New Negro Movement — Glossary

The early twentieth-century assertion of Black self-definition, pride, and political militancy that Alain Locke named and anthologized in 1925.

The “New Negro” was an idea before it was a movement. The phrase circulated at the turn of the century — Booker T. Washington, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Norman B. Wood used it for the title of A New Negro for a New Century (Chicago, 1900), billed as a record of the “upward struggles of the Negro race.” After the First World War it took on a sharper edge. The Great Migration, the wartime race riots, and the disillusionment of returning Black soldiers fed a mood of self-assertion that found expression in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, in the NAACP’s Crisis under W. E. B. Du Bois, and in the National Urban League’s Opportunity, edited by Charles S. Johnson.

The philosopher Alain Locke gave the movement its manifesto. As guest editor of the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” he assembled poems by Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Langston Hughes, an essay by Du Bois, portraits by the German-born artist Winold Reiss, and Arturo Schomburg’s “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” The issue drew such attention that Locke expanded it into The New Negro: An Interpretation, published by Albert and Charles Boni later in 1925.

In his foreword Locke complained that most writing on Black life was “about the Negro rather than of him,” and he set out to let Black Americans speak for themselves. He placed their cultural awakening alongside the nationalist movements of India, China, Egypt, Ireland, Russia, and Mexico. The New Negro ideal — race pride, cultural self-definition, and refusal of deference — became the animating spirit of the Harlem Renaissance.

Sources

Alain Locke, “Foreword to The New Negro, An Interpretation” (1925). Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University. Link
New York Public Library, “A Look at Arturo Schomburg’s Essay, ‘The Negro Digs Up His Past,’ 100 Years Later” (2025). Link
New York Public Library Digital Collections, Survey Graphic, “Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro” (March 1925). Link
Booker T. Washington, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Norman B. Wood, A New Negro for a New Century (Chicago: American Publishing House, 1900). Internet Archive. Link

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MLA: “New Negro Movement.” Black-History.com, 30 Sept. 2026, https://black-history.com/glossary/new-negro-movement/.
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