The Harlem Renaissance

Closely intertwined with the Harlem Renaissance was the New Negro Movement. The two are often paired hand-in-hand, as they both functioned in a symbiotic relationship, bouncing off of each other to keep the other alive. The New Negro Movement is less tangible than the Harlem Renaissance, and thus more difficult to define. The New Negro Movement is perhaps best described as a militant ideology characterized by overt racial pride. The political decentralization of black men and women forced African-Americans to “invent new strategies” to “pivot around American political structures” and gain a sense of inclusion in the nation’s future (Stewart, 17) Since African-Americans had been continuously denied political citizenship, black intellectuals retaliated by inventing a “cultural citizenship that promised a new kind of American identity defined by culture instead of politics” (Stewart, 17). Alain Locke, a Harvard educated black intellectual, coined the term “New Negro” to reflect this new cultural identity, rooted in concepts of self-determination and racial consciousness. The New Negro was not an individual persona, but an ideological construction concerned with the contributions that African-Americans could make to American society. That being said, the New Negro Movement was the ideological makeup behind the artistic aspect of the Harlem Renaissance: the renewed sense of racial pride and encouragement of cultural self-expression helped catalyze the creation of great Harlem works. Locke and black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois popularized the New Negro idea to redefine racial stereotypes that pervaded America, hoping to achieve an end result of cooperative nationalism between both black and white Americans.

Larsen may have flirted with how the New Negro Movement functioned in action in Passing, using her character Clare Kendry as an intermediary between both races. Irene Redfield is seemingly content with her social position in Harlem’s  black bourgeoisie class, but is soon subject to the realities that exist outside of Harlem when she meets Clare’s racist husband in Chicago. While Harlem was shielded from harsh racism due to its geographical location and its tight community of solidarity, it was naive to think that the New Negro Movement was effective in facilitating cooperation between both races on an international level. Larsen was not unreasonable in her pessimism–segregation occurred for another 40 years, until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

Alain Locke, writer of the essay The New Negro, is credited as the founder of the New Negro Movement