Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

The Birth of the New Negro

Chapter 4 explores how the idea of the New Negro challenged anti-Black images circulating in American society. New Negroes were young, educated, culturally sophisticated, and middle-class. Gates traces the roots of the concept to the late 19th century, arguing that it developed in response to the collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of racist Redemption policies. Segregation became law during Jim Crow. Social customs reinforced these laws, as did vigilantism. By 1900, the gains represented by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments had almost entirely disappeared. Campaigns of violence and intimidation drastically reduced the number of Black voters. The period also saw the rise of sharecropping and convict leasing, new forms of enslavement that indebted Black tenants to white landowners and forced Black people to work as punishment for their crimes. Black people responded by forming their own social and cultural institutions. A class of Black intellectuals, artists, and activists emerged, deepening existing class divisions in the Black community.

“The Politics of Respectability”

Drawing on Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s idea of “the politics of respectability,” Gates argues that New Negros tried to differentiate themselves from Old Negroes by adopting white Victorian social and moral values. Black people began dressing like middle-class white people, rejected Black dialect in favor of standard English, and crafted a public image designed to refute racist stereotypes, emphasizing conservative morality and sexual restraint. New Negroes sought to dismantle racist stereotypes, but they could not turn a blind eye to the social ills affecting the Black community, notably, gambling, criminality, and poverty. Black leaders urged members of their community to address these problems and to become New Negroes.

Every Picture Tells a Story: Du Bois’s Exhibit of American Negroes

This section focuses on W. E. B. Du Bois’s Exhibit of American Negroes at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Trained in sociology, Du Bois turned to visual media to combat negative stereotypes of Black people, something he had previously done in his writings. Du Bois was a quintessential New Negro—educated, cultured, and articulate. His exhibit, funded by President William McKinley after lobbying by Black leaders, comprised 363 photographs documenting Black achievement since the end of enslavement. Included were portraits of Black men and women with different skin tones and facial structures. Sitters with aquiline noses were shown in profile to combat racial stereotypes. Students and professionals were among the sitters. Most subjects were photographed indoors to combat the stereotype of the Black agricultural laborer. The exhibit presented the New Negro to a global audience, replacing the old idea that had been projected onto Black people.

The Look of Respectability

This section centers on the role of artists as leaders of racial progress. In 1903, Du Bois unveiled his idea of the Talented Tenth, which referred to the best and brightest Black leaders. Du Bois included poets and novelists among this group. The Talented Tenth, which helped formulate and propagate new ideas of racial assertiveness, spurred Du Bois to organize his Exhibit of American Negroes. In 1904, the art illustrator John Henry Adams Jr. published two articles about the nature of New Negro women in Voice of the Negro, which included sketches similar to Du Bois’s exhibit. Adams focused on the personal appearance of Black people to comment on their character. In contrast to Sambo art and racial science, which ridiculed and derided Black bodies, Adams presented them in positive ways. As Gates observes, the efforts of Du Bois and Adams underscore the role of Black agency in fighting anti-Black racism and celebrating the progress of the New Negro.

“Brutal Drawing of the Color Line”

This section addresses the divisions between Old and New Negroes. Some educated Black people expressed a greater kinship with white people than with uneducated Black people. Similarly, many New Negroes embraced “the politics of respectability” to separate themselves from Old Negroes. Anti-Black racism, however, forced the Black elite to stop conceiving of itself as a separate class. Anti-Black racism was class-blind, which promoted Black unity.

Enter the Newer New Negroes

This section focuses on successive New Negro movements between 1894 and 1925. These movements, which emerged against the backdrop of the Great Migration of Black southerners to the industrial centers of the North, were as much about politics as they were about economics and class. Many educated Black people believed that Reconstruction had been suspended and that it was up to them to revive it by fighting for political rights. A militant strain in New Negro political thought emerged. This new, more radical New Negro not only embraced socialism and Black nationalism, but also criticized the older generation of ineffectual leadership. The eruption of racial violence, including attacks on Black people in Chicago, Washington, DC, and Elaine, Arkansas, during the Red Summer of 1919, fueled Black militancy, as did the lynching of Black veterans by white mobs who did not want to compete for the same jobs. The newer New Negroes—the militant Black socialists—aimed to achieve political, economic, and social equality by fighting oppressors with weapons. These newer New Negroes differed from Du Bois’s Talented Tenth, who fought Jim Crow through organized protests, campaigned to make lynching a federal offense, and sought to combat negative stereotypes through art and literature. Non-militant and militant New Negroes coexisted in the 1920s and 1930s.

A New Race Literature

This section traces the origins of the Harlem Renaissance (originally called the New Negro Movement), a period during which Black art and literature flourished and became central to the quest for civil rights. Gates begins with a discussion of Victoria Earle Matthews, a Black journalist who published an essay titled “The Value of Race Literature” in 1895. In this essay Matthews highlighted the importance of literature in the struggle for Black social and political rights. Matthews was not alone in using Black art and literature to fight for civil rights—both Douglass and Du Bois used photography to combat racist depictions of Black people. Black literature flourished five years after Matthews published her essay, as seen in the poetry of Du Bois and Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the novels of Charles W. Chesnutt. Gates describes Matthews’s essay as a literary call to arms, a clear pronouncement about the role of literature in advancing civil rights. James Weldon Johnson repeated the call in 1922 with his Book of American Negro Poetry, a manifesto widely held to have sparked the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance: Let the Negro Speak for Himself

The section focuses on the Harlem Renaissance, starting with a discussion of Alain Locke, the movement’s main architect and the first Black Rhodes Scholar. Locke’s The New Negro, an illustrated anthology published in 1925, showcased a who’s who of Black artists, writers, and scholars. In his foreword, Locke described how Black people had internalized white people’s opinions about the “Negro Problem.” Locke called on younger generations to do away with the cautious moralism of the past, urging them to “stop speaking for the Negro” and instead “speak as Negroes” (223). In short, Locke wanted Black writers not to act as mediators between Black people and white readers, but to be speakers “unto themselves and for themselves” (223). Locke also urged Black artists to look to their own past for inspiration, praising Pablo Picasso for finding inspiration in African tribal masks. The New Negroes of the Harlem Renaissance sought to define a new class of Black people in response to the accommodationist tactics of their predecessors. The movement remains a potent symbol of the rich and enduring culture Black people created, despite virulent and often violent anti-Black racism.

Reframing Race: Enter the New Negro

This section consists of images of the New Negro. Among them are Du Bois’s self-portraits and portraits of New Negroes from Du Bois’s exhibit for the World Exposition in Paris.