a key symbol for his fellow African Americans. He looks for love among his own people and marries an African-American woman. relations between them deteriorate. Eventually, Baptiste is not allowed to see his wife. She kills her father for keeping them apart and commits suicide. Baptiste is accused of the crime, but is ultimately cleared. An old love helps him through his troubles. After he learns that she is a mulatto and thus part African, they marry. This film deals extensively with race relationships.

Micheaux’s second silent film was Within Our Gates, produced in 1920.[5] Although sometimes considered his response to the film Birth of a Nation, Micheaux said that he created it independently as a response to the widespread social instability following World War I. Within Our Gates revolved around the main character, Sylvia Landry, a mixed-race school teacher. In a flashback, Sylvia is shown growing up as the adopted daughter of a sharecropper. When her father confronts their white landlord over money, a fight ensues. The landlord is shot by another white man, but Sylvia's adoptive father is accused and lynched, along with her adoptive mother.

Sylvia is almost raped by the landowner’s brother but discovers that he is her biological father. Micheaux always depicts African Americans as being serious and reaching for higher education. Before the flashback scene, we see that Sylvia travels to Boston seeking funding for her school, which serves black children. They are underserved by the segregated society. On her journey, she is hit by the car of a rich white woman. Learning about Landry's cause, the woman decides to give her school $50,000.

Within the film, Micheaux depicts educated and professional people in black society as light-skinned, representing the elite status of some of the mixed-race people who comprised the majority of African Americans free before the Civil War. Poor people are represented as dark-skinned and with more undiluted African ancestry. Mixed-race people also feature as some of the villains. The film is set within the Jim Crow era. It contrasted the experiences for African Americans who stayed in rural areas and others who had migrated to cities and become urbanized. Micheaux explored the suffering of African Americans in the present day, without explaining how the situation arose in history. Some feared that this film would cause even more unrest within society, while others believed it would open the public’s eyes to the unjust treatment by whites of blacks.[5] Protests against the film continued until the day it was released.[5] Because of its controversial status, the film was banned from some theatres.[5]

Micheaux adapted two works by Charles W. Chesnutt, which he released under their original titles: The Conjure Woman (1926) and The House Behind the Cedars. The latter, which dealt with issues of mixed race and passing, created so much controversy when reviewed by the Film Board of Virginia that he was forced to make cuts to have it shown in the state. He remade this in 1932, releasing it as Veiled Aristocrats. Both versions of the film are believed to have been lost.

 

[Larry Lobster]

Nah, we doing better trying to integrate with the whites

 

[QuintessentialBM]

how do you think we should get a new movement started?

The trillion dollar question.......

Well, there's a slow way and a fast way....... The celebrities(Athletes, Actors, Musicians, ect) collectively have the most money and influence in the black community. As much as most black celebs avoid taking and making political and economic stances, the black community needs them to give back. It would be nice if everyone would, at least, donate their free time and voice towards issues like education, violence/crime and black entrepreneurship. The celebrities have to be the driving force... no one else is going to listen to anyone else but... which is sad....

We need a formal, nationwide black education/crime-violence/business initiative and EVERYONE needs to participate.... Every age group, every class.