Gabriel A. Briggs. The New Negro in the Old South

In the first half of the twentieth century, African Americans left the Cotton Belt for the soon-to-be Rust Belt, trading agricultural work limited by drought and mechanization for the promise of socioeconomic mobility. These migrations transformed black life, shifting its locus from south to north and from rural to urban. Burgeoning black communities in industrializing cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, emboldened with expectation and stymied by northern racism, responded with public protest and cultural, artistic, and literary production. In 1925, Howard University professor Alain Locke heralded the emergence of this “New Negro,” praising his independent spirit, political engagement, and cultural imagination (17). In The New Negro in the Old South, Gabriel A. Briggs takes seriously Locke’s characterization. Yet he challenges historians’ temporal and spatial explanations by contending that the “New Negro” did not owe its origins to the Great Migration. Rather, the characteristics Locke identified could be found in the urban South after Reconstruction.

Economic history · Ethnology · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies