The New Negro in the Old South

Gabriel A. Briggs

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813574806
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Standard narratives of early twentieth-century African American history credit the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern metropolises for the emergence of the New Negro, an educated, upwardly mobile sophisticate very different from his forebears. Yet this conventional history overlooks the cultural accomplishments of an earlier generation, in the black communities that flourished within southern cities immediately after Reconstruction.  
 
In this groundbreaking historical study, Gabriel A. Briggs makes the compelling case that the New Negro first emerged long before the Great Migration to the North. The New Negro in the Old South reconstructs the vibrant black community that developed in Nashville after the Civil War, demonstrating how it played a pivotal role in shaping the economic, intellectual, social, and political lives of African Americans in subsequent decades. Drawing from extensive archival research, Briggs investigates what made Nashville so unique and reveals how it served as a formative environment for major black intellectuals like Sutton Griggs and W.E.B. Du Bois.
 
The New Negro in the Old South makes the past come alive as it vividly recounts little-remembered episodes in black history, from the migration of Colored Infantry veterans in the late 1860s to the Fisk University protests of 1925. Along the way, it gives readers a new appreciation for the sophistication, determination, and bravery of African Americans in the decades between the Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance. 

1. The New Negro Genealogy

The generation of negroes which have grown up since the war have lost in large measure the traditional and wholesome awe of the white race which kept the negroes in subjection.

—Memphis Commercial Appeal, May 17, 1892

As early as 1745 an anonymous eighteenth-century writer contributing to the London Magazine noted that the phrase New Negro was used by black slaves in America to describe slaves who were newly arrived from Africa.1 Although this reference is an isolated one, it highlights an early transformation in African American identity. Not yet representative of “an entity or group of entities,” this New Negro label exists “as a coded system of signs, complete with masks and mythology.”2 Though the label appears to be used only among blacks, its usage has a decidedly somber if not ironic tone. While maintaining their collective identity as Negroes, what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a dark-skinned group of peoples originally native to Africa south of the Sahara,” these relocated persons acknowledge that their arrival in America represents a shift in the direction of their lives and in their identity.3 This new Negro consciousness acknowledges distance from a previous self and from a former place of residence. The unholy waters of the Atlantic have washed away the old lives of these persons and their familiar points of reference. Within this space of dislocation newly arrived blacks were forced to assume a new identity and a new way of life signified by an absence of self as well as by what Orlando Patterson has called “social death.”4 Although usage of the term New Negro will not become popular until the late nineteenth century, this early reference suggests that since their arrival in America in 1619, blacks have been forced consistently to redefine their identity and to establish their place in American society.

In 1988 Henry Louis Gates Jr. published a seminal essay, “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” identifying African American discourse between 1895 and 1925 as the “crux of the period of Black intellectual reconstruction” and the “era of the myth of the New Negro.”5 This important work was the first to draw attention to the New Negro as a late nineteenth-century rather than solely a twentieth-century figure. Gates expanded his examination of the New Negro to encompass the years 1892–1938 in a 2007 anthology that he coedited with Gene Andrew Jarrett, and the period 1892–95 remains the earliest starting point to date for studies of the New Negro.6 As a whole, the enormous body of scholarship on the topic over the past twenty years suggests that the first era of New Negro development dates from the 1890s until 1910, with the publication of the Crisis.7 Following the publication of this periodical, a more radical version of the New Negro emerged during the years 1910–24. While this radical figure does not disappear after 1924, a more conservative, cultural interpretation takes center stage and becomes the focal point of intellectual and political conversations well into the 1930s. While the New Negro associated with Harlem and the 1920s has achieved the greatest notoriety, in sociological practice it has exhibited a discernible tension “between strictly political concerns and strictly artistic concerns” since its inception.8

A number of works provide a window on the earliest political function of a new racial representation, one that sought to replace white-based notions of black inferiority with a racial consciousness that would help reshape the way African Americans perceived themselves. The activist and reformer Anna Julia Cooper saw the literary marketplace as one of the places where African Americans needed to establish their voices. In her essay “One Phase of American Literature” (1892), Cooper critiqued white renditions of African American characters in literature, noting, “The devil is always painted black—by white painters.” Challenging the work of white writers from William Dean Howells to Joel Chandler Harris, Cooper claimed that no white writer had created an “authentic portrait” of African Americans that reflected “a free American citizen . . . divinely struggling and aspiring yet tragically warped and distorted by the adverse winds of circumstance.” Cooper urged African Americans to believe in themselves and to use a literary forum to “paint what is true with the calm spirit of those who know their cause is right and who believe there is a God who judgeth nations” rather than leave their image in the hands and imagination of whites.9

Many of Cooper’s contemporaries shared her belief in blending art and politics to establish positive representations of African Americans in literature. Among the numerous examples of African American novelists and essayists of the period who followed Cooper’s lead were Frances E. W. Harper, whose novel Iola Leroy (1892) claimed that “out of the race must come its own defenders. With them the pen must be mightier than the sword,” and Victoria Earle Matthews’s “The Value of Race Literature” (1895), which encouraged the “race-loving Negro artist to compete with his elder brother in art and succeed where the other has failed.”10

In the Reverend W. E. C. Wright’s “The New Negro” (1894), education becomes a defining feature of post-Reconstruction African American identity, so that formal training makes New Negroes “at once examples and apostles of a new era.” Wright argued that, upon graduation from college, educated African Americans should relocate across the country, particularly within the former slave states of the South, where they should quickly take their place “among the foremost leaders of every upward movement” and stand as “New Negro” representatives from an “era of freedom” rather than as remnants of an “Old Negro . . . slave civilization.”11 Wright’s foundational perspective reverberates through the writing of numerous African American intellectuals, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, whose own “talented tenth” would become “leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people” upon graduation from colleges and universities.12 Wright hoped, however, to educate all African Americans regardless of class or gender, so that in the near future “the Negro shall be so completely made new as to become wholly an element of strength and hope in the nation’s life.”13

Decades before Alain Locke announced the spiritual and psychological transformation that ushered in the New Negro of the 1920s, J. W. E. Bowen’s 1895 “An Appeal to the King” claimed that a renewed “consciousness” or “racial personality under the blaze of a new civilization” would enable the New Negro of the late nineteenth century to achieve his social and political aims. While giving a speech before thousands attending Negro Day at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, Bowen asked the crowd to observe the statue standing at the entrance of the Negro building. What they saw was a large, muscular black man looking carefully at the broken manacles that hung from his wrists. Bowen then exclaimed, “This is the new Negro. . . . He is thinking. And by the power of thought, he will think off those chains and have both hands free to help . . . build this country and make a grand destiny of himself.”14 Building on the significant achievements of African Americans since slavery, the New Negro was also poised to become an integral part of American progress over the next century.

It is no small coincidence that Booker T. Washington’s A New Negro for a New Century reached American audiences in 1900. Washington deemed the title of his mammoth text, 428 pages long and composed of eighteen chapters, appropriate because “the negro of today is in every phase of life far advanced over the Negro of thirty years ago.”15 To explore the many accomplishments of African Americans since slavery, Washington included historical writings by and about accomplished African Americans, catalogued their valiant participation in America’s wars since the Revolution, and included essays that revealed the progressive attitude of African American culture at large. Fannie Barrier Williams’s “The Club Movement among Colored Women of America” (1900) is exemplary of the final category of writings included by Washington. Carefully recording the advancements of an organized and sustained women’s club movement among African American women, Williams declared that they could no longer be viewed as an “unsocialized, unclassed, and unrecognized” portion of American society. Williams encouraged African American women to join the cause of social reform as a way to escape the confinement of domestic roles and inferiority of second-class citizenship and “to feel that [they] are a unit in the womanhood of a great nation and a great civilization.”16 Williams’s coupling of self-respect and respect for one’s race, as well as her ability to see the role of African Americans in a national framework, remained defining features of the New Negro and of Washington’s thought-provoking work.

Contrary to the effort of so many African American writers who portrayed the inner characteristics of the New Negro, John Henry Adams Jr. provided an alternate perspective for black and white American audiences in his “Rough Sketches: A Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman” (1904) and “Rough Sketches: The New Negro Man” (1904). Adams believed that his work could preserve and honor “race identity and distinction,” while also challenging the “Southern social monster which argues the inferiority of the Negro to the white folk.” While the superior beauty of white women was, in general, unquestioned in Adams’s eyes, few whites were willing to see the merits of the African American woman, whom he claimed must be judged “upon the scales that were employed in the weighing of queens and noble-men’s wives and daughters.”17

Challenging the pseudo-science that declared the physical inferiority of African American men for generations, Adams recast the image as “tall, erect, commanding, with a face as strong and expressive as Angelo’s Moses and yet every whit as pleasing and handsome as Reubens’s [sic] favorite model. There is that penetrative eye about which Charles Lamb wrote with such deep admiration, that broad forehead and firm chin. . . . Such is the new Negro man.” Yet despite the romantic overtones of Adams’s portrayals, there is also an undercurrent of more radical New Negro features, of one who seeks “perpetuation of his own social, political, and material advancement” and girds himself to a “fight for manhood—not man. Man dies. Manhood lives forever.”18 With these words Adams revealed the intensified political responses that become the hallmark of the New Negro of the following decade.

Among the notable examples from the second phase of what has been called “New Negro criticism” is a collection of essays from William Pickens.19 In an effort to challenge a white American majority that has “distorted and buried in contempt” a socially and intellectually relevant African American history, Pickens published The New Negro in 1916.20 Political in its purpose, the text questioned the denial of full citizenship rights for African Americans in the face of constitutional protection and of their own tremendous material and intellectual advancements in previous decades—despite a history of enslavement and subsequent repression at the hands of whites, both northern and southern. Pickens also suggested that whites, not African Americans, were responsible for the evolution of the New Negro.

According to Pickens, a number of decisive factors molded the New Negro out of the Old. Most prominent among these was legal recognition, which altered African Americans’ status from chattel to citizen through constitutional amendments thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen. Yet the inability of many whites to accept the transformation from that of “usable article” to man resulted in an atmosphere of intolerance and opposition. When whites no longer recognized the patient, unquestioning, and devoted Old Negro, they began to feel disconnected from him and, according to Pickens, withdrew from acquaintance with African Americans. This distance alienated whites from African Americans, lessening the ability of whites to sympathize with the condition or struggles of African Americans in society. And though it was whites who were responsible for marginalizing African Americans within society, they viewed any evidence of ambition and independence among African Americans or any attempt to express dissatisfaction with their lowered social status as a threat. Within this void the New Negro became an object of distrust and suspicion, one recast by whites as a new racial stereotype synonymous with the thief, the loafer, or the black brute. Pickens challenged the dominant culture and its ideology of supremacy by claiming that the New Negro was “resolved to fight, and live or die, on the side of God and the eternal Verities” in his efforts to obtain equal protection under the laws of the United States. Pickens saw his work as the first in a line of texts over the next fifty years responsible for emphasizing the role of the New Negro in America and for chronicling what he viewed as a cultural “renaissance of the Negro race.”21

In many ways Pickens’s writing was representative of the wartime and postwar New Negro that inserted his voice into intellectual and cultural conversations on a range of issues. This era witnessed the rise of numerous politically charged periodicals, including Crisis (1910), Messenger (1917), Negro World (1918), Crusader (1918), Liberator (1919), Opportunity (1923), and Worker’s Monthly (1924), that joined established black newspapers to shape and further define the New Negro.22 It is no accident that many of these publications emerged following the series of explosive race riots that raged in more than twenty locations across the country between April and October 1919.23 According to Barbara Foley, during what she calls the “revolutionary crucible of 1919,” the term New Negro “signified a fighter against both racism and capitalism; to be a political moderate did not preclude endorsement of at least some aspects of a class analysis of racism or sympathy with at least some goals of the Bolshevik Revolution.”24 In a letter written one month after Chicago’s riot to Victor F. Lawson, editor and publisher of the Chicago Daily News, a World War I veteran named Stanley B. Norvell declared that the Old Negro so readily identified with a servile, Uncle Tom plantation caricature was “as extinct as the great auk, the dodo bird, old Dobbin and the chaise, and the man who refused to shave until William Jennings Bryan was elected.” Citing the experience and perspective garnered by an estimated 200,000 Negro troops who served overseas during the war, Norvell declared, “Today we have with us a new Negro [who] has become tired of equal rights. He wants the same rights. He is tired of equal accommodations. He wants the same accommodations. He is tired of equal opportunity. He wants the same opportunity.”25 Norvell expressed the dismay of many African American soldiers who fought and saw their comrades die in defense of the civil and political liberties prov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The New Negro Genealogy
• 2. Nashville: A Southern Black Metropolis
• 3. Soul Searching: W. E. B. Du Bois in the “South of Slavery”
• 4. “Mightier than the Sword”: The New Negro Novels of Sutton E. Griggs
• 5. “Tried by Fire”: The African American Boycott of Jim Crow Streetcars in Nashville, 1905–1907
• 6. “Before I’d Be a Slave”: The Fisk University Protests, 1924–1925
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index