Alain Locke: “Enter the New Negro”

Context

Two major developments in African American history formed the backdrop for Locke’s essay. One was the Great Migration, the term given to the movement of African Americans to northern and midwestern cities during the 1910s and 1920s, in part to escape the entrenched racism in the South, in part to seek employment in burgeoning industrial cities. During the Civil War, only about 8 percent of Blacks lived in the North or Midwest. In 1900 still only about 10 percent lived in states that were not formerly slave states. That would change dramatically in the first decades of the new century. From 1910 to 1920, for example, the Black population of Chicago grew from 44,000 to 110,000. In 1914 the Black population of New York City was 50,000; in 1930 it was 165,000. In 1910 the Black population of Detroit was 6,000; by 1929 the figure was 120,000. Cleveland, Boston, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and other major cities experienced similarly rapid Black population growth; so did smaller cities such as Dayton and Toledo in Ohio; Omaha, Nebraska; and Flint, Michigan. This growth was part of a national urbanizing trend and a corresponding decline in the rural population. In 1910 the majority of Americans lived in rural areas, defined at the time as communities with populations under 2,500. Thus, 49.9 million people lived in rural areas, while 42 million lived in urban areas; by 1920 the balance had shifted, with 54.1 million living in urban areas and 51.5 million living in rural areas. This trend continued throughout the 1920s so that by 1930, 68.9 million lived in urban areas to just 53.8 million in rural areas.

Typifying this urbanization was a city like Tulsa, Oklahoma. When Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1907, the city’s population was a mere 7,000; by 1920 the city’s population had increased more than tenfold, to 72,000. Included in that population were 11,000 African Americans, who were enjoying some measure of prosperity because of the state’s oil boom. The Black section of Tulsa, called the Greenwood district, was so prosperous that the Black leader Booker T. Washington called its commercial district, with its restaurants, groceries, stores, professional offices, newspapers, churches, hospitals, and a library, the “Negro Wall Street.”

Oil contributed to Tulsa’s growth, but a number of other factors conspired to shift the nation’s Black population northward and westward. In the late 1910s, for example, a boll weevil infestation devastated southern cotton crops, forcing many Black sharecroppers off their land. Then the outbreak of World War I opened large numbers of jobs in northern defense industry plants. The war, plus the Immigration Act of 1924, curtailed the flow of immigrants to the United States, increasing the demand for labor in northern factories. In 1927 major flooding in Mississippi again forced many southern Blacks off their land. Often, Black families heading north simply purchased the cheapest available train ticket, explaining why, for example, many Mississippians ended up in Chicago. In all, from 1910 to 1930 about 4.1 million African Americans left the South for opportunities in the North and Midwest.

The result of the Great Migration was the urban concentration of African Americans who had previously lived in relative isolation from one another in rural areas. Many who migrated were by definition ambitious and energetic, looking for a better life for themselves and their families. In their new communities, they formed a critical mass of culture in the broadest sense of the term: art, literature, music, church life, and dance as well as political and social awareness. Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, along with new periodicals such as Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, were giving voice to the aspirations of African Americans. The new communities provided an audience for African American achievement. The result was the emergence of a Black artistic and intellectual class under the leadership not only of Locke but also of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Walter White. In addition to a flowering of poetry and fiction—by such writers as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Arna Bontemps, and numerous others—more popular forms of Black culture flourished, led by a roster of Black jazz and blues singers and musicians whose names are still recognized today: Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Eubie Blake, Fats Waller, Josephine Baker, Billy Strayhorn, Lena Horne, and dozens more. Much of this popular culture was centered in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, the site of such cultural magnets as the Apollo Theater, the Savoy Ballroom, and the Cotton Club. Black Swan Records recorded the work of numerous Black musicians.

Ironically, Harlem, with its stately homes and facilities such as the Polo Grounds (home of the New York Giants) and an opera house, had been a bedroom community for Manhattan’s white upper class in the nineteenth century. It became a largely Black community after a financial crash caused real estate values in Harlem to plummet and Philip Payton, Jr., the owner of the Afro-American Realty Company, opened the district to Black tenants. Some white property barons resisted this demographic shift by buying up apartment buildings and evicting Black tenants; Payton and others retaliated by buying up buildings of their own and evicting whites.

The Harlem Renaissance was by no means a unified movement with a manifesto and shared aims. On the one hand, the Harlem Renaissance encompassed those who were drawn to popular forms of entertainment and culture and who sought patrons exclusively among the emerging Black middle class. More conservative elements, though, wanted to see greater integration of Black culture with mainstream white culture and sought white patrons for their work; one of the key events in the Harlem Renaissance was a 1924 gathering hosted by the journal Opportunity that included a number of white publishers who were taking an interest in Black literature and wanted to publish it. The conservative element feared that a great deal of Black popular literature and entertainment played into stereotypes about African Americans. They were also troubled by the militancy of many Blacks, especially those who espoused the doctrines of Socialism and Communism. This tension between the Black intelligentsia and those who preferred “Stompin’ at the Savoy” (the name of a 1930s big-band hit song), rather than undermining the movement, contributed to its vitality, for the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance reached throughout the entire Black community, from the Harvard-trained professional to the factory worker—though that spirit would be dampened by the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.

Such a movement demanded intellectual underpinnings. These underpinnings were provided by such writers as Du Bois, the author of the 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, and, later, Alain Locke. “Enter the New Negro,” along with The New Negro, was a key document in the flowering of Black culture during the 1920s. The essay was published in the same year as other important events affecting African Americans. That year, A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first largely African American labor union; Cullen, one of the finest Black poets in this era, published his first collection, Color; and the singer and dancer Josephine Baker performed overseas in La revue nègre, expanding the audience for African American artists to France, where she was wildly popular.