Rising up from the oppression, discrimination, violence, and lynching that was the Nadir, African Americans rose up and adopted new values ​​that gave rise to a concept known as “New Negro” during the early third of the 20th century. African Americans of this era were idealistic after experiencing war and risking their lives for their country. They developed a new attitude that displayed the attributes of fighting against oppressive violence and the old era of slavery and the Jim Crow era stereotypes and beliefs of both blacks and whites They gave meaning to a “new” Negro by reacting rather than adopting a submissive attitude in order to break down misconceptions. of inferiority. They fought against the belief that it was shameful and wrong to be black and instead proudly celebrated their African heritage and history. A new type of African American arose soon after the end of World War I and the mass exodus of blacks who left the South for urban cities where there was less racism and violence, more jobs thanks to the advent of World War I, and the opportunity and potential to prove themselves and fight against the culture that despised the people of African origin. The New Negro is therefore defined not by blacks who have adopted the old belief system of tolerating and becoming something palatable to white standards, but by a new generation of African Americans, who resented the constant discrimination and left the South, and who have created their own standard and fought for it socially, politically, and artistically, in order to achieve the goals of the freedom to advance in a white-dominated society and the freedom to express one's various identities unfiltered by thoughts of inferiority. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayAlain Locke defined the New Negro as an offensive attacking group and the Old Generation as defensive in his essay "The New Negro." In it he wrote: “The intelligent Negro of today is determined not to make discrimination a mitigating factor for his deficiencies in performance, individual or collective; tries to keep itself at par neither inflated by sentimental allowances nor devalued by current social discounts. Locke also emphasized how the goal of the New Negro lies in control of one's "inner life" which "is still in the process of forming" and is "an attempt to repair a damaged group psychology and reshape a distorted social perspective." Locke explained above that the Negro was a movement to empower oneself without needing help based on “feeling.” Basically the New Negro demanded that society's values ​​be changed and appreciated so that he or she could be judged on merit. Faced with discrimination, he will no longer take it at face value or find a way around its limitations without confrontation, but will instead fight to somehow change the racist system. Before that, the older generation had to be submissive and respect even the rudest or most unfair white man. Locke also described the New Negro as one who “realized that in social endeavor the cooperative basis must supplant remote philanthropy, and that the only safeguard for mass relations in the future must be provided in the carefully maintained contacts of enlightened minorities of both racial groups." The New Negro had to figure out how to work together and unite to ensure a society based that did not discriminate based on race. The New Negro who represented this new mood is seen in "If We Must Die " by Claude McKay. Poetryincluded lines such as "If we must die, let it not be like pigs / Hunted down and locked in an inglorious place" and "Like men we will face the murderous and cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but we fight back." . Black rhetoric and ideology have shifted from appeals for human sympathy to the idea of ​​countering no. It doesn't matter what the costs are because the Black race has had enough; African Americans had realized that to progress and change society for the better they had to take up the reins of civil rights and activism and express themselves in a unique way, untainted by the history of white notions of what is best for blacks. the older generation had two idealistic black leaders named Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois who were the precursors of the New Negro attitude but were not quite there yet because their rhetoric implied some form of adaptation to white ideology or it idealized only a certain subset of blacks rather than uniting the race for common goals. Alain Locke defined the New Negro as "the birth of a new racial consciousness and a new conception of self...the frank acceptance of the race...without apology" and "strenuous appeals to pity and conscious philosophy of defense." Washington on the other hand stated that “the wisest of my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges which will come to us must be the result of hard struggle and constant." Locke would say that Washington does not represent the New Negro because Washington admits that Negroes needed to prove themselves worthy of rights just because their skin is darker. He's apologizing for the race even though they didn't do anything wrong. The New Negro instead argued that they should be proud of blacks, unite against such a system of discrimination, and fight for the opportunity to work on merit. Dubois, though more sympathetic to Washington's New Negro, argued that only the talented tenth will save and "can lead the masses away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races." The New Negro called on the race as a whole to work together to fight bigots. It wasn't just down to the talented tenth. The masses and ordinary people had their own experiences and important stories to tell that offered a clearer picture of race relations. Dubois and Washington in this essay will be proven wrong as the following paragraphs will discuss stories and accounts of fights even among the Negroes who were more respectful towards the whites and worked to the death for the greedy white men. The older generation of African Americans was different from the New Negro because all their identities, hopes and dreams were crushed by years of bone-crushing labor and callous mental servitude to white superiority and appealed primarily through sad human stories. This can be seen in the short story “A Summer Tragedy” by Arna Bontemps. Bontemps told the story of an old black couple with his wife Jennie having "the appearance of a dead, wasted leaf... a body as thin as a string bean." Her husband Jeff, who has been a “black farmer” for at least forty years, looks no better and is so weak that his fingers are too shaky to put on a bow tie. The most tragic scene in the story was when the couple resigned and accepted suicide, as Bontemps pointed out: “All the pain had disappeared from her face. She sat upright, with her blind eyes wide open, tense and frightening... Now, after having suffered and endured the sadness of being separated from loved things, she showed no anguish. She was deep in thought” Bontemps, an African American New Negro writer, aptly described how the older generationit differed from the new one. Their hopes and dreams are repressed until nothing remains in their tortured souls but the determination and relief of death. Their inner lives were never satisfied, as Locke would say. Langston Hughes wrote a poem called “Harlem” that can be related to this story of this old couple. In the poem he writes “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry / like raisins in the sun? Or fester like a sore – / And then run away? / ...Maybe it sags / Like a heavy load. / Or does it explode?" The couple in Bontemps' story had their dreams "postponed" and their unjustly repressed dreams had dried up, deteriorated and weakened, but they were always there until the end. Their dreams never "exploded" while they committed suicide and tried to remember their youth and their lost hopes Alain Locke would say "With the older generation... it all began and ended with a humanitarian and moral appeal... full of pathos and self-pity... but in a not very impressive way" The hopes and dreams of the New Negros would not be tied like black sharecroppers to the land and instead will try to take those old withered dreams and attempt to express their true identity and fight back through militancy, politics, rhetoric , the arts, or in any way possible because they were tired of hearing about tragic stories like those of Jeff and Jennie. Many African Americans had left the harsh South by the end of the 1930s, so that "one-fifth of the nation's nearly twelve million African Americans. lived in the North." They left during the Great Migration to escape the harshness and constant fear that life in the South entailed. Mark Robert Schneider wrote that the “most important” reason for this migration was “disgust with the Jim Crow system…Blacks had to submit to whites in every interaction with them.” As stated earlier, blacks always had to be aware of what they said, otherwise the consequences would be severe. Schneider again noted that “any expression of resentment against this state of affairs would provoke white violence. An individual could be beaten or killed just for responding to an offensive white person.” Blacks, who could leave the South, chose to leave because of whites who, out of bigotry, refuse to allow blacks any space to succeed in their world. Unfounded hatred and racism caused old black men suffering in their inner world and social life because they attempted to reduce white aggression; they tried to pretend to be a stereotype of a black subservient to whites, but the end result was only internal suffering and lack of progress. Evidence of the racist culture and Southern society experienced by the old Negro, as Schneider stated, is seen in Richard Wright's biographical account, "The Ethics of Jim Crow Life," in which he detailed a one-sided situation in favor of Mr. Pease, a white man. , who accuses Richard of not using the respectful title "Sir" when addressing him. Richard was doomed no matter what he said because "the worst insult a Negro could give a Southern white" was to say he was wrong. Ultimately, Richard had to leave his job surrounded by racists who had taught him nothing about the trade. Mr. Pease subtly created an unfair situation to intimidate and bully and not give black people the chance to learn a trade or even hold a job. Living as a black person in the South, Richard's parents noted, meant "staying in your place." The black experience in the South and in rural areas involved a life in which, no matter how deferential one was to racedominant, the white man still found a way to deceive them and distance them from progress and advancement, and yet continued to blame the failure of blacks on racial inferiority. This older generation has had to assume an attitude of submission that has dried up the potential for inner growth. Paul Dunbar had accurately expressed this sentiment in the poem “We Wear the Mask” when he said: “We wear the mask that smiles and lies, / Hides our cheeks and shadows our eyes, - / This debt we pay to human cunning; / With hearts torn and bleeding we smile / ... Why should the world be too wise, / In counting all our tears and looks? / No, let them only see us, while / We wear the mask”. This passage is an example of how the older generation was oppressed psychologically because it shows the trials they had to go through just to survive; they wore a mask to hide their suffering as they went through the trials and obstacles that whites put blacks through. The older generation could not be as outgoing, expressive, or proud as the New Negro. Eventually blacks grew tired of this type of treatment in northern industrial cities and the great migration and steps towards a new identity began. The origin of the New Negro occurred at the end of World War I and during that time and in subsequent years there would be violence and bloodshed as whites felt threatened by the new attitude coming from African Americans who felt bolder in asserting how they rightly and deservedly had rights and opportunities similar to those of white men. African American war veterans were an important factor for the new generation. This is seen in the book African Americans in the Jazz Age: A Decade of Struggle and Promise by Robert Schneider, in which he stated that veterans proved that black men had courage, a fact that most whites denied. Nearly four hundred thousand black soldiers served, half of them in France, and thirty thousand of these had seen battle… Their most famous hero, Sergeant Henry Johnson, killed or captured over twenty Germans. One lesson of the war was that black soldiers could face and kill a white enemy. The black soldiers also learned that not all whites were hostile. Before the war, a black person bravely fighting on the battlefield or even killing white people was unheard of and crazy. This was an example of how deep and ingrained the stereotypes of the older generation's ideals were and how they were still present in the 1920s. Schneider emphasized the “lessons” learned by blacks: the ability to fight back and even kill white men and the fact that not all whites were racist and violent towards blacks. From this knowledge they gained confidence and awareness that the values ​​of the society in which they lived and in which they rarely traveled were not as set in stone as they seemed. As a result, a new attitude emerged from this new realization. Blacks were angry that African Americans had risked their lives and died for their country, but they were still treated with disrespect and hostility. In my opinion, the most representative man and institution of the New Negro is Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association. The “New Negro” was born as a response to the still entrenched culture of racism and white people blaming black people for many things. As Mark Schneider has argued, the rapid changes and conflicts of the year following the war led many whites to scapegoat their problems. The capitalists caused the strikes, a virus caused it.