people” (378). DuBois, who also advanced a theory
of the “Talented Tenth,” members of the black ar-
istocracy who would, through their leadership and
vision, move the black race and masses further up
the ladder of social progress, had referred to “The
New Negro” in an essay he submitted to Century
Magazine before the turn of the 20th century.
More specifically, Rhodes scholar ALAIN LOCKE,
in the lead essay, “The New Negro,” of his spe-
cial Survey Graphics issue on Harlem, which he
also included in his anthology, The NEW NEGRO
(Albert & Charles Boni, 1925), offered a gen-
eral explanation for the emergence of the New
Negro and the accompanying cultural move-
ment, which Locke attributed to black migration
and urbanization, the emergence of Harlem as a
black mecca, a deepening racial pride, a new gen-
eration of determined and self-reliant writers,
and the founding of sociopolitical organizations
such as JAMES WELDON JOHNSON and DuBois’s
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF
COLORED PEOPLE (NAACP) and MARCUS GARVEY’s
black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA). Garvey motivated and mul-
tiplied the membership of his mass movement
with his motto: “Up you mighty race! You can ac-
complish what you will!” Equally important was
black participation in World War I, the founding
of the Association for the Study of Negro Life
and History by historian Carter G. Woodson and
its journal The Journal of Negro Life and History,
and the founding of such publishing organs as
the NAACP’s The CRISIS (edited by DuBois), the
National Urban League’s OPPORTUNITY (edited by
CHARLES JOHNSON), and the UNIA’s The Negro
World (edited by Garvey), all of which published
and promoted (through annual contests) the
work of emerging black writers. Many renais-
sance writers first published in these venues or
won literary contests sponsored by them.
Many of the emerging writers, including
Hughes, Hurston, and Thurman, who stood in the
vanguard of this cultural blossoming, saw it as the
cultural harvest of the spirit of the black masses
rather than merely the progress being made by
black intellectuals, the “thinking Negro,” and so-
ciopolitical leaders, as DuBois and Locke main-
tained and celebrated. Locke, in defining the New
Negro, wrote, almost with uncertainty, that the
objectives of the New Negro’s “inner life are yet in
the process of formation, for the new psychology
at present is more of a consensus of feeling than
of opinion, of attitude rather than of program”
(10). In contrast, Hughes almost chauvinistically
declared in his signature essay, “The Negro Artist
and the Racial Mountain,”Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bel-
lowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues
penetrate the closed ears of the colored near
intellectual until they listen and perhaps un-
derstand. Let Paul Robeson singing “Water
Boy” and Rudolph Fisher writing about the
streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding
the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron
Douglas drawing strange black fantasies cause
the smug Negro Middle class to turn from their
white, respectable, ordinary books and papers
to catch a glimmer of their own beauty. We
younger Negro artists who create now intend
to express our individual dark-skinned selves
without fear or shame. (95)As an alternative to Locke and DuBois, Hughes,
Hurston, Nugent, Douglas, Thurman, and others
published the short-lived FIRE!! (1926), a jour-
nal for the younger generation of writers who
wished to “burn up a lot of the old, dead conven-
tional Negro-white ideas of the past” (Hughes,
233–234).
Significant, too, as Cheryl A. Wall argues in
Women of the Harlem Renaissance (1995), “The
Harlem Renaissance was not a male phenomenon.
A substantial number of literary women played
significant roles” (9). As Wall carefully points out,
this group includes not only the better-known
writers, Hurston, Fauset, and Larsen, but also “a
host of lesser-known poets” (9), MARITA BONNER,
ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON, GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHN-
SON, and Anne Spencer, to name a few, who pub-
lished in extant journals and magazine. Johnson’s
weekend parlor gatherings in Washington, D.C.,
provided a central venue for introduction and ex-
posure for many of the renaissance’s luminaries.230 Harlem Renaissance