“With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pressure there may be of conditions from without. The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing happens spiritually in the life-attitudes and self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education and his new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise and greater certainty of knowing what it is all about. From this comes the promise and warrant of a new leadership.”
—So wrote Alain LeRoy Locke in his essay “The New Negro,” which appeared in The New Negro: An Interpretation, published a century ago. Locke—a Phi Beta Kappa inductee at Harvard and the first Black student to be named a Rhodes Scholar—taught philosophy at Howard University for many years. In addition to the essays he contributed, The New Negro included work by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and other eminent writers and thinkers. It is considered to be a seminal text of the Harlem Renaissance.
