Alain Locke And The Harlem Renaissance

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“The pulse of the Negro World has begun to beat in Harlem,” Dr. Alain LeRoy Locke, Professor of Philosophy at Howard University in the 1900s. The Harlem that Locke speaks of is one in which “art must discover and reveal the beauty which prejudice and caricature have overlaid” on the Negro Spirit. Locke helped to ‘discover and reveal the beauty’ as a writer of the Harlem Renaissance, or The Negro Renaissance as he liked to call it. To confront white prejudice, the Negro Renaissance united all Negros at Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City, with a common theme of activism by creative work and the Negro culture. Due to racism and prejudice, Negros had lost much sense of pride in themselves, but Alain Locke provided Negros with the correct sense …show more content…
After slavery, “New Negro” was a term given to the new generation of African Americans; the generation of African Americans who were subjected to slavery were the “Old Negros.” Locke explains the Old Negro as “a creature of moral debate and historical controversy” one in which to be “argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden” (1925, p. 1). This was the mentality that many Negros had of themselves. Locke counteracted this mentality with the conversion to the New Negro, which helped to fix the mentality behind the Negro spirit, and it was needed after so many years of slavery and oppression. For example, the New Negros had an evident “changed social attitude, ready to accept and recognize the material achievement” (Special to The New York Times, 1931, p. 17). At this time, natural rights were a new concept for Negros, and Locke did not allow for African Americans to take their rights lightly but, instead, to embrace them. With the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, Negros could freely express their culture; the right to assemble granted Negros the ability to protest for their equality; two things no Old Negro could ever do. The New Negro preserved a “sense of folk solidarity, and [the] peculiar folk-values [with it] were emotionally and spiritually intensified” (Special to The New York Times, 1931, p. 17). A common value among the time was education, but education was also relatively new to the Negro population, so the New Negro mentality was to get the most out of it. Locke led to a new social understanding of the Negro spirit. The same social understanding that marked Negros as a “new spiritual power” (Special to The New York Times, 1931, p. 17). Hence, the New Negro was effective. In addition to the shifted mindset of the Negro body, the New
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