Transcript Harlem Renaissance

The New Negro, Garvey,
and the UNIA
Nadir
• Racism intensified (Birth of a Nation, second Ku Klux
Klan, etc.)
• Return of black troops to segregation,
disenfranchisement, and violence
• First Red Scare (Espionage and Sedition Acts, A. Mitchell
Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover, etc.)
• Great Migration continued, found de facto segregation
and racism in northern cities
The “New Negro”
• New attitude of self awareness and defiance grounded
black arts renaissance
• Flourished with contributions from Langston Hughes,
Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and others
• 1925, Howard University professor Alain Locke published
The New Negro
• Artistic racial consciousness spread to other mediums and
beyond Harlem
Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,”
White Shadows (1922)
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Louis Armstrong, “Struttin” (1925)
Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Blues (1929)
Marcus Garvey
• 1887, b. in Jamaica, grandson of slaves, apprenticed to
printer, edited several newspapers
• Influenced by Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery
and the Pan-Africanist movement
• 1914, founded Universal Negro Improvement
Association as charitable club and literary society
• 1916, immigrated to United States, toured and lectured,
pulled into Harlem’s political ferment
Universal Negro Improvement Association
• 1917, re-established by Garvey in Harlem, quickly grew
into first mass organization of African-Americans
• Opposed “amalgamationist” views of NAACP and
Urban League and rejected class analysis of trade
unionists, socialists, and communists
• Promoted African ancestry, black pride, racial separation,
and repatriation as well as armed self-defense
• 1925, collapsed when Garvey convicted of Black Star
Line-related mail fraud, jailed, and deported
“What We Believe,” (1924)
The Universal Negro Improvement Association advocates
the uniting and blending of all Negroes into one strong,
healthy race. It is against miscegenation and race suicide.
It believes that the Negro race is as good as any other, and
therefore should be as proud of itself as others are.
It believes in the purity of the Negro race and the purity of
the white race.
It believes in the social and political physical separation of
all peoples to the extent that they promote their own ideals
and civilization, with the privilege of trading and doing
business with each other.
It believes in the promotion of a strong and powerful Negro
nation in Africa.
Marcus Garvey on UNIA