Stereotypes From Little Black Sambo to Aunt Jemima and Beyond Art Paintings Gods Hand Painting
The New Negro and the Black Prototype: From Booker T. Washington to Alain Locke
A longer version of this commodity under the title "The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black" appeared in Representations, No. 24, Special Issue: America Reconstructed, 1840-1940 (Autumn, 1988). Reprinted by permission of the author.
In an authentic, if humorous, sense, blacks seem to have felt the need to attempt to "reconstruct" their image to whites probably since that dreadful day in 1619 when the first boatload of us disembarked in Virginia. . . . Almost as soon equally blacks could write, information technology seems, they set out to redefine—against already received racist stereotypes—who and what a blackness person was, and how unlike the racist stereotype the black original indeed really could exist. To counter these racist stereotypes, white and black writers erred on the side of nobility, and posited every bit fictitious black archetypes, from Oroonoko in 1688 to Kunta Kinte in more than recent times. If diverse Western cultures constructed blackness as an absenteeism, then various generations of blackness authors take attempted to reconstruct blackness as a presence. . . . For me, black intellectual reconstruction commenced in the antebellum slave narratives, published mainly between 1831 and 1861, and ended (if indeed it has ended) with the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s. And the trope of reconstruction that I wish to trace is the trope of the New Negro in Afro-American discourse between 1895 and 1925. (See related material on African American history during this menses.)
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The "New Negro," of form, was only a metaphor. . . . [T]he trope itself . . . [combines] . . . a business organization with time, antecedents, and heritage, on the one hand, with a concern for a cleared space, the public confront of the race, on the other. . . . [It asserts a] . . . self-willed beginning [whose] . . . "success" depends fundamentally upon self-negation, a turning away from the "Old Negro" and the labyrinthine memory of black enslavement . . . toward the . . . "New Negro," an irresistible, spontaneously generated black and sufficient self. . . . It is a bold and adventurous deed of language, signifying the will to power, to dare to recreate a race past renaming it, despite the uncertainty of the venture.
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The New Negro and the Quest for Respectability: 1895 to World State of war I
Let us trace the history of the thought of the New Negro from 1895. An editorial in the Cleveland Gazette, celebrating the passing of the New York Civil Rights Law, spoke of "a class of colored people, the 'New Negro,' . . . who have arisen since the state of war, with education, refinement, and coin." In marked contrast with their enslaved or disenfranchised ancestors, these New Negroes demanded that their rights as citizens be vouchsafed by police. Significantly, these New Negroes were to be recognized past their "education, refinement, and money," with holding rights strongly implied as the hallmark of those who may demand their political rights. "Holding," in this sense, is just one of a list of "properties" demanded of this New Negro. "Education" and "refinement"—to speak properly was to be proper—would ensure one's rights, along with the security of property. These terms come to bear, curiously, upon subsequent definitions. J. Westward. E. Bowen, in "An Appeal to the Male monarch" later on that same year, once more defined the New Negro, but here in terms merely of racial "consciousness" and its relation to "civilization": "the consciousness of a racial personality under the blaze of a new civilization." Bowen's "New Negro" leads directly to the [Harlem or New Negro] Renaissance, for it was to a higher place all through literature that both "a racial personality" and "the bonfire of a new culture" would manifest themselves. Bowen's "New Negro" would create a universal racial art.
[The New Negro was also on the listen of Booker T. Washington. In 1900 he set out to define just who and what the New Negro was in] an elaborately constructed compendium of excerpted blackness histories, slave narratives, journalism, biographical sketches, and extended defenses of the combat performances of black soldiers from the American Revolution . . . to the Castilian-American War. [Titled A New Negro for a New Century: An Accurate and Up-to-Appointment Record of the Upward Struggles of the Negro Race, it] conspicuously intended to "turn" the new century's image of the black away from the stereotypes scattered throughout plantation fictions, blackface minstrelsy, vaudeville, racist pseudo-science, and vulgar Social Darwinism. The task was an enormous i, especially since blacks had only the most minimal command over the mass production and dissemination of information, and since black intellectuals seem to have believed that their racist treatment in life just imitated their racist "treatments" in art. Accordingly, to dispense the image of the blackness was, in a sense, to manipulate reality. The Public Negro Self, therefore, was an entity to be crafted.
And craft it Washington and his beau editors attempted to exercise. The whole of A New Negro, some 428 pages and 60 portraits, reads at present every bit a complex, if beefy, sign of both the individual achievements of black men and women as abolitionists, soldiers, and artists, and of the twentieth century's "New Negroes," the "progressive" classes of the race, who were forming numerous self-help institutions, such as "Colored Women's Clubs," cardinal indicators of the race'due south "capacity" for "elevation." . . . "Capacity" designated physical cranial measurements, simply it quickly became the metaphor for the measure of the potential of man intelligence. The following lines from Frances Allen Watkins Harper, quoted in Mrs. Booker T. Washington'south essay on the "Society Motility Among Negro Women" in J. L. Nichols and William H. Crogman's 1920 edition of The New Progress of a Race, point these origins conspicuously:
There is light beyond the darkness,
Joy beyond the present pain;
In that location is hope in God'south cracking justice
And the Negro's rising encephalon.
A New Negro'southward use of the keyword progressive dozens of times relates straight to an idea of progress through perfectibility. Booker T. Washington's New Negro . . . stood . . . caput and shoulders above the ex-slave blackness person, freed now for only 30-5 years. As the introduction postures:
This book has been rightly named A New Negro for a New Century. The negro of today is in every phase of life far advanced over the negro of thirty years ago. In the post-obit pages the progressive life of the Afro-American people has been written in the lite of achievements that will be surprising to people who are ignorant of the enlarging life of these remarkable people.
Of this album's 18 chapters, no less than seven are histories of black involvement in American wars, while six chapters "unmask" slavery. . . . Two chapters treat the "Social club Movement Amid Colored Women," and one charts the educational progress of the race. Booker T. Washington'due south portrait forms the frontispiece of the volume, while Mrs. Washington's portrait concludes the book, thus standing as framing symbols of the idea of progress. Betwixt this handsome pair are portraits of military machine figures . . . creative writers such every bit Paul Laurence Dunbar, T. Thomas Fortune, Charles Chesnutt, and Frederick Douglass; scholars, including . . . ; West. Eastward. B. Du Bois and notable women such equally . . . Mary Church building Terrell . . . all of whom appear to be very "progressive" indeed.
 Charles Due east. Young. |  |  Mary Church Terrell. |
The anthology's apparent militaristic emphasis seems intent upon refuting claims made by Theodore Roosevelt in Scribner's Mag in 1899 of the inherent racial weaknesses that would preclude black officers from commanding effectively, thus making mandatory, in subsequent wars, their control by white officers. Almost the whole of Sgt. Presley Holliday'south rebuttal, printed initially in the New York Age in 1899, appears in A New Negro, along with the histories of black valor in every American war. The tone of these essays is adequately represented past Holliday's claim that black soldiers in the Civil War "turned the tide of state of war against slavery and the Rebellion, in favor of liberty and the Union." To have fought nobly, clearly, was held to exist a legitimate argument for full citizenship rights.
Despite an unprecedented emphasis upon black histories written by black historians, withal, the New Negro'south relation to the past of the Erstwhile Negro is a problematical 1. "Let united states smother all the wrongs nosotros accept endured," urges 1 essayist; "Permit the states forget the past." This aspect of "the past" is non only forgotten in A New Negro, it is buried beneath all of the faintly smiling bourgeois countenances of the New Negroes pending only the new century to escape the recollection of enslavement. Fannie Bulwark Williams's essay on the "Club Motility Among Colored Women" is pertinent evidence here of an urge to displace racial heritage with an ideal of sexual bonding. "To feel that you are something meliorate than a slave, or a descendant of an ex-slave," she writes, "to feel that you lot are a unit in the womanhood of a great nation and a great civilization, is the beginning of self-respect and the respect of your race." Information technology is this straight relationship between the self and the race, between the part and the whole that is the unspoken premise of A New Negro. As much equally transforming a white racist image of the black, then, A New Negro's intention was to restructure the race's epitome of itself. As Williams puts this necessity, "The consciousness of being fully free has not even so come up to the great mass of the colored women in this country," in role because "the emancipation of the mind and spirit of the race could not be accomplished by legislation." This call to "progress" and "respectability," therefore, was meant to marshal the masses of the race into the regiments of the New Negroes who, of grade, would control them. And if "Zip Coon," "Sambo," and "Mammy" were thought to be the stereotyped figments of racist minds, there was merely enough lingering doubt most their capacities for progress for Washington and his cohorts to structure a manifesto directed as much at them equally at sensitive, intelligent, and wealthy whites.
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 Sambo: "A Water-melon Feast." From Edward King's | |
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 "'Mammy' and Her Pet." | |
Fannie Williams, writing . . . in 1902 . . . places the black adult female at the eye of the New Negro'south philosophy of self-respect. "The Negro woman'due south social club of today," she maintains, "represents the New Negro with new powers of cocky-aid." Two years later, John H. Adams, Jr. in a Voice of the Negro essay chosen "A Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman," concurred with Williams's assessment of the fundamental office of the Afro-American adult female in the New Negro move, and even went so far equally to reproduce images of seven ideal New Negro women and so that other women might design themselves subsequently the image. Ane such photograph bears the post-obit caption:
An gentleman of Fine art, a performer on the violin and the piano, a sweet singer, a author mostly given to essays, a lover of good books, and a abode making girl, is Gussie.
[T]wo months later Adams published the male response to his earlier essay. "The New Negro Homo" appeared in the October 1904 number of the Voice of the Negro. Over again, Adams is eager to chart the unpainted features of this New Negro. How does he describe him?
Here is the existent new Negro human. Tall, erect, commanding, with a face as strong and expressive as Angelo's Moses and still every whit equally pleasing and handsome as Reuben'southward 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, and he who finds the real man in the promise of deriving all the benefits to be got by acquaintance and contact does not run upon him by mere risk, just must become over the paths of some kind of biograph, until he gets a reasonable understanding of what it actually costs of human being attempt to be a man and at the same time a Negro.
As he had done in his essay on the New Negro woman, Adams prints seven portraits of the New Negro man, and so that all might be able to recognize him.
What is of importance here is Adams's stress upon the "features" of this "new" Negro, drawing a correlation betwixt the specific characteristics of the individuals depicted and the larger character of the race. Why is this so of import? Precisely considering the features of the race—its collective oral cavity shape and lip size, the shape of its head (which especially concerned phrenologists at the plough of the century), its black skin color, its kinky hair—had been caricatured and stereotyped so severely in popular American art that black intellectuals seemed to feel that zero less than a total facelift and a complete break with the enslaved past could improve the social weather condition of the modernistic black person. While this concern with features would imply a visual or facial priority of concern, it was, rather, the precise structure and resonance of the black vocalization by which the very face of the race would be known and fundamentally reconstructed. Both to contain and to develop this black vocalism, a virtual literary renaissance was called for.
We see this impulse conspicuously in an essay printed in the A.Thou.E. [African Methodist Episcopal] Church Review in 1904. Incredibly, it is entitled "The New Negro Literary Movement," which many take long assumed to be a phrase first introduced into blackness letters in the twenties. Citing the minutes of a literary society meeting of 1892, W. H. A. Moore quotes Anna J. Cooper (writer of A Voice from the South, 1892) as demanding that "we must begin to give the character of beauty and ability to the literary utterance of the race." This urge, Moore continues, finally assumed a form in the writings of Dunbar, Chesnutt, Du Bois, and others, which taken together constitute a literary movement, a motion of New Negro voices that could recreate the received stereotypic figure of the black as Sambo. The metaphor of vocalisation appears in Moore'southward offset sentences:
The New Negro Literary Movement is non the note of a reawakening, it is a halting, stammering vocalization touched with sadness and the pathos of yearning. Different the Celtic revival it is not a stiff influence in the literature of to-mean solar day; neither is it the spirit of an try to recover the song that is lost or the motive of an aspiration to repossess the soul-dear that is dead. Somehow information technology can not be measured by the standard of keen accomplishment; and yet information technology possesses an air of distinction and speaks in the language of promise. It is the culminating expression of a heart growth the near foreign and bonny in American life. To most of us it is as oddly familiar as though it breathed and spoke in the jungle of its forebearers.
In this new Negro voice, Moore concludes, a vocalization epitomized past Du Bois's Souls of Blackness Folk, "Nosotros are going a long way in the direction of reaching a true understanding of the highest precept and purpose of the final democracy."
What a curious phrase, "the final commonwealth"! The final democracy could be realized simply with the registering of the cadences of the black literary voice. This idea has such a long and intricate history in black letters that one could write a volume about it. Suffice it to say here that Westward. H. A. Moore received it from writers such every bit E. Fortune, Jr., who in 1883 published an essay on "The Importance of Literature: Its Influence on the Progress of Nations," and establish these ideas echoed in essays such as a 1905 New York Age editorial entitled "Dearth of Afro-American Writers," in which T. Thomas Fortune argued that "the chapters of a race is largely measured past the achievements of its writers, in whom its natural vigor and perspicuity of intellect, its highest moral revelations and its most frail and cute emotions should reach consummation." These statements are simply two of many more than. A New Negro would signify his presence in the arts, and it was this impulse that lead, of course, to the New Negro Renaissance of the twenties.
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From Politics to Art: The New Negro from 1919 to 1925
[The New Negro], this black and racial cocky, equally nosotros define it hither, does not exist equally an entity or grouping of entities but "only" as a coded arrangement of signs, complete with masks and mythology. At least since its usages after 1895, the name has implied a tension between strictly political concerns and strictly artistic concerns. Alain Locke'south appropriation of the name in 1925 for his literary motility represents a measured co-opting of the term from its adequately radical political connotations, every bit defined in [African American publications similar] the Messenger, the Crusader, the Kansas City Call, and the Chicago Whip, in assuming essays and editorials printed during the post-World War I race riots in which Afro-Americans rather ably defended themselves from fascist mob aggression. Indeed, this tension between definitions is readily gleaned in the drastic divergence between the "Old Crowd Negro-New Crowd Negro" cartoon, printed in the Messenger of 1919, and that drawing of "The New Negro," done by Allan R. Freelon, which serves equally the frontispiece to the 1928 number of the Carolina Magazine, heavily influenced past Alain Locke, that was devoted to the "New Negro" and his writings.
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 The New Negro by Allan R. Freelon. |
Locke's antecedents are virtually certainly the "Old Crowd Negroes." Past 1928, the apparent, radical self-defense of the Messenger's "New Crowd Negroes" has turned in upon itself in Freelon'due south drawing: the two lynched figures in the lower left of the drawing are the ironic echoes of the "New Crowd Negroes." The white mob fleeing the "New Negro'due south" firing guns are besides echoed ironically in the 3 white crosses on the hill, possibly as well ambiguously connotative of Calvary and the Klan, especially in such proximity to the lynched blackness bodies. In Freelon's drawing, the nude and supple black female, in a posture of arrested motion, is silhouetted against what is meant to be a ritual mask of African descent, consummate with cowrie shells. The whole is framed by a transcending rainbow, against the midnight background of the cosmos. In less than ten years, the figure of the "New Negro" has undergone changes of the profoundest sort. The two poles of this obviously drastic transformation, nevertheless, are present in even the earliest uses of the phrase, and its sheer resonating . . . force can be gleaned somewhat from the fact that Alain Locke'southward and others' postwar literatures saw fit to graft, onto its postwar connotations of aggressive self-defense, the mythological and primitivistic defence of the racial self that was the basis of the literary movement which nosotros phone call the New Negro, or Harlem, Renaissance.
We take come up a remarkably long way from Booker T. Washington'due south paradigm of the New Negro at the turn of the century. . . . [T]he militancy of the . . . [postal service World War I] figure of the New Negro was both likewise potent and also problematical to predominate within the black intelligentsia. In 1925, Alain Locke edited a special number of Survey Graphic entitled "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro," which served both to codify and to launch a 2d New Negro literary movement. Only Locke'due south New Negro served fifty-fifty more than this: it transformed the militancy associated with the trope and translated this into an apolitical move of the arts. Locke's New Negro was a poet, and it would be in the sublimity of the fine arts, and non in the political sphere of action or protest poetry, that white America (they thought) would at final embrace the Negro of 1925, a Negro ahistorical, a Negro who was "only like" every other American, a Negro more deserving than the Old Negro considering he had been reconstructed as an entity somehow "new."
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In response to a seemingly rigid and fixed set of racist representations of the black equally the ultimate negated "Other"—as all that white culture feared most its "nether" side—black writers attempted to rewrite the received text of themselves. Blacks, well earlier 1925, were an "already read text," every bit [critic] Barbara Johnson has defined a stereotype. Locke and his followers, by appropriating the trope of the New Negro from the radical black socialists and then supplanting that content with their own, not just sought to rewrite the black term, they also sought to rewrite the (white) texts of themselves. If the New Negroes of the Harlem Renaissances sought to erase their received racist prototype in the Western imagination, they also erased their racial selves, imitating those they least resembled in demonstrating the full intellectual potential of the black mind.
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Despite its stated bounds, the New Negro movement was indeed quite polemical and propagandistic, both within the black community and exterior of information technology. Claiming to be above and beyond protestation and politics, information technology sought nix less than to reconstruct the very idea of who and what a Negro was or could be. Challenge that the isolated, cultured, upper-form part stood for the potential of the larger black whole, information technology sought to imitate forms of Western poetry, "translating," equally it was put, the art of the untutored folk into a "higher," standard English manner of expression, more compatible with the Western tradition. Challenge that information technology had realized an unprecedented level of Negro self-expression, it created a trunk of literature that even the most optimistic among united states of america find wanting when compared to the blues and jazz compositions epitomized by Bessie Smith and the immature Duke Ellington, two brilliant artists who were non frequently invited to the New Negro salons. It was not the literature of this period that realized a profound contribution to art; rather, it was the black creators of the classic blues and jazz whose artistic works, subsidized by the black working class, divers a new era in the history of Western music. . . .
Guiding Student Discussion
Tracing the evolution of the trope of the New Negro from 1895 to 1925 gives teachers the opportunity to do at to the lowest degree two important things: first, to introduce students to the long tradition of African American efforts to recast the blackness image, and second, to explore the modulated political tenor of the Harlem Renaissance.
Equally nosotros have seen, African American intellectuals accept sought to reconstruct the blackness prototype for two reasons: first, to refute racist stereotypes and 2nd, to instruct blacks themselves on what they—the intellectual leaders—took to be the proper way for blacks to advance, individually and collectively, when they institute themselves in new circumstances. In 1895 the new circumstance was freedom; in 1925 it was the escape from the Due south and the assemblage of blacks in the cities of the Northward.
In the classroom you can begin your discussion of the New Negro and the remaking of the black image by considering Booker T. Washington in a new low-cal. Students probably know him chiefly as an educator through his work with the Tuskegee Institute and as an abet for black economic advancement and racial accommodation by virtue of his Atlanta Exposition Accost. Presenting him equally the editor of A New Negro for a New Century introduces him in a different function, that of epitome maker. To prepare your students to see him in this office, ask them to describe the epitome of the black worker he creates in his famous Atlanta address. What stereotype is he combating in that location? Then take your students analyze a choice of portraits from A New Negro. In one case you accept pointed out that they reflect the standard portrait way of the day, ask why it was significant for both blacks and whites that African Americans exist depicted that way at that time. For what audiences were the portraits intended—blackness, white, rural, urban, Northern, Southern? What would they say to dissimilar viewers? What values do the portraits illustrate? What goals were Washington and his young man editors seeking to achieve with the publication of A New Negro?
Washington was non the only African American to utilise visual images to gainsay racist stereotypes in belatedly nineteenth-century America. In 1893 creative person Henry Ossawa Tanner painted The Banjo Histrion. Displayed at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, the same result at which Booker T. Washington delivered his Atlanta Compromise speech, it transforms the stereotype of the banjo-playing Sambo into an image of dignity, antecedents, and heritage. The Banjo Histrion and some examples of its racist antecedents are available in the National Humanities Centre's online anthology "The Making of African American Identity: Vol. II, 1865-1917." (To facilitate discussion about this painting or any visual epitome, you might want to use the analytical method provided by the National Humanities Eye in its online anthologies.) Enquire your students to compare Tanner's approach to combating stereotypes with Washington'southward. Which is more effective? Why? How, if at all, does The Banjo Actor embody the values of Washington'due south New Negro of 1900, of Locke'due south New Negro of 1925?
In 1900, the aforementioned yr in which A New Negro appeared, W. E. B. Du Bois compiled two albums of photographs entitled "Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A." for the American Negro Pavilion at the Paris Exposition. These albums are available "The Making of African America Identity: Vol. 2, 1865-1917." Like A New Negro, the Du Bois albums characteristic many portraits of members of the black elite, but they besides include images of working people and grouping photos plus images of buildings, towns, and landscapes. Select a representative sample of images from Washington and Du Bois, and ask your students to compare and contrast them. What difference, if any, does it make that the Du Bois albums were intended for a foreign audience? How exercise Washington's portraits depict black life in tardily nineteenth century America? How practise the Du Bois albums? Which collection offers the most accurate portrayal? To what extent, if at all, do the Du Bois images capture the spirit of Washington'southward "New Negro" of 1900? How does history figure into each drove? Which collection is more than effective in refuting racist stereotypes? Which makes the ameliorate example for racial progress?
Of grade, the deployment of black-created visual images to combat racist stereotypes connected through the twentieth century, equally is evidenced by the piece of work of African American artists Joe Overstreet and Betye Saar. Both took on the epitome of the mammy, specifically her incarnation as Aunt Jemima. You can innovate your students to their powerfully witty piece of work and compare it profitably to Tanner's The Banjo Player through the National Humanities Center's online anthology "The Making of African American Identity: Vol. III, 1917-1968."
As noted above, in its usage later on 1895, the trope of the New Negro existed inside a continuum defined past the political on one side and the artistic on the other. Immediately after World War I, it gravitated toward the political, merely by 1925 Alain Locke had pulled it in the direction of the artistic. The political-artistic tension exhibited in the evolution of the New Negro trope reflects a larger contend nearly the role of African American literature in full general. Thus exploring the development of the trope allows y'all to introduce this result to your students. In the antebellum era black writing was driven past abolitionist zeal, and in the years after the Ceremonious State of war information technology served what the writer Charles Chesnutt chosen "the high holy purpose" of advancing the recognition and equality of the race. With the appearance of the New Negro Motion of the 1920s critics asserted that black writing should be complimentary to abandon its explicit social and political purposes in favor of more aesthetic goals. This debate was conducted mainly past Due west. Eastward. B. Du Bois, who argued that "All art is propaganda," and Alain Locke, who argued that "propaganda perpetuates the position of grouping inferiority." You will find the pertinent texts with discussion question in "The Making of African American Identity, Vol. III, 1917-1968."
To explore the modulated politics of the New Negro movement of the 1920s, you lot might discuss with your students the Sometime Negro-New Negro cartoons and the Alan Freelon illustration presented in a higher place. How do political concerns enter the Freelon drawing? What does the illustration say nearly political activeness? According to Freelon, what is the proper function of black cocky-expression?
Y'all might also examine protest verse written by Harlem Renaissance writers. "The Making of African American Identity, Vol. III, 1917-1968" offers examples past Claude McKay, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Sterling A. Dark-brown, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. How does the spirit of their poetry compare with the spirit of the Old Negro-New Negro cartoons of 1919? To what extent do their poems ostend or abnegate the exclamation that the New Negro movement of the 1920s sought the acceptance of white America in the sublimity of the fine arts and not in the political sphere of action or protestation poetry?
Source: http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1917beyond/essays/newnegro.htm
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