Alain Locke: “Enter the New Negro”

Glossary

• argosies fleets of merchant ships
• Armadas fleets of naval ships
• changeling a child secretly exchanged for another in infancy
• chrysalis the pupa of a butterfly enclosed in a cocoon
• Garveyism a reference to the views of Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
• “How would you have us …” from James Weldon Johnson's poem “To America”
• idols of the tribe a figure of speech, coined by Sir Francis Bacon, referring to deceptive beliefs
• “Mine is the future …” from Claude McKay's poem “To the Intrenched Classes”
• norns goddesses in Norse mythology that preside over human destiny
• “O Southland, dear Southland! …” from James Weldon Johnson's poem “O Southland”
• Sambo a commonly used racial slur in the nineteenth century
• Uncle Tom a character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; often used disparagingly to refer to a Black person who submits to whites
• “We have tomorrow …” from the poem “Youth” by Langston Hughes
• Wesleyan a reference to John Wesley, the eighteenth-century founder of the Methodist denomination
• Zionism a reference to the movement among Jews to create a homeland in Palestine