New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South

Claudrena Harold, Bryant Simon, Jane Dailey

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780820354767
  9780820335124
• eBook ISBN:
  9780820349848
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This study details how the development and maturation of New Negro politics and thought were shaped not only by New York–based intellectuals and revolutionary transformations in Europe, but also by people, ideas, and organizations rooted in the South. Claudrena N. Harold probes into critical events and developments below the Mason-Dixon Line, sharpening our understanding of how many black activists—along with particular segments of the white American Left—arrived at their views on the politics of race, nationhood, and the capitalist political economy.

Focusing on Garveyites, A. Philip Randolph's militant unionists, and black anti-imperialist protest groups, among others, Harold argues that the South was a largely overlooked "incubator of black protest activity" between World War I and the Great Depression. The activity she uncovers had implications beyond the region and adds complexity to a historical moment in which black southerners provided exciting organizational models of grassroots labor activism, assisted in the revitalization of black nationalist politics, engaged in robust intellectual arguments on the future of the South, and challenged the governance of historically black colleges.

To uplift the race and by extension transform the world, New Negro southerners risked social isolation, ridicule, and even death. Their stories are reminders that black southerners played a crucial role not only in African Americans' revolutionary quest for political empowerment, ontological clarity, and existential freedom but also in the global struggle to bring forth a more just and democratic world free from racial subjugation, dehumanizing labor practices, and colonial oppression.

NOTES

Abbreviations

Marcus Garvey Papers	Robert A. Hill, ed. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Vols. 1–6. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983–89.
NAACP Papers-LC	National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.
NAACP Papers-MF	Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1982–.
NJG	Norfolk Journal and Guide
NW	Negro World
NYT	New York Times

Introduction

1. New York Age, September 20, 1919.

2. For primary data on the National Brotherhood’s activities consult the United States Railroad Administration files in Grossman, Black Workers, Reel 10, Frames 770–85; Messenger, August, December 1919; Marcus Garvey Papers, 1:467. Brief mention of the NBWA can also be found in Spero and Harris’s seminal text, Black Worker, 117–19.

3. Messenger, August 1919.

4. Ibid., December 1919.

5. Ibid., August 1919.

6. Marcus Garvey Papers, 2:121.

7. For a broader discussion on New Negroes’ complex relationship to modernity, see Baker, Modernism; Gates, “Trope”; Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance; Spencer, New Negroes and Their Music; Favor, Authentic Blackness; Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left; Foley, Spectres of 1919; Ross, Manning the Race; Nadell, Enter the New Negroes; Carroll, Word, Image, and the New Negro.

In my exploration of black southerners’ quest for citizenship, economic security, and literacy during the New Negro era, I have relied on Houston Baker’s definition of Afro-modernity: “The general effects of African, African diasporic, and Afro-American people’s ‘strike toward freedom,’ their move toward a cosmopolitan mobility of citizenship, work, cultural reclamation and production that enhance the lives of a black majority globally conceived” (Turning South Again, 34).

8. The idea of the South as a site of cultural backwardness, political repression, and racial horror finds expression in the utterances of such notable Harlem Renaissance protagonists as Nella Larsen’s Helga Crane, Rudolph Fisher’s King Solomon Gillis, and Jean Toomer’s Ralph Kabnis. See Rudolph Fisher, City of Refuge; Larsen, Quicksand; Toomer, Cane. For the regional politics of the Harlem Renaissance’s literary productions, see Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?”; Lawrence Rodgers, Canaan Bound, 70–96; Nathan Grant, Masculinist Impulses.

9. NW, March 9, 1929.

10. Stansell, American Moderns, 7.

11. In fleshing out this particular issue, I have found the work of historian Charles Payne quite useful. Payne argues that southern blacks in the civil rights movement possessed a “dialectical worldview sensitive to how contradictions in social structure shape contradictions in people, and also sensitive to people as at least potentially changing and evolving.” This worldview, he continues, “militated against thinking about people in one dimensional terms” (I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 314). Suggested but not explicitly stated in Payne’s analysis was how black southerners’ humanism may have guarded them against theoretical and political dogmatism.

12. NW, November 17, 1927.

13. Significant insight into the contested history of interracial unionism in the American South can be gleaned from Gutman, “Negro and the United Mine Workers”; Rachleff, Black Labor in the South; Rosenberg, New Orleans Dockworkers; Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans; Arnesen, “Following the Color Line”; Letwin, “Interracial Unionism”; Norwood, “Bogalusa Burning.”

14. See Iton, Solidarity Blues.

15. Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests, 46–58; Foley, Spectres of 1919.

16. For more on the NAACP’S work during the New Negro era, see Eisenberg, “Only for the Bourgeois?”; Reich, “Great War.”

17. Several New Negro activists, most notably Randolph, Owen, Hubert Harrison, and Cyril Briggs, denounced the NAACP for what they perceived as its stubborn unwillingness to move beyond its reformist agenda. A great deal of their criticism was directed toward W. E. B. Du Bois, whom they deemed out of touch with the realities of the black masses. As historian Paula Pfeffer explains, “Just as Booker T. Wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One The Hour Has Come
• Two Now Comes the Test
• Three Making Way for Democracy
• Four On the Firing Line
• Five The South Will Be Invaded
• Six New Negro Southerners
• Seven Stormy Weather
• Epilogue In the Whirlwind
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index