The Harlem Renaissance Weekly

Reading the New Negro Movement in 1920s Black Newspapers

Martha H. Patterson

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009566698
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Martha H. Patterson's The Harlem Renaissance Weekly offers a groundbreaking study of the Black literary renaissance that appeared in weekly Black newspapers in the 1920s. In her richly contexualized readings, she uncovers a popular Harlem Renaissance deeply committed to political and social issues: the fight against lynching, segregation, and anti-miscegenation laws and to the challenges posed by urban vice, infidelity, and family separation during the Great Migration. Through mostly romantic plots, Black newspaper fiction writers emphasized that the cabaret and church, white and black race leader, flapper and race mother could be bridged on behalf of racial well-being and civil rights justice. As the Ku Klux Klan grew increasingly powerful, this fiction offered readers not only entertainment, but also cautionary advice, political hope, and weekly affirmation of their full humanity. With a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this powerful study revises understanding of an important dimension of the Harlem Renaissance.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword: The Weekly New Negroes
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Harlem Renaissance Weekly
• 1 Dueling and Dancing with Demon Rum?: Prohibition during the Harlem Renaissance
• Battling the Hydra of Profitable Hate in White Newspapers: Anti-lynching Second Serials in the Black Press
• 5 Wayward Husbands, Jazzy Jezebels, and Lost Children: The New Negro Woman’s Anguish after the Great Migration
• 6 The “Chocolate Baby” versus the New Negro “Roué”: Revisiting the Mann Act in George Schuyler
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index