Overview
Sculptors, writers, and musicians used their artwork to communicate a different language—a language that was not monotonous nor contented during the 1920s and onward. It demonstrated a diversion from the constrained and simplified voice of a victimized African American. Many were influenced by the works of bellwethers like Alain Locke, Langston Hughes and Charles Alston, whose works depicted unprecedented perspectives--from politics, racial injustice, and racial art--that connects every-day black life with the ancestral roots of Africa.
"What does the heritage of Africa mean to me?" and "How do I reconcile ideas of the continent with my own experiences as an African in America?"were among the questions that artists encountered during that era were.
Writers such as W.E.B DuBois subsequently organized political organizations to fight against such racial oppression. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League sought to change the disgraceful image of negros across the country, through the endeavors of skilled artists. As Henry L. Gates at Harvard University asserts, “blacks felt the need to attempt to ‘reconstruct their image to whites Probably since that dreadful day in 1619 when the first boatload of us disembarked in Virginia.”
The New Negro movement was advanced by Alain Locke, who “employed masculinist language in order to clean a racialized manliness within the context of hegemonic, white, middle class manhood that was defined through, and performed in the marketplace” (Summers 1939). Anna Pochmara, author of The Making of the New Negro, asserts that Locke fashioned the movement as a regeneration and ‘rebirth’ of black culture which is inextricably related to his persistent celebration of youth as the source of cultural vitality (58). The movement, however, rarely celebrated nor promulgated black women. This notion is primarily emphasized in dissertations on the wind of migration from the South to the North, described as a progressive step toward emancipation that provided black men with various opportunities to perform their masculinity in the marketplace (Pochmara, 203).
Women counted as worthy for showcasing were Mulatta--or 'near white.' This was indisputably done in order by African Americans to gain approbation and reasonable acceptance by the paler race.
Sherrard-Johnson’s Portraits of the New Negro Woman, “Exalting New Negro Womanhood,” concedes that mulatta emerge(d) as "an iconic figure at the cusp of the Harlem Renaissance, a period in which narratives of passing preoccupied black and white modernists, just as the legal designation of mulatto/a was disappearing" (7). In other words, artistocratic illustrations of the New Negro Woman was idealized as a sort of Victorian mulatta, whose occupancy was either an upper-class teacher, librarian, or nurse. Not only did this restrict the true agency of the negro woman, but it also resisted the notion of black women engaging in artistic and antiracist work unless aboded by the socio-economic class and color standards (11).
It rings a sense of double consciousness and propaganda. 'Double consciousness' was a term famously dubbed by W.E.B DuBois, in The Souls of Black Folk. An excerpt reads:
After the Egyptian an Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, ungifted with second sight in this American world,--a world Which yields him no true self-consciousness , but only let's him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. […] The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife--this long to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this emerging he wishes neither of the older selves should be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro body keeps it from being torn asunder. This internal blood has a message for the world.
Augusta Savage played a crucial role in the making of the true, New Negro Woman, as she played the role of an activist in the intervention of African Americans’ humanity amidst oppression. Yet, she was overlooked, in favor of elevating the mulattress and black male artist, in order to gain acceptance in racial ambiguity. In no wise are New Negro Men—James Baldwin, Counter Cullen, andJacob Lawrence, among others—insignificant to this period, however, Savages’ pioneered ‘groundwork’ played a detrimental role in the representation of the New Negro, as her presence alone defied the betrayal of black beauty.