The New Negro

An anthology of essays, fiction, poetry, drama and visual art, edited by the Howard University philosopher Alain Locke and expanded from a 1925 special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic devoted to Harlem. It became the defining collection of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke's title essay argues that the Great Migration and city life had produced a new Black American self-understanding: no longer a social problem to be managed, but a people expressing itself on its own terms through art. The book gathers poems by Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer, fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, and essays by W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson and Arthur Schomburg, whose piece on recovering the Black past argues that history is a source of self-respect. Locke also writes on spirituals and on African art as an inheritance for modern artists. Portraits by Winold Reiss and designs by Aaron Douglas run through the volume.

It shows a philosopher arguing that culture and art, not only politics, are how a people claims dignity, and it remains the best single entry into the Harlem Renaissance.