On the evening of Monday, March 11, 1907, at Harvard’s Union Building, Booker T. Washington spoke to an enthusiastic crowd: “If I could be born again and the Great Spirit should say to me: ‘In what skin do you wish to be clothed? I should answer, ‘make me an American negro!’” According to the Tuskegee Student, “[t]hese words lent inspiration to every Negro present, and won for the speaker and the race immeasurable respect from the whites.”¹ African American Harvard student and English major Aubrey Howard Bowser likely attended the event. His classmate Alain LeRoy Locke, also class of 1907, who had returned home to Philadelphia for the week to interview for the Rhodes Scholarship, did not.²

Longing to be accepted among white Harvard students, Locke disdained his fellow Black classmates, including Bowser as “not fit for company [and] … not gentlemen.”³ Yet both men began their careers under the conservative sway of Washington’s influence and longed to make their mark as “race men.” Even after Washington lost national influence as the reigning New Negro when the 1908 Springfield, Illinois, race riot sparked the formation of the NAACP, Locke admired the accommodationist Washington and saw him as a “big man.” In 1912, Locke traveled with Washington to Florida to give a series of lectures and sought his help in advancing his career. In the years following, Locke began teaching at Howard University, completed a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard, and returned from time to time to Europe, where, in 1923, he and Claude McKay, while strolling through Berlin’s Tiergarten, discussed the philosophical underpinnings of what Locke would later celebrate as a new cosmopolitan, Pan-African consciousness. Seizing the opportunity to edit the March 1925 special issue of the Survey Graphic, Locke then iconized that New Negro vision into an international sensation with his carefully curated collection of illustrations, essays, fiction, and poetry, The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925).⁴

Bowser, meanwhile, struggled to find steady, well-paying work as a reporter in New York’s Jim Crowed journalism.⁵ In an update for Harvard’s alumni magazine in 1917, he assumed a Harvard man’s tone of affable self-deprecating wit to describe experiences that must have been bitterly disappointing:

In the 1922 alumni report, Bowser explained that the weekly in question was the New York Age, the renowned Black newspaper whose co-founder T. Thomas Fortune had gained prominence as a fearless civil rights journalist, but who also served as a ghostwriter for Booker T. Washington. (In late 1907, a beleaguered Fortune sold the Age to business leader and Washington acolyte Fred R. Moore, who apparently didn’t like [Bowser’s] “Harvard’s English.”)⁶ Bowser married Fortune’s daughter, Jessie, in 1912.⁷ When Jessie became pregnant shortly after their marriage, Aubrey found that writing for the subscription-dependent Black newspapers could not pay the bills: “Marriage compelling me to get a regular job,” he found work as a clerk in a railway mail service.⁸ In 1919, he began editing the Harlem-based, Salem Methodist Church-subsidized weekly magazine The Rainbow, the mission of which was to portray Black accomplishments, to “help men up [rather] than pull them down.”⁹

But The Rainbow folded in 1920, and Bowser had to transform his literary ambitions yet again to meet the demands of a broader Black reading public.¹⁰ Repurposing some of the same material he had written for The Rainbow for Black newspapers dependent on sensational literary content to sell copies, Bowser reshaped his narratives to include fewer of the rigors of uplift and more of the salacious details of Harlem life. Unlike the largely white, progressive audience for Locke’s special issue of the Survey Graphic, and his subsequent New Negro anthology pitched to a similar audience, Bowser, by necessity, had to write for a wide middle- and working-class Black audience, and, to judge from the fact that his work often appeared on the woman’s page in Black newspapers, a largely Black female one.¹¹

While Locke crafted his anthology as a Black literary tour de force, representative of the best modern, generally male, New Negro’s diasporic, aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural expression, Bowser and his fellow literary journalists wrote for the weekly rhythm of Black life, crafting mostly romance fiction that negotiated the Great Migration and the pleasures of the Jazz Age. Bowser, in other words, wrote with the urgency of a dynamic weekly “now” where Black, largely northern urban readers, especially Black female readers, found in his romantic fiction both escape and affirmation.¹² While Locke would be lauded as the standard-bearer of the cosmopolitan New Negro, Bowser and the weekly escapades of his seemingly more provincial New Negroes would be largely forgotten. Writing for ephemeral and market-driven newspapers, Bowser had little time for the luxury of literary craft most likely to ensure lasting renown.¹³

Yet Locke’s carefully cultivated “paean to a new Black masculinity,” to use biographer Jeffrey Stewart’s phrase, and Bowser’s didactic romances both evolved from Booker T. Washington’s earlier uplift rendition of the New Negro, seized on Harlem as the cultural and political center of Black life, and strove to represent, albeit cautiously, the voice of a younger Black generation. Despite Locke’s college-era disdain for Bowser, their paths would converge in ways that suggest at least some common ground. In November of 1924, at the celebration of a new home for the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, Bowser introduced Locke, who, in an address entitled “Social Salvation,” spoke to how the Church “could apply practical [C]hristianity to the social problems of Harlem.”¹⁴ Four years later, in a review of Wallace Thurman’s new magazine Harlem, Bowser praised Locke for striving to rein in the young rebels, who, in their desire to appeal to white readers, fostered “King Dirt” rather “than decency” by portraying Blacks as pimps, “two-dollar prostitutes,” and gamblers.¹⁵ Locke, of course, would never acknowledge any shared literary goals with Bowser, but both Black writers, their work, audiences, and mediums, comprise the warp and weft of the Harlem Renaissance – interwoven to such an extent that they should inform the way we understand the trope of the New Negro and the larger New Negro literary movement itself.¹⁶

The Harlem Renaissance Weekly asks that we consider the largely overlooked newspaper serial fiction of the 1920s in relation to, and sometimes in direct response to, events of daily interest to Black people, and especially Black women, who likely constituted its primary readers.¹⁷ I am offering, like Erin Smith’s study of hard-boiled fiction’s cultural work, a “reading where the boundaries between readers’ lives and their texts are fluid and fluctuating and where an advanced level of literacy cannot be taken for granted.”¹⁸ The major Black weeklies that published serial fiction in the 1920s clearly saw it as vital to increasing circulation since they advertised each new serial on their front pages or, in the case of White’s The Fire in the Flint, began the novel on the front page, and ran at least one segment in virtually every issue. Some of this fiction in the Pittsburgh Courier, the primary Black newspaper I examine, included male-authored second serializations of anti-lynching novels depicting varying degrees of “racial realism.”¹⁹ Other original serials offered melodramatic romantic “anomalous fiction” that often featured racially ambiguous characters and little or no mention of Jim Crow oppression.²⁰ Together the narratives reflected these papers’ divergent imperatives – to urge readers to engage in civil rights struggles while helping them negotiate, often as new city dwellers, the stresses of courtship, betrayal, and marriage. By recentering Black newspapers and by reading them as part of a reader-generated weekly montage, I show how this broad-based popular form helped readers renegotiate the cultural work of New Negroes, refiguring civil rights protest as they navigated the pleasures and dangers of the Jazz Age. At the same time, I demonstrate how the twenties New Negro Woman featured in the Courier increasingly dominated racial representation and contested compulsory patriarchal Black leadership. If the New Negro Man led the race on the editorial page, the New Negro Woman represented the race on the front page. It was not Alain Locke’s implicitly male New Negro who defined the weekly Harlem Renaissance, but rather the New Negro Woman, who, almost invariably in the context of a heterosexual love plot, propelled narratives, spurred sales, and defined a distinctly modern Black socio-political consciousness.

As the papers’ serials by Black men, especially their second serials of anti-lynching novels, foregrounded New Negro male struggles – to represent the race and fight Jim Crow – they positioned Black men as de facto race leaders, but they did so most often in a female genre, a romance context that largely assumed a female reader. Indeed, while the anti-lynching second serials centered New Negro men in the fight against Jim Crow racism culminating in lynching, the romantic fiction positioned New Negro Women as the primary markers of racial dynamism and modernity. If the New Negro man in this fiction laid claim to the courage, strength, mobility, and education necessary to lead movements and the New Negro Woman possessed the education, poise, and race loyalty to guide him, together they were part of a continuum of New Negroes from earlier decades.

As threatening as she was fascinating, the Jazz Age “bad” New Negro Woman, however, was different. As a flapper, she represented a distinct shift from earlier, unfailingly respectable ideals of Black womanhood. Even as most of the literary journalists I examine offered readers a “good” New Negro woman protagonist – as college graduate, wage-earning independent woman, or modern race mother – whose race consciousness mitigated the risk of her male counterpart falling prey to Jazz Age self-centeredness, they foregrounded the greater sexual, educational, professional, and consumeristic assertiveness of urban Black women. Of the fifty-one complete, extant, digitized issues of the Pittsburgh Courier for 1925, photographs of Black New Women appear on the front pages of forty-nine; “Modern circes,” “pretty stage stars,” “bobbed hair girls,” “college-trained wives,” popularity contest winners, gun-wielding protectors, tennis and basketball players, and a female Santa. Together they signified a race fully attuned to the most modern of social currents, the flapper.

When compared to the anti-lynching content of the male-authored second serials, the romantic newspaper fiction may seem like a light diversion, yet this fiction, particularly when read in dialogue with the content surrounding it, offered readers crucial tools to survive in the new urban environments so many of them found themselves in. By rejecting the previous era’s sexual purity dictates and sanctioning a measured economic and intellectual agency within the confines of marriage, these stories offered a kind of pragmatic feminism attuned to the hopes and desires of Black women forging new lives in Jazz Age cities across the country. As they featured New Negro female protagonists successfully struggling to repair marriages riven by infidelity, coping with the grief of loved ones left behind during the Great Migration, or navigating the challenges of prospective marriage partners succumbing to drunken philandering, they foregrounded a scarred but resilient New Negro Woman, worldly wise but not cynically worldly. By each serial’s end, the New Woman protagonist has proven herself resourceful in finding respectable employment, although not driven by her own professional ambition, sexually knowledgeable, although not, or no longer, sexually transgressive, more empowered in her marriage, although not the dominant figure within it. Black female journalists, in particular, wrote novels where the emotional center was not the New Negro man’s struggle against Jazz Age transgressions, but rather the New Negro Woman’s need for solace and healing. Such fiction, then, challenges our current understanding of what has been seen as a split in twenties Black feminism: between a blues performers’ working-class sexual assertiveness, on the one hand, and, on the other, the New Negro Woman’s fraught professional ambition and relative propriety.²¹ As Erin Chapman argues, the New Negro Women protagonists featured in the work of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Marita Bonner end up trapped between the white-dominated sexual objectification of the “sex-race marketplace” and the patriarchal expectations of race motherhood. By contrast, with the exception of second serializations, the newspaper New Negro Woman lives in an all-Black world and thereby escapes racist degradation and violence. Accepting the help of a loving Old Negro Woman figure, this New Negro Woman claims a weathered but modern marriage, offering readers, week after week, visions of security and hope restored.²²

The New Negro

Originating in 1887 in response to Henry Grady’s historic New South address, different figures of the New Negro, what soon became an international phenomenon, emerged during periods of local, national, and global crisis, sociopolitical transformation or artistic innovation. Black Americans who deployed the phrase used it to combat white supremacist mythology endemic in the white media and specific anti-Black stereotypes, even as they sometimes implied the continuation of an old Negro character type that perpetuated racist stereotypes. In general, the New Negro connoted the prevailing rhetoric of racial “success” within each period – including social Darwinist, professional, organizational, nationalistic, artistic, consumer, and political – while its usage reflected anxiety about how its meaning could be co-opted by the white press especially since African American achievement often spurred white backlash. As the trope in the Black press could lay claim at once to a spirit of self-reliance, collective protest, revolutionary fervor, colonial resistance, consumer makeover, and personal as well as aesthetic accomplishment, it functioned as an overdetermined signifier, gesturing to previous renditions of “newness,” “Negro-ness,” and “New Negroes.” Nationally circulating, commercial, and generally supportive of the party of Lincoln, Black newspapers also sought to diminish, but certainly did not eliminate, international, regional, and local differences in New Negro expression. Indeed, although the trope reinforced a Black/white binary and elided the often complex multiracial identities of those under its capacious umbrella, the New Negro was versatile enough to serve the needs of those holding vastly different artistic, social, political, and cultural allegiances.

Until World War I and the Red Summer of 1919, when the New Negro would take a decisive radical turn, the trope signified Black uplift, rectitude, and measured defiance. What Evelyn Higginbotham has termed a “politics of respectability” prevailed: a “bourgeois vision” that “equated public behavior with individual self-respect and with the advancement of African Americans as a group.”²³ Members of the Black elite deployed the New Negro as a laudatory image that generally, but not exclusively, described young Black men who sought racial uplift through some combination of the following: political engagement, economic advancement, post-secondary education, creative expression, race consciousness, and civil rights protest. Politicians, educators, artists, writers, ministers, social workers, business leaders, doctors, soldiers, and civil rights leaders appeared most often as New Negroes.

Although the trope seemed to imply gender inclusivity, in practice, it typically referred to Black men. As such, the New Negro reflected what Hazel Carby has observed is a dynamic where the experiences of Black men were considered to speak for “the race” in ways that Black women’s experiences were not.²⁴ Often defined as a rejection of the feminine – deemed to be the loyal, submissive, and self-sacrificing Uncle Tom – the New Negro represented, as Adena Spingarn argues, “the emergence of a new black masculine ideal which, following a turn-of-the-century ‘crisis of masculinity,’ replaced the standards of civilization and Christian virtue with self-assertion.” In the abstract, the New Negro was a movement by and for both Black men and women, but because it was usually defined within the confines of an ideology of manhood that negated the Old Negro, which was almost invariably used to describe Black men in feminized, subservient terms, the New Negro (man) often took precedence.²⁵

As this discourse interpellated, propagandized, critiqued, mobilized, and inspired Black readers, casting some Black people, especially educated young men, as racial representatives, most Black people, especially those living in rural areas with little access to formal education, risked being considered outside of the modern or respectable spheres. The New Negro implies, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argues, “a cause-and-effect relation,” the idea that if Black people could fashion new, self-empowered modern selves, they would defy vicious “old” stereotypes of Sambos, coons, brutes, mammies, and Jezebels, imagery among the most dehumanizing propaganda of Jim Crow. New Negro proponents always risked the threat that in claiming status for one segment of the Black population they would relegate the rest of Black folk – those less educated or modern – to the lowest tiers of Jim Crow’s racial infrastructure. If members of W. E. B. Du Bois’ “Talented Tenth” could claim their status among New Negroes, the remaining 90 percent of Black Americans, however, could not. For Gates, as the trope reflected how Black people understood their own lives, it embodied a paradox since the success of the New Negro’s creation depended upon “self-negation, a turning away from the ‘Old Negro’ and the labyrinthine memory of black enslavement” and its legacy in Jim Crow.²⁶

The New Negro, however, was often freighted with what Leigh Raiford calls a “critical black memory,” of a legacy of slavery that returned readers to a brutally painful past as much it propelled them to a hopeful future.²⁷ Even as many New Negro proponents used the figure to demonstrate the extraordinary results of racial “progress” despite enslavement – a critical strategy given the prevailing propagandized fiction that Black electoral progress under Reconstruction was an abject failure – others emphasized slavery’s merciless racial capitalism to underscore white hypocrisy in wealth and opportunity hoarding. Still other proponents celebrated a legacy of Black resistance leaders that had roots in Black abolitionism. A number of New Negro journalists pointed out the hypocrisy of white claims to moral superiority given white men’s long history of sexual assaults on Black women. For other Black writers, the New Negro dwelled, not in a self-made future, but in the melancholia of what Saidiya Hartman calls slavery’s “afterlife.” Claiming elements of the “old” in their “new” became, for these writers, a radical critique of modern consumerism and its ethic of purchasing the new as a means of replacing, and hence, forgetting, the old. And for twenties New Negro Women literary journalists, the Old Negro figure of the mammy, auntie, or the southern folk wife – who has known suffering and still practices folk ways – either refuses to judge the “fallen” New Negro Woman or fiercely reclaims the fallen New Negro Man, and thus heals the trauma and rifts caused by the Great Migration.²⁸

The rise in the New Negro coincided with the rise of the Black press as a crucial Black political outlet when Jim Crow strictures and violence increasingly blocked direct political participation in the South. As the 1920s news editor of the Kansas City Call, Roy Wilkins, maintained that the Black press “devot[ed] itself to the task of making Negroes free men and citizens and from that day to this fighting the battles necessary to securing for them the enjoyment of the rights of citizenship.”²⁹ With the rapid rise in literacy during Reconstruction, Black newspapers found an ever-increasing reading audience desperate for news from a Black perspective. From 1880 to 1890, 504 Black newspapers were started. During the period from 1895 to 1915, 1,219 Black newspapers were founded with a peak in 1902, at a pinnacle of Jim Crow white mob violence, when 101 Black papers began.³⁰

The New Negro Woman trope appeared far less often in print than either the usually male-inferred New Negro or the (white) New Woman because it was so risky to deploy and the business of journalism was male-dominated. Popularized in 1894, the New Woman signified a tidal change in women’s traditional roles. Increasingly, New Women demanded both a public voice – through the suffrage, temperance, women’s club, and a whole host of other social reform and political movements – and greater personal autonomy through meaningful paid work, higher education, and freer sexual expression. The dominant press responded by roundly parodying them as mannish, barren, and browbeating. After Margaret Murray Washington, Booker T. Washington’s wife, addressed the First National Conference of Colored Women in August 1895, the trope would be repurposed to define the New Negro Woman as a clubwoman committed to domestic efficiency, moral purity, and racial uplift. To claim an identity that evoked both the authority of the New Negro and the transgressiveness of the (white) New Woman – a traitor to home, childrearing, and the supposed eternal qualities of her sex – proved especially risky for Black women because it could potentially trigger mammy and Jezebel stereotypes Black women already combatted. And because most Black journalists were men and some Black male leaders adopted the dominant pejorative rendering of the “New Woman” in the white press, many Black female intellectuals who might otherwise have claimed the phrase eschewed it.

Although both white and Black women positioned their newness as ultimately benefiting the “race,” the dominant press frequently criticized (white) New Woman’s demands as inherently inimical to the biological imperative that they be mothers. In this view, campaigning for suffrage, pursuing higher education, advocating for dress reform, and sexual or artistic expression made women mannish, barren, or degenerate. If the (white) New Woman appeared selfish, the New Negro Woman must appear selfless, committed to helping her less fortunate Black sisters – “it is the lifting up as we climb which means growth to the race.” Margaret Murray Washington invoked the New Negro Woman figure in her address but transformed its meaning to represent the older trope of the white “true woman” ideals of republican domesticity, piety, and purity for Black women, especially in the club movement.³¹

At the same time, the New Negro Woman needed to appear modern, and the ubiquitous mass-market version of the (white) New Woman at the fin-de-siècle was of Charles Dana Gibson’s statuesque, corseted Gibson Girl. Before being overtaken by John Held’s gangly, flat-chested flapper in the 1920s, the Gibson Girl dominated the marriage market, propelled her father or prospective mates to fuel her consumer desires, and fought to the death to eliminate her rivals. By the 1920s, the front cover of Life carried John Held’s flapper sporting a hip flask, gambling with the guys, and dancing the Charleston. Yet even as these were the beauty standards to emulate, they generated social anxiety that, when overlaid by prevailing racist and sexist stereotypes of Black women as Jezebels and viragos, made appropriating these figures especially treacherous for Black women. By the beginning of World War I, African American writers seldom used the trope explicitly or its successor “the flapper,” but instead invoked the idea of the New Woman to reflect a modern woman supportive of the civil rights struggles of the New Negro man, while committed to one or more of the following: women’s suffrage, educational attainment, professional success, Black nationalism, socialism, and, increasingly as the twenties progressed, personal, artistic, and sexual freedom. To counter the image of Black women as Jezebels, the iconography of the New Negro Woman until the early twenties featured African American women as modern and stylish but also reserved and race conscious, generally avoiding the Jazz Age pleasures of gambling, illicit drinking, and suggestive dancing so often associated with the white flapper. In other words, while adopting a Gibson Girl look – in 1901 Margaret Murray Washington was, in fact, compared to one by a white settlement house leader – the New Negro Woman largely eschewed the white Gibson Girl narrative.³²

Because African American writers and orators were not just using the New Negro to describe particular Black people or behaviors, but to hail certain Black people as New Negroes in their respective movements, I read the trope in reference to the organizational affiliation of the writer and newspaper, as well as the paratextual appeals surrounding the serials.³³ Each New Negro is a repetition of earlier New Negroes or other “new” rhetoric, and often, to use Judith Butler’s performative theory of gender, “subversive repetitions” of previous versions of the new. In other words, anyone who deployed the trope could not avoid evoking alternative “new” visions.³⁴ Even though Alain Locke, for example, clearly sought to eschew the socialist and Black nationalist connotations of the figure in his culturist vision of the New Negro, given the tremendous power and sweep of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) movement in the early twenties, Garvey’s New Negro vision would still have resonated for Locke’s readers and most certainly for those of Robert L. Vann’s Pittsburgh Courier.

I argue then that it is crucial to read each version of the New Negro trope both diachronically, as change across time, and synchronically, as various versions and cultural intersections at the same moment. Reading it diachronically, the trope becomes a palimpsest of previous renditions, historical events, and suppressed voices: moving from the “erect carriage” of dignity in the face of Jim Crow, to Booker T. Washington accommodationism, then to DuBoisian civil rights activism, followed by the increasingly World War I-inspired radical and Garveyite Black nationalism, and culminating in the pan-African cosmopolitanism of the cultural New Negro.³⁵ This evolving New Negro figure gathers meaning from other rhetoric of the “New” that it refuted, claimed, refigured, or fought against, including: the New South, New Woman, New Thought, “new Americans,” “new morality,” “new slavery,” “new white man,” and the supposed “new crime” of Black men raping white women. Reading it synchronically, it becomes a montage of one moment in time, multiple and overlapping conceptions of the New Negro, and a paratext of all the other items on the page or in the volume of text. With both perspectives in mind, the New Negro that emerges from my analysis exists in uneasy states of provisionality, oscillating between freighted pasts and idealized futures, ancestral homelands and migratory dislocations, conservative bulwarks and sometimes radical transformations, Victorian propriety and modern freedoms. In the ideologically divergent printscape of Black periodicals, and particularly Black newspapers, the New Negro ideal is a predominantly heteronormative one that moves between ideologies celebrating group uplift and individual freedoms, integration and separatism, religious and secular values, nonviolence and armed self-defense. Uncovering this dialectical New Negro, especially in the early years of its iteration, is essential, I argue, in documenting the evolution of a trope that would come to define the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance.³⁶

The violence of the long Red Summer when at least twenty-six major race riots erupted in American cities in the summer of 1919, the Russian Revolution, that, at least initially, was viewed by many on the left as a triumph of progress toward economic equality, and the widespread postwar, labor unrest forged a Black radical, predominantly male, version of the New Negro determined to fight back. In the words of Afro-Caribbean socialist Hubert Harrison, this New Negro demanded “equal justice before the law” or else “‘[a]n eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ and sometimes two eyes or a half dozen teeth for one.’”³⁷ Deployed to recruit members into actual movements, this radical New Negro appeared far more often in print and in speech than had previous versions. Connoting the revolutionary potential of their socialist, labor, or communist movements as well as the “new” collective empowerment of their adherents, many of whom were Caribbean immigrants unaccustomed to what historian Winston James calls the “crude kick-’em-in-the-teeth discipline of Jim Crow,” this New Negro assailed the brutality of racial capitalism while rejecting more moderate civil rights organizations.³⁸

As the Jamaican-born Black nationalist Marcus Garvey meanwhile launched his UNIA movement and its organ the Negro World, he repeatedly hailed New Negroes as those who committed themselves to intellectual development, economic self-reliance, Afrocentricism, and Black nationalism. More popular than any other New Negro proponent, Garvey and his newspaper spread this version to his tens of thousands dues-paying members and millions of followers around the world.³⁹

Alain Locke, however, eschewed mention in his anthology of Garvey’s hold on the trope, as if Garvey, having been rearrested in February 1925 at Harlem’s 125th Street train station and then incarcerated at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, had tainted it. Locke’s New Negro also did not provoke outrage by professing a shared commitment to segregation with the Ku Klux Klan; in July of 1922, Garvey met with the the Klan’s Assistant Grand Wizard, Edward Clarke.⁴⁰ And Locke’s New Negro did not enjoin readers in a dubious campaign to buy stock in a shipping line for their return to Africa, a continent Garvey declared was rightfully theirs to lead. So even as Locke praised Garvey for making pan-Africanism central to his movement and even as he surely admired Garvey’s extraordinary oratorical skills, he clearly saw Garvey’s messianic theatricality as one of the “quixotic radicalisms” to be “cured” by his New Negro’s call for a “new democracy.” Rather than what Jeffery Stewart sees as Locke’s commitment to an accretive “New Negro,” Locke’s introductory essay to his anthology suggests he sought to wrest control, to fundamentally override the radical New Negro narrative.

The New Negro in the Black Press Compared to Alain Locke’s Vision

By relying on Alain Locke to represent the iconic cultural New Negro of the twenties, scholars risk eliding the deeply politically engaged, interurban, “feminized” nature of the New Negro that emerges from Black literary journalism at the same time. Indeed, while the commercial Black newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier generally embraced Republican politics, they covered socialist events and printed articles by socialists such as A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, and Hubert Harrison. Before Garvey’s conviction for mail fraud in June of 1923, the Courier ran a column entitled “U.N.I.A. News,” and afterward, when its coverage turned almost entirely negative, it still regularly reported on Garvey and his movement and included letters from readers complaining about the negative coverage. An essential vehicle for several writers that Locke included in his New Negro collection – especially J. A. Rogers, Kelly Miller, and Walter White – as well as for many that he did not, the Courier situated its literature into far more heterogeneous ideological contexts.⁴¹

For the peripatetic Locke, the cosmopolitan New Negro’s spiritual and physical restlessness signified his strivings towards artistic genius. According to Marlon Ross, the New Negro’s modernity, internationalism, and the “manly freedom of mobility” across racial, geographical, and class lines affirmed his “success” in the Progressive-era’s social Darwinist “race of the races.” Yet Ross omits and Locke downplays the profound loss such mobility created, especially as reflected in the New Negro romantic fiction so popular for readers. For some Black writers, such as Aubrey Bowser, Rose Atwood, Blanche Tyler Dickinson, and Walter White, that mobility reflected and potentially generated what they saw as a consumeristic mentality that promoted selfishness, self-indulgence, and infidelity. If these writers often coded the threats of mobility as feminine, the remedies often appeared in feminine terms as well. The noble New Negro Woman’s communal race consciousness kept families together and grounded in love.⁴²

The same year when over 30,000 Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue robed but unmasked – in what the Washington Post reported as “one of the greatest demonstrations this city has ever known” – Alain Locke published his signature anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation. A revision and expansion of his groundbreaking special March 1925 issue of the Survey Graphic, Locke celebrated the New Negro as signaling a change in consciousness, rooting his panegyric in Black creative genius, cosmopolitanism, and culture in an ancestral Afrocentric folk tradition. Locke’s use of the trope would define a literary and cultural movement, eclipsing for most readers today the trope’s radicalism.⁴³

With its bold Africanist designs by Aaron Douglass, European modernist illustrations by Winold Reiss, and careful assemblage of many of the most acclaimed and younger Black writers, Locke’s collection defiantly positioned the New Negro as culturally modern but careful to avoid offense. Omitting earlier versions of the trope, Locke staked his claim in his introductory essay that his “New Negro” volume channeled the “new psychology,” “new spirit,” and, in an apparent dig at Garveyism, the “new democracy” of the age.⁴⁴

Writers who appeared in Locke’s anthology and who also wrote for major Black newspapers extolled it. Writing for the Norfolk Journal and Guide, conservative critic Kelly Miller pronounced that “no book on the race question had ever received such extravagant laudation from high literary authorities.” In the Courier, Langston Hughes celebrated it as a breakthrough for the younger generation of Black writers, “those bad New Negroes.” Relishing the positive reviews Locke’s anthology received from highbrow white journals and members of the smart set, most Black weeklies kept readers abreast of the latest praise.⁴⁵

The Philadelphia Tribune, however, questioned whether Locke’s “new” New Negro was perhaps too cultured, a “knight at the tea table” who had gone “flabby” thinking only of “layer cake” and “pink teas.” While the Philadelphia Tribune’s satire certainly reflected the era’s pervasive homophobia – a dig particularly ironic given that, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. observed, “the Harlem Renaissance was surely as gay as it was black” – it also reveals anxiety that by celebrating Locke’s New Negro as an ideal for Black manhood, the Black elite had strayed too far from emphasizing the “hard practical things of life” – “business enterprises and political achievement.” The accompanying cartoon shows a light-skinned mustached dandy seated with a cigarette holder and teacup, surrounded by bobbed-hair women. His chair is labeled “The New Negro/(self-styled),” and the cartoon’s larger caption reads, “He Had Better Go to Work.” In at least one column for the Pittsburgh Courier, Alice Dunbar-Nelson seemed to echo this anxiety, questioning whether Locke’s young urban New Negroes demonstrated the necessary grit the age demanded. She cautioned that the spirit of the New Negro existed not only in the “youthful poets and artists in the metropolis,” who “age rather young,” but also perhaps more powerfully in elderly Black southern farmers who, with “the indomitable will that conquers time,” had gone to school to learn to read and write.⁴⁶ Even as Black papers lauded the accomplishments of the Black literati, their first commitment was to offer content relevant to readers’ life experiences.

The younger generation of Black writers, meanwhile, chafed at Locke’s strictures against any content that risked perpetuating anti-Black stereotypes, inciting charges of indecency, or even hinting at political radicalism. Even though ostensibly an endorsement of Locke’s anthology, Hughes’ “bad new Negroes” were at once more risqué, avant-garde, and, in Wallace Thurman’s Fire!! (1926), while avoiding politically radical ideas themselves – the fear of federal surveillance loomed large – at least willing to entertain a discussion of radical ideas.⁴⁷ Thurman’s boldest move, however, a move that the dapper, carefully closeted Locke would never have endorsed, was to include Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” with its elliptical but obvious homoerotic fantasy. In setting Locke’s carefully cultivated heteronormative New Negro at least partially ablaze, the young Turks refused the repression mass circulation demanded.

The New Negroes that emerged in the most popular 1920s Black newspaper journalism read as palimpsests of most of these earlier variants while attuned to the daily hopes and struggles of Black urban readers. Indeed, reading the New Negro within a newspaper context reveals a literary and visually stunning challenge to Locke’s vision. Within the pages of Black newspapers, the New Negro is deeply engaged with social and political debates of the period. As the twenties unfolded within the pages of Pittsburgh Courier, it was the spectacular New Negro Woman as flapper who took center stage, suggesting that it was her dynamism more than the New Negro Man’s that defined the promise and perils of the modern age. In The Harlem Renaissance Weekly, I examine this deeply contested New Negro, assembled each week to appeal to everyday Black readers’ lived experience.

The Twenties Black Press

Virtually all of the canonical writers of the Harlem Renaissance read the major Black newspapers, or at least their reviews, assiduously, while Black periodicals and readership expanded exponentially.⁴⁸ Beyond the fact that many of the era’s most famous writers of the Renaissance – including Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Georgia Douglass Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Hubert Harrison, and Walter White – wrote with at least some regularity for Black newspapers, significantly more Black literary journalists who have received little critical attention generated their own followings. Publishing in multiple papers and often under pseudonyms to disguise the extent of their contributions – most Black journalists needed to work for more than one publication to support themselves – these writers reached a larger Black audience at the time, and, arguably had just as much, if not more, impact on shaping the cultural work of the New Negro than the canonical texts of the Renaissance.⁴⁹

Indeed, even though weekly Black newspapers may have lacked the prestige of Black monthly magazines, the waters of the elite/popular divide were particularly muddy in the Harlem Renaissance, especially in newspapers like the national edition of the Pittsburgh Courier, which strove to attract the best writers as part of its growth plan.⁵⁰ George Schuyler served as a contributing editor to and regular columnist for the socialist Messenger magazine before joining the Courier in 1925, writing for both publications for several years before committing himself to regular columns for the latter. In addition to publishing in the Messenger and the Urban League’s Opportunity magazine, Zora Neale Hurston, Eric D. Walrond, and Claude McKay all wrote for Black newspapers or saw their work reprinted in them during the Renaissance. Hurston’s “lost” stories from the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as her essay, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” appeared as part of a continuum of fiction and editorials in the Courier written by Black women.⁵¹ In the 1920s and 1930s, both Eric Walrond and Rudolph Fisher published at least one short story apiece in the Courier, while Claude McKay’s poetry appeared on several occasions. As a regular column writer and special correspondent, Joel Augustus Rogers published over 2,000 articles in the Courier during the course of his career, while also publishing in Opportunity and the Messenger. In addition to contributing poetry to the Courier, Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote a regular column entitled “Une femme dit,” later renamed “So It Seems,” for the Courier’s “Woman’s Page.” Georgia Douglas Johnson, meanwhile, regularly published her poetry as well as a brief column of words of wisdom entitled “Homely Philosophy” for the Courier’s editorial page, where Countee Cullen’s poetry often appeared as well. While Langston Hughes wrote extensively for the Chicago Defender later in his career, in the 1920s, he wrote several articles for the Courier in addition to at least one letter to the editor while contributing to the Crisis, Messenger, and Opportunity. Walter White likewise submitted articles regularly to the Defender later in life – but agreed in 1926 to the Courier’s terms for the serialization of his novel The Fire in the Flint (1924) and to writing a concurrent weekly theater column.⁵²

Major Black newspapers generally featured book reviews and celebratory author profiles that linked the authors themselves with their middle-class, aspiring, race-conscious New Negro protagonists. In an effort to cultivate new writing talent, Marcus Garvey’s Negro World sponsored literary contests and clubs as essential for the self-education necessary for New Negro identity.⁵³ Several major Black newspaper editors founded their own middlebrow magazines, further blurring the divide.⁵⁴ As David Earle and Brooks Hefner have demonstrated, it is virtually impossible to extricate mass market fiction from elite modernist texts, given their shared writers, themes, references, and commercial and uplift imperatives.⁵⁵ Both Black magazines and newspapers played a crucial role in fostering a continuum of Black literacy, but also, as Hefner argues in his study of Black newspaper pulp fiction of the late 1920s through 1950, in rewriting anti-Black racist popular literary formulas to promote racial equity.⁵⁶

Given the often heterogenous and contradictory content in Black newspapers, interpreting the “cultural work” of their fiction – that is, considering how these texts reflect the needs, fears, and desires of the communities they address – is far more complex than if considered out of context.⁵⁷ I am informed by Otto Groth’s theory of the four characteristics of newspapers: periodicity, universality, actuality, and publicity. Groth defines periodicity as the “public rhythm” in “space and time,” universality as “the necessary insights for strengthening and creating bonds with the community for which it reports,” actuality as the present information necessary for people’s lives, and publicity as the newspaper’s circulation.⁵⁸ Groth’s paradigm, however, does not account for the fact that Black newspapers published within a mostly hostile dominant print culture, where they were continually compelled to combat white newspapers’ race-baiting disinformation campaigns.

Even as many African Americans read white newspapers for their daily news coverage and Black papers, in turn, reprinted content from them, white newspapers largely, but not exclusively, dismissed or pathologized the Black community, perpetuated racist stereotypes, enabled systemic racism, and legitimated racial terrorism as they mobilized, shielded, and validated white lynch mobs.⁵⁹ By constantly including demeaning references to African Americans and by repeatedly using phrases such as “criminal negro,” “burly negro,” “black brute,” “negro thief,” “negro ravisher,” “negro rapist,” and “negro murderer,” white papers throughout the US fomented the fear of violent black criminality to sell newspapers. As of this writing, a search on newspapers.com for “negro murderer” in US newspapers results in over 81,000 hits alone compared to just over 6,000 hits for “white murderer.”⁶⁰

Black newspapers responded by reminding readers frequently of how racist fearmongering in the white press propelled Jim Crow atrocities. The September 6, 1919 issue of the Defender, for example, featured an editorial cartoon entitled “Fanning the Smoldering Embers” (Figure I.1), where a fat bearded newspaper editor, labeled “Agitating White Newspapers,” appears bent over waving his hat to fan the flame of “race hatred” with the words “Chicago,” “Washington,” and “Knoxville Riots” rising from the smoke. Rolled up in his back pocket, a newspaper entitled the Daily Prevaricator, blares a headline, “NEGRO RAPES WHITE WOMAN.”⁶¹ African American newspapers, then, also performed a crucial validity function, affirming Black individual and collective experiences while mobilizing readers to fight Jim Crow.⁶² Indeed, the Black press connected, informed, interpellated, mobilized, and validated a heterogeneous Black community – even as it exposed its rifts – by reporting and synthesizing current events most relevant to it, and then circulated those assembled perspectives. In other words, Black newspapers played an important role in bolstering the morale of the Black community in the face of Jim Crow oppression. Examining 1920s literary journalism within both white and Black print culture encourages a greater appreciation of Black readers’ perceptions of events as they are revealed both in and around the newspaper fiction, part of an evolving, weekly cultural dialogic.⁶³

Figure I.1 “Fanning the Smoldering Embers,” Chicago Defender, September 6, 1919, 20.

Using such a paradigm, 1920s Black newspaper fiction, like the Illustrated Feature Section pulp fiction that would follow it, challenges what Claudia Tate calls the “racial protocol” of canonical literature that “explicitly represent[s] … lived experiences with racial oppression.”⁶⁴ Even though the Pittsburgh Courier included reprints of published novels or second serializations that subscribed to the “racial protocol,” they also published second serializations, newspaper fiction, and original fiction that did not. Regardless, newspaper fiction takes on new meanings when read in the context of the articles that surround it. By contrast, most of the Courier’s original fiction in the 1920s avoided Jim Crow realities entirely in favor of stories devoted to the New Negro and New Negro Woman negotiating an all-Black modern culture. These stories and novellas focused on the traumatic and liberating elements of Black migration to urban centers, particularly Pittsburgh and Harlem, increasingly defined as vice-ridden entertainment districts. As such, they wrestle with questions that focus on intraracial or psychological rather than interracial conflict: How should the New Negro navigate between the allures of the Jazz Age and the responsibilities of racial uplift, the modern secular signs of success that promote individualism and Black religious traditions that sustain communal consciousness? How much guilt should a mother bear after leaving a child born in a loveless, patriarchal southern marriage in favor of a northern companionate one? How much of the flapper’s glamor and daring should a race woman emulate? How can marriages be saved despite infidelity?

I focus this book on the Pittsburgh Courier because by the 1920s, it seemed to best capture the new Jazz Age journalism in its writing and layout. Offering generally more celebratory coverage of cabaret culture than the major Black weeklies, the Courier grew both in popularity and esteem because editor Robert Vann had assembled some of the best Black literary talent to bolster his feature section, addressed a national audience, and adopted many of the sensational tactics of the leading white dailies.⁶⁵ Since major white advertisers largely eschewed placing ads in Black newspapers, the Courier appealed to the largest Black audience possible to maximize revenue from direct sales and subscriptions.⁶⁶

As part of that broad-based appeal, the Courier offered a complex and contradictory ideological voice. As it depended on the weekly columns and serial fiction (much of it written under a pseudonym) of thorn-to-the-Negro-elite George Schuyler, it included articles from the very race leaders Schuyler criticized. Although it featured weekly skin-lightening ads, it promoted Afrocentric pride in Black history cartoons. It included a page devoted to church news while simultaneously offering racy blues advertisements. Accordingly, the 1928 “Illustrated Feature Section” pronounced itself “Clean, Wholesome and Refreshing,” even as it offered titillating images of scantily clad women and lurid details of “true crime.”⁶⁷

Like its main rival the Defender, the Courier learned quickly that sensationalism sold papers. Pioneered by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, the yellow press featured: typographically and thematically bold headlines, sometimes enhanced by red lettering; campaigns against the powerful elite; front pages that included a mix of political, war, sports, and society news; an increasing use of photographs, illustrations, comics, editorial cartoons, and illustrated advertisements; a tendency to rely on anonymous sources in news reporting; and, finally, explicit self-promotion within news stories. Black sensationalist newspaper editors drew from the tactics of the yellow press while challenging the socially conservative dictates of uplift ideology and skewering white racism.⁶⁸ Writing in 1926, African American journalist Eugene Gordon declared that the Black press now “flaunted” “yellowness” “as a badge of progress.”⁶⁹ Throughout the twenties, the Courier’s front pages featured photographs of glamorous women, shocking banner headlines, and contests promoting the paper.⁷⁰ Noting that the New York Daily News had “the largest circulation in the United States,” editors of the Courier maintained in 1930, “The small minority of educated persons may not be interested in crime, scandal and other sensational news but most whites and blacks, are.”⁷¹

Locke and Wallace Thurman, as well as other Black intellectuals, all denounced what they saw as Black newspapers’ “tabloid” elements, selling sensationalism rather than educating readers. Alain Locke saw newspapers as devoted more to the garish display of a Marcus Garvey parade and the lavish parties of cosmetic millionaire Madame C. J. Walker’s daughter, A’Lelia Walker, rather than the in-depth reflections of the intellectual. In his essay entitled “Harlem” in the March 1925 special issue of the Survey Graphic, Locke describes the Black “Mecca” as a layered metropolis, with newspapers just below the “exotic fringe”: “Beneath this lies again the Harlem of the newspapers – a Harlem of monster parades and political flummery, a Harlem swept by revolutionary oratory or draped about the mysterious figures of Negro “millionaires,” a Harlem pre-occupied with naive adjustments to a white world – a Harlem, in short, grotesque with the distortions of journalism.”⁷² To the extent that the Black press relied on crime and vice to sell papers and therefore indirectly perpetuated anti-Black racial stereotypes they, to apply Frederic Jameson’s description of Wyndham Lewis’ modernist collages, “[drew] heavily and centrally on the warehouse of cultural and mass cultural cliché, on the junk materials of industrial capitalism, with its degraded commodity art, its mechanical reproducibility, its serial alienation of language.”⁷³ For Thurman, relying on such sensational bait – reports of “gun play, divorce actions … and brick throwing parties” – meant Harlem newspapers seldom focused on the underlying causes of crime and immorality.⁷⁴ Howard University Professor Kelly Miller took the roaring twenties’ Black press to task even within its own pages: “If we complain, and justly, against white journalism in the attempt to blacken the reputation of the race by advertising its evil deeds to the world, with minimum mention of worth-while achievements, what shall we say about Negro journalism, which goes them one better.”⁷⁵

The term that best describes the reading experience of Black newspapers and what I have chosen as the guiding interpretative framework in my analysis of Black literary journalistic texts is “montage.” While little is known about what prompted the Pittsburgh Courier’s specific layout decisions, readers were certainly encouraged to experience the newspaper as a dynamic interplay of photographs, news articles, features, literature, advertisements, announcements, cartoons, illustrations, and editorials. Reading the newspaper’s pages encouraged complex connections, new associations, and aesthetic appreciation. Thinking of these newspapers as mass-produced montages, where readers create an improvisatory assemblages of meaning, provides a better framework for imagining the actual experience of 1920s Black readers.

Although “collage” and “montage” are sometimes used interchangeably and montage is an extension of collage, recent critics have highlighted key distinctions between them that are important for my work.⁷⁶ From the French verb coller meaning to paste, to stick or to glue, collage generally refers to original artistic assemblages of different objects glued to a surface, to create, according to Martino Stierli, “fragments of reality rather than re-presenting them.” “Montage,” from the French verb monter meaning “to assemble,” on the other hand, is associated with the film-editing and theory of Sergei Eisenstein, who argued that the technique “was a purposeful … socially conditioned, ideologically tendentious reconstruction of reality in images.” Montage, then, usually includes photographs of objects, rather than the objects themselves, and, Stierli writes, relies on “dialectical juxtaposition” to create meaning as it “affirm[s] … the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility.”⁷⁷ Montage, then, is a more accurate term to describe the process of both creating a mass-produced, multi-page newspaper and reading it.

“Collage,” however, has been the preferred term in Harlem Renaissance studies. For Anne Elizabeth Carroll, collage theory helps to illustrate the importance of protest and affirmative content in periodicals such as the Du Bois’ Crisis, Charles S. Johnson’s Opportunity, Locke’s New Negro, and Thurman’s Fire!! A collage lens helps to explain these texts’ embrace of the Black elite and the folk, the transgressive and the upright, the emphasis on a shared humanity and artistic vision with whites, coupled with the imperative to fight Jim Crow degradations and violence.⁷⁸ For Rachel Farebrother, drawing on the work of Ralph Ellison and Kobena Mercer, a collage theory of Harlem Renaissance artistic and literary production provided a means of exploring the essentially collaborative approach to the medium, in this case the “transatlantic cultural exchanges that underpinned modernist experimentation among black and white writers and artists of the period.”⁷⁹ Michael Soto likewise sees collage elements in novels such as Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, where the protagonist of the novel, Helga Crane, marvels at the range of skin tones in a Harlem nightclub: “the literature of black Harlem abounds with similar descriptions of Harlemites’ visual diversity, so much so that it’s fair to call the colorist collage a modernist literary motif.”⁸⁰

As Black newspapers offered a kind of call and response to their readers – reporting relevant current events, shaping a Black diasporic consciousness, and helping readers process the trauma, displacement, opportunities, and joys of their lives under the shadow of Jim Crow – they evoked a collage/montage metaphor of Black experience.⁸¹ Collage evokes Jim Crow atrocities as well as the vast displacement of Black peoples during the Great Migration of the early and mid-twentieth century. In Kobena Mercer’s words, “African American identity … itself [has] been ‘collaged’ by the vicissitudes of modern history.”⁸² At the same time, however, the collage aesthetic of artists such as Romare Bearden, who began his career in the 1930s drawing cartoons for the Crisis and the Baltimore Afro-American, and, by extension, a collage-aesthetic of Harlem Renaissance periodicals, provides testament to black endurance, creativity, aspiration, and cosmopolitanism.⁸³

Yet as newspapers are referential and purposeful mass-produced objects, rather than handmade, unique, artistic assemblages, and as consuming them requires turning the pages creating new juxtapositions of images and text, newspapers offer dialectical compositions. Composed of news, editorials, special features, drama, music, and book reviews, “practical advice and useful information,” “humorous matter” (and later comics), fiction and poetry, illustrations, and advertisements, popular Black newspapers in the twenties exemplify visual and ideological montage.⁸⁴ Containing disparate injunctions to work towards racial uplift and revel in salacious stories, to straighten hair and to exhibit race pride, to inform citizens and to entertain consumers all while offering serialized fiction continuing from one issue to the next and cartoons moving from frame to frame, compound the montage aesthetic.

Concepts such as “paratext” and “printscape” – first introduced by Russ Castronovo, but later theorized by Mark Noonan to describe newspaper content creation, circulation, distribution, and reader experience are invaluable in my work. According to Noonan:

Noonan also notes that “[t]he printscape metaphor … highlights the juxtaposition of paratextual content and various reading matter. In ‘reading across the page,’ readers make imaginative connections to these varied materials and come to share a worldview with other readers.”⁸⁵

I prefer the term “montage,” however, not to suggest that each newspaper is a deliberately constructed art form – clearly the exigencies of news worthiness, sectional divides, advertising, and space constraints largely dictated text and image placement in newspaper issues – but rather to evoke both the collage composition of the newspaper page and the improvisational experience of reading newspapers. Turning pages of a newspaper, readers nonetheless choose what to focus on and come away with their own impressions, revising their thoughts again when they discuss newspaper content with others or read alternative accounts.⁸⁶

For the film pioneer Sergei Eisenstein, montage offered a dialectical composition that “somehow, finds its unity in opposition” not unlike the “stunning effect of Negro syncopated jazz.” One might characterize post–World War I urban commercial districts and neighborhoods like Harlem as a similar kind of dialectical composition.⁸⁷ Times Square, writes William Leach, presented a “provocative startling, brilliant, and sometimes suffocating blend of color, glass, and light,” while Negro Harlem’s Seventh Avenue or “Black Broadway,” according to Wallace Thurman, was “teeming with life and ablaze with color.”⁸⁸ Harlem was the capital of Black America, “the city of refuge” from lynching and debt peonage, and “the promised land” where, between 1920 and 1930, the Black population in Harlem increased by 115 percent, 25 percent of whom was from the West Indies.⁸⁹ As it concentrated African diasporic populations and cultural forces, the city offered the promise of a transformed, American self, a New Negro born again in Harlem, the “city within the city,” or in any number of metropolitan areas with sizable Black populations.⁹⁰ Most evocatively, according to Thurman, Harlem was a modern jazz composition, at once thrilling, overwhelming, and “half mad” in its rhythms:⁹¹

With its alliteration, play of hard and soft consonants, and allusion to a Black city signifying on the cadences of an urban white metropolis, Thurman’s riff on Harlem transforms it into a syncopated jazz performance.

By offering a series of montage readings of twenties Black serial fiction, I strive to connect largely forgotten literature more closely to Black people’s actual lived experience in Jazz Age cities, revealing deeply intertextual and ideologically conflicted texts of New Negro formation.⁹³ I am inspired by what bell hooks describes as the “yearning to do intellectual work that connects with habits of being, forms of artistic expression, and aesthetics that inform the daily life of writers and scholars as well as a mass population.”⁹⁴ Indeed, by examining connective motifs within literary journalism and the paratextual items that surround it – headlines, illustrations, advertisements, announcements, and other articles – as well as the printscape of which it is a part, I have created my own improvisatory montages, which complicate and enrich fiction divorced from such a context.

Interpreting montage elements of a newspaper becomes an improvisatory process of creation because it highlights readers’ efforts to make meaning when faced with complex, sometimes contradictory ideological content. For Elza Adamowicz, the act of reading the disparate, generally unsubordinated, elements in collage “takes as its premise the active cooperation of the reader, who fills in the spaces in the text or image, identifies sources or intertexts, or simply inhabits the gaps.”⁹⁵ For Marjorie Perloff, the “mode of detachment and readherence” in a collage aesthetic fundamentally “undermines the authority of the individual self, the ‘signature’ of the poet or painter.”⁹⁶ W. J. T. Mitchell suggests the danger of assuming an ideologically unified periodical: “Difference is just as important as similarity, antagonism as crucial as collaboration, dissonance and division of labor as interesting as harmony and blending of function.”⁹⁷ To use a jazz metaphor, each newspaper page offers readers the chance for a new kind of motivic improvisation, where thematic elements in the story or surrounding paratext enable new syncretic, potentially transgressive solos. Regardless of what Benedict Anderson calls “calendric coincidences,” the juxtaposition of the serial fiction and the newspaper content surrounding it are intrinsic to the fiction’s cultural work.⁹⁸

The process of absorbing such montage content would likely have had both alienating and integrative effects on readers. Anthony Giddens notes that the “collage effect” of modern national newspapers could reorient a viewer’s sense of time and space creating a kind of “reality inversion” when distant events potentially become more real than the experiences of everyday life in the reader’s location.⁹⁹ At the same time, the fact that 1920s daily newspapers received rapid transmissions of news events via telegraph – Black readers often read white dailies in conjunction with Black weeklies – could make events far away feel part of the reader’s daily life, thereby unifying disparate readers despite vast distances. In newspapers’ more or less “simultaneous consumption,” they create what Benedict Anderson describes as a “mass ceremony” of both an intensely private and intensely communal experience thereby creating “that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.”¹⁰⁰ Even as recent scholars have rightly challenged Anderson’s notion of unified print cultures creating “imagined communities” critical to national identity formation, I do want to emphasize that the editors of the Black newspapers I examine advanced specific political causes and platforms as they positioned their papers as critically engaged in broader national debates and those specifically related to the Black communities they served.¹⁰¹

A critical element of the identity formation Black newspapers fostered was that of shaping modern, race-conscious consumers. With more images and advertisements than many of its rivals, the Pittsburgh Courier hailed readers into “consumer citizenship,” where purchasing offered “symbolic evidence of blacks’ accepted status in society.”¹⁰² Rather than just selling a product, the ads that appeared most often in the twenties Courier – furniture, dresses and suits, hair treatments and straighteners, skin lighteners, firearms, blues records and sermons, movies, and revues – generally perpetuated bourgeois Anglo-Saxon beauty and success standards as they sold a vision of purchasing pleasure and power. Beginning in late 1925, the Courier ran the syndicated humor column “Flivver Sam” about the hazards and pleasures of owning a car, the dominant icon of Jazz Age mobility and power: “Go buy a nice flivver / And then you won’t shiver / For you’ll be an ace in the pot – / Since it’s catch – as – catch can / With the speeding fan / It is better to ‘get’ than be ‘got.’”¹⁰³ Wherever possible, Courier society columnists noted signs of Black wealth through purchasing power – “world tour[s]s,” “Rolls Royces, Packards and Pierce Arrows,” and “Parisian wardrobe[s].”¹⁰⁴ Even as montaged elements of consumer culture presented ever more disconcerting, potentially alienating experiences, they still acted as a vital component of the dream world promise of advertising.

In his representation of artist genius, Alain Locke would turn away from the obviously commercial to celebrate the extraordinary diversity of New York’s Black print culture as evidence of Harlem’s and, by extension, the New Negro’s cosmopolitanism. Indeed, for Locke, Black magazines and newspapers, especially Marcus Garvey’s UNIA organ, the Negro World, which included, for a period, both French and Spanish sections, reflected not the tremendous transatlantic success of Garvey’s UNIA but rather the international cadences of a vital New Negro cultural movement: “The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem. A Negro newspaper carrying news material in English, French and Spanish, gathered from all quarters of America, the West Indies and Africa has maintained itself in Harlem for over five years.”¹⁰⁵ Black newspapers, by necessity, also sought to respond to the diasporic identities of their audience in ways that the major white dailies largely left to their foreign language counterparts.

For the increasingly sensationalist Black press, however, that cosmopolitanism extended to social and sexual transgressions, especially challenges to the color line, traditional gender roles, and sometimes compulsory heterosexuality. As Marjorie Perloff notes, in French, collage “is also a slang expression for two people living (pasted) together – that is to say, an illicit sexual union.”¹⁰⁶ Prohibition-era drinking, a blues and jazz craze, concentrated Jim Crowed vice districts coupled with quasi-integrated Harlem nightclubs and the marketing of the new, go-to destination of Harlem would encourage such illicit unions. Kim Gallon argues that Black editors and reporters in the twenties and thirties, appealing to readers’ interest in nonconforming sexual content, offered articles on Black homosexual and transgender activities that reflected a “politics of ambivalence,” but also an “African American sexual selfhood that was ignored and repressed in other contexts.”¹⁰⁷ Hayward Farrar describes the 1920s Baltimore Afro-American, with its biblical quotations and moralism coupled with its salacious news coverage, as a “blend of the prurient and the pious.”¹⁰⁸ At the same time, the Afro-American and the Pittsburgh Courier, particularly in the thirties, explored the politics of interracial sex through popular romances. Of the texts I examine in the Courier, only one second serialization includes an apparent interracial relationship, but a number of them include Black female characters who have some “sexual subjectivity,” reinforced by risqué blues ads and pictures of seductive chorus girls on the same page in the same issue.¹⁰⁹

Harlem appears in much of the fiction I analyze as the symbolic catalyst of a deeply contentious modern New Negro, at odds with the celebratory “crucible” in Locke’s March 1925 issue of the Survey Graphic. Using language evocative of Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) and Israel Zangwill’s Melting Pot (1908) to describe the “new man” created by the ideals and circumstances of a new nation, Locke described Harlem as a beacon for dark-skinned people around the world who have migrated to Harlem. From vastly heterogenous backgrounds, these Negroes, seized by a desire for “group expression and self-determination,” found themselves part of a great “race welding”:

Locke’s move in claiming the national symbolism of a predominantly racist nation, was, for Houston Baker, an act of extreme “deformation of mastery.” In his declaration, Locke was, “writing a black renaissance and righting a Western Renaissance.”¹¹¹

In contrast to the vision of Harlem that appeared in 1920s higher-brow publications, Black newspapers offered a decidedly more ambivalent depiction of the Black Mecca, particularly as white law enforcement increasingly funneled vice into Black districts and white revelers found Harlem “slumming” thrilling. Offering as many “illusions” of freedom – in terms of alcohol, gambling, and commodified sex – as it did less treacherous avenues for free expression and empowerment, the New York Age, New York Amsterdam News, and Pittsburgh Courier balanced its cautionary tales with its reasons to celebrate.

In the newspapers I look at, Black journalists became the preeminent New Negroes of the urbanscape as they and the papers they represented not only fought for racial justice, challenging pervasive Jim Crow stereotypes of mental and moral inferiority but also served as savvy “tour guides” of a potentially treacherous city.¹¹² In keeping with Du Bois’ injunction that Black art be propagandistic to challenge Jim Crow stereotypes, the vast majority of New Negro protagonists may stray, but they always returned to a New Negro ideal of hardworking, steadfast, usually well-educated, middle-class race leaders who are, almost invariably, committed to heteronormative family structures.¹¹³ While the New Negro male protagonists hold various highly esteemed positions – Pullman porter, doctor, businessman, lawyer, and journalist – the New Negro female protagonists are, in general, defined by their plucky independence and affective commitment to race progress.¹¹⁴ Although Black female writers, especially, often affirmed a sexually expressive New Negro Woman, they opposed the sexually brazen Black flapper who threatened the race wife and mother. Yet, despite these narratives’ futurity of the New Negro woman returning to traditional gender and race representative roles, they position New Negro men and women as needing to know the workings of the Jazz Age as much as the evils of Jim Crow. The ideal New Negro always reads the news.

Although I do discuss serials that appeared in the Afro-American and the Amsterdam News, I focus more on fiction in the Pittsburgh Courier because it, along with the Afro-American, published the most serials among Black newspapers in the twenties. Begun in 1907 as what Robert Vann described as a “‘two-page sheet initiated by a Negro in a pickle factory,’” the Courier did not take off until Vann took ownership of it and hired Ira Lewis as the paper’s business manager. Adept at securing the best talent and promoting his newspaper using the most modern methods, Vann hired George Schuyler as a columnist in 1925 and Floyd J. Calvin as the New York branch manager a year later. By 1926, the Courier announced that it had won exclusive second serialization rights for The Fire in the Flint by well-known NAACP lynching investigator Walter White, who also submitted a theatrical review column for the paper. White felt so invested in the Courier’s success, in fact, that he promoted it among New York tastemakers as an essential voice of the Renaissance. Although in 1927 the Courier had to close its branch office in New York City, it retained agents in New York, and after joining the Associated Negro Press in November of 1925, it increasingly shifted away from local news in favor of national coverage. By 1926, the Courier’s circulation was almost 55,000 (a figure that is likely much higher because of the high pass-along rate among Black readers), becoming second only to the Chicago Defender, which it would surpass in circulation by the late thirties.¹¹⁵ In 1927, the Courier’s special feature editor, Floyd J. Calvin, touted the paper’s technological innovations that allowed it to better depict the new era’s salacious goings on. New linotype printing technologies enabled it to include significantly more diverse feature content in each issue – articles ranging from birth control to salesmanship, movies to sports, fraternities to finance. In November of that year, the Courier hailed Calvin’s invitation to host the New York-based “Pittsburgh Courier Hour” – a radio broadcast the paper lauded as “the first time in the history of Negro journalism that a Negro newspaper has brought its own program to the radio world.” The following year, through a contract with the white-owned Chicago advertising agency the William B. Ziff Company, the Courier proclaimed that it had taken yet another “new forward step in Negro journalism” by securing the syndicated Illustrated Feature Section, initially edited by Schuyler and including fiction, true crime stories, cartoons, photographs, and celebrity gossip focused on African Americans. So many Black newspapers around the country ran the supplement that, according to Schuyler, it had a combined circulation of more than a quarter million.¹¹⁶ In October of 1928, Calvin then declared that the nationally syndicated Courier now had “It,” a slang term Elinor Glyn had coined in 1923 as shorthand for sex appeal.¹¹⁷ The following month, journalist and Boston Post feature writer Eugene Gordon declared that the Courier was America’s best Black weekly. H. L. Mencken agreed, and both he and Carl Van Vechten subscribed.¹¹⁸ I end my study with the Stock Market Crash of 1929 when a “new” direct action New Negro trope emerged to combat the compounded crisis of the Depression amid Jim Crow.

In Chapter 1, I seek to dislodge the dominant Harlem Renaissance narrative of a “cabaret school” wet victory over “prudish” dry Black Victorians.¹¹⁹ I focus on the career of Harlem writer Aubrey Bowser, who began editing the uplift literary journal The Rainbow, the official organ of Reverend Frederick A. Cullen’s Salem Methodist Episcopal Church (Rev. Cullen was the adoptive father of Countee Cullen), and who re-edited some of that material which then appeared in the Amsterdam News, Journal and Guide, as well as in the Afro-American. The printscape of Bowser’s work offers a fascinating window on the pressures that Jazz Age Black journalism placed on writers committed to racial uplift, as well as how Black newspapers bridged tensions between religious, dry, daytime tenets, and secular, wet nighttime indulgence. On the one hand, Black conservative journalists deplored what they saw as degenerate writing and behavior while castigating those events, people, and practices they deemed too transgressive. On the other hand, broad-based Black commercial papers depended on vice themes and advertisements to sell papers. As the Black press advertised, reported on, and editorialized “uplift” events concurrently with Harlem nightlife, it encouraged readers to mitigate at least some of those ideological divisions by offering a cosmopolitan vision of the New Negro.¹²⁰ Within this context, the cultural work of Bowser’s fiction, especially after 1925 when most Black newspapers shifted their stance and saw Prohibition as a failure, assuaged readers that “knowing” wet Harlem did not mean abandoning the church and attending church didn’t mean condemning the cabaret.

Chapters 2 through 4 examine a succession of anti-lynching novels serialized by the Pittsburgh Courier and Afro-American, which, by 1919, had the largest circulation of any Black newspaper on the East Coast, signifying that the fight against lynching was central to popular New Negro fiction. While the only essay in Locke’s New Negro anthology to mention lynching is Walter White’s and he does so generally, for Black newspaper editors, vivid and specific anti-lynching narratives were imperative.¹²¹

In Chapter 2, I examine both the extraordinarily fraught printscape surrounding the twenties Ku Klux Klan and lynching to demonstrate how the autodidact Joel Augustus Rogers turned the mirror, both literally and figuratively, on his southern white antagonist. When the NAACP and leading Black journalists celebrated the New York World’s 1921 exposé of the Ku Klux Klan’s financial wrongdoing and vigilantism, they anticipated that the negative coverage would kill the organization “deader than a doornail.” Instead, the free publicity proved a boon for Klan membership, and the all-out Klanification of popular American print culture soon followed. Compounding the complexity of the Jim Crow printscape, Black anti-lynching activists determined that publicizing lynching atrocities had the best chance of mobilizing Black people while awakening white people’s seemingly moribund conscience. When the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill won passage in the House of Representatives in January of 1922, civil rights leaders saw the possibility that a majority of white US lawmakers could be convinced to use the power of the federal government to bring lynchers to justice. Even though that hope would be crushed later when Southern Democratic senators filibustered the Bill, the NAACP and the Black literary journalists I focus on were convinced that lynching could provoke moral transformations. The catalyst for what I call these “liminal crucible” moments are spectacle lynchings of such abject barbarism that they propel white characters out of their complacency and into personal crises of racial reckoning and ultimately civil rights commitment.

Yet in writing such narratives, Joel Augustus Roger, Joshua H. Jones, Jr., and Walter F. White faced a double dilemma: how to avoid turning the atrocity of lynching into grisly dehumanizing spectacle and how to deploy New Negro protagonists to refute a lynching “logic” that depended on “Old Negro” stereotypes. If defenders of lynching insisted that it served as just retribution for the supposed “new negro crime” of the rape of white women, the New Negro, in having to prove his utmost propriety, still left unaddressed the “Old Negro” stereotype whose behavior supposedly needed reform. The New Negro relationship to the Black lynching victim, then, was especially fraught. If too aloof, his murder risked becoming lurid sensationalism. If too close, his suffering might overwhelm the New Negro’s triumph. If the New Negro himself became a lynching victim, the writer risked consigning him to the status of unmanly victim. And if the lynching victim were a Black female, a fact which in itself refuted the logic of the supposed “new negro crime,” her murder might overtake the masculinist lynching narrative. All three of these second serializations published in succession wrestle with these questions as they reveal the exigencies of New Negro politics in the Klan era.

I then turn to the first in the series of anti-lynching novels the Pittsburgh Courier published, Rogers’ semi-autobiographical debate novel From “Superman” to Man (1917), which features an erudite Pullman porter methodically debunking the anti-Black racist arguments of a southern senator traveling on his route. Signifying on the pseudoscientific foundations of Jim Crow bigotry, the New Negro porter turns what Eric Lott calls the “black mirror” – “all the beautiful (or demonic) attractions of ‘blackness,’ generated out of a thousand media sources and ideological state apparatuses [essential] for the reproduction of national white selfhood if not dominance” – back on the senator to reveal, ultimately, the utter abjection of white supremacy.¹²² Having already “proved” the Negro’s humanity through his erudition, the porter’s explicit reading of a gruesome lynching becomes a catalyst for the senator’s “liminal crucible” moment, a moral transformation great enough that he ultimately offers the porter a job in his film studio devoted to combatting race prejudice.

Part of the fascination of Rogers’ influential but little studied novel are the revisions Rogers made from his 1917 novel to his 1923 serialization. These edits reveal Rogers’ increasing anger over the growing brutality and frequency of white mob violence as well as the race-baiting newspapers that fomented it. I demonstrate how Rogers negotiated the contradictory imperatives the New Negro faced in the early twenties. On the one hand, given the ascendancy of Klannish ideology, the New Negro, especially within the montaged context of the newspaper, increasingly “proved” his quintessentially American identity by comparing himself more favorably to immigrants in his capacity for assimilationist uplift. On the other, in the spirit of the post–World War I radical New Negro – epitomized by early followers of Marcus Garvey – he embraced race consciousness and the left. This paradox, I argue, ultimately meant that despite the southern senator’s conversion to Black civil rights, Rogers’ New Negro remains subsumed within a racial capitalist culture industry.

In Chapter 3, I examine Joshua Henry Jones’ By Sanction of Law, originally published as a stand-alone novel in 1924 and then serialized in the Pittsburgh Courier and Afro-American. Jones made lynching at once more visceral, horrifying, and threatening to the principal characters than had Rogers, suggesting both greater urgency for federal anti-lynching action and a greater need for a new white consciousness. By including a white man, a pregnant Black woman, and a New Negro character among the lynching victims, describing the lynchings in the novel’s real time, crafting his lynching scenes as dramatic white racial self-reckonings, and depicting what appears as an interracial romance, Jones offers a more radical antilynching vision than Rogers.¹²³ In direct opposition to the dictates of white supremacist eugenicists, Jones evokes Israel Zangwill’s melting pot as the remedy to America’s lynch logic.

I show how the montage of paratextual articles surrounding By Sanction of Law’s serialization shaped readers’ understanding of it. While the novel offers very little character development in its lynching scene, within the pages of these newspapers, it would have engaged what Leigh Radford calls a “critical Black memory” of the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner.¹²⁴ And although the novel does not directly mention twenties-era racial purity campaigns or the nativism and interracial marriage bans they generated, within the context of the newspapers, it deeply engages these movements. Within the pages of the Black press in the mid-twenties, it was racial, gendered, and sexual boundary transgressions that increasingly defined the modern and “new,” not the Klan and its sympathizers who demanded specious, immutable racial and gender barriers to police claims of “100% Americanness.” Given prevailing nativism coupled with the fear of increased job competition from new immigrants, however, the Black press generally opposed unrestricted immigration on the grounds that it posed a threat to Black employment opportunities and public safety. Like Rogers, Jones emphasized both the essential performative nature of American identity, epitomized by the New Negro’s education, demeanor, and work ethic, but unlike Rogers, Jones raised the nativist specter of radical immigrant agitators.

Ultimately, I show how the Pittsburgh Courier and Afro-American encouraged their readers to come to significantly different conclusions about the novel’s import. For the more nativist Courier, Eastern and Southern European immigrants imperiled Black American livelihoods. Readers of the Courier saw a montaged content that emphasized both violent white mobs and Southern and Eastern European immigrants as serious threats, certainly not equivalent in degree, but, nonetheless, both to be met with decisive legislation and literal or figurative armed self-defense. Read within the context of the less nativist Afro-American, the culmination of Truman and Lida’s romance represents a hard-fought claim to an honorable, “unbleached,” American melting pot, what the paper saw as the ultimate remedy to Jim Crow discrimination and violence. The right to honorable amalgamation was paramount, but, regardless, any attempts at re-bleaching would fail.

In Chapter 4, I examine the last, most canonical, and most controversial anti-lynching novel in the Pittsburgh Courier’s series, Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint. Reflecting the paper’s greater cynicism after 1925, both regarding Prohibition and the repeated failure of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, The Fire in the Flint offers no white transformation but rather ends in the bitterness of a failed cooperative initiative and the lynching of both of its New Negro protagonists. When the New Negro physician’s culminating gesture of selfless professionalism is misconstrued by the town’s Klansmen, a white mob – another such mob had already murdered his more radical New Negro brother – ambushes and kills him. Loosely based on White’s NAACP lynching investigations of the 1919 Elaine massacre, the novel is the only work of fiction I examine that generated a published letter to the editor lamenting the tragic ending.

Considered apart from the paratextual elements that surrounded it, White’s text worked to secure the Courier’s position as a dominant voice in the Harlem Renaissance and signaled the paper’s endorsement of the masculinist, interracial NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign. Read separately, the cultural work of the novel signaled that the New Negro protagonist must reject a self-centered, consumer-based professional masculinity in favor of the affective influence of the more communally and politically conscious, but clearly subordinate New Negro Woman. Imbued with a new commitment to work on behalf of racial justice, this “new” New Negro then seeks liaisons with sympathetic white leaders.

Considered within the montaged paratextual elements that surrounded it, however, women’s voices gain significantly more agency. Although some of the paratextual advertising, illustrations, and editorials of the Courier, reinforce the patriarchal assumptions of White’s New Negro, the advertisements for guns around the serial installments emphasize the “ghostly” presence of Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching militance. In addition, just one month before the serialization of White’s novel appeared in January of 1926, the Courier began publishing a column by editor, writer, and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson on behalf of suffrage and the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. Informed by her long career as a writer, organizer, and civil rights activist, Dunbar-Nelson pushed the boundaries of the Woman’s Page in which her column appeared and discussed some of the very topics White addressed in his novel, including the Georgia Ku Klux Klan. Reading White’s serial in conjunction with Dunbar-Nelson’s column reanimates Black women’s leadership, especially given that in White’s novel, New Negro Women protagonists are the only survivors.¹²⁵

In Chapter 5, I examine how four Pittsburgh Courier writers – Julia Bumry Jones, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Blanche Taylor Dickinson, and Zora Neale Hurston – code the cabaret flapper’s “sexual spending” within both the ideology of “race motherhood” and what Erin Chapman describes as the “sex-race marketplace.”¹²⁶ The Courier’s typical cabaret flapper indulges – in fashion, alcohol, and sexual conquests – even as she must “sell” herself to sustain her rate of consumption. And yet, even as these writers present the Black flapper as threatening the New Negro Man, and by extension the race due to her “wasteful” excesses and dysgenic spending, they both heighten and dampen their critique through their construction of the flapper’s foil: the “race mother.” Rather than presenting the New Negro Woman as hopelessly caught between the “servile mammies and selfish, over-sexed divas” of the “sex-race marketplace” and the dutiful, idealized race mother, these writers affirm modern, urban, resilient but pragmatically more conservative versions of the New Negro Woman. Instead of passing for white, renouncing professional and artistic careers to marry, or succumbing to the stuporific effects of serial pregnancies, the heroines of newspaper fiction never aspire to self-sufficient artistic careers nor to leave the Black community. With help from Old Negro maternal figures, they fix their flawed marriages and develop more companionate ones. When a flapper tempts their spouse to infidelity, they gain the moral high ground even as readers see that the pleasures of fashion and sex can be compatible with a newly redefined race mother status. Unable to count on their husband’s race marriage commitment, Black women, these stories suggest, must up their game if they are to compete with the flapper in this new more hedonistic age. At the same time, however, within the montaged context of the newspaper, this stepping up represents not a fall from the purity-demands of “moral motherhood,” but a fun, desirable, and distinctly modern revision of this iconic race figure.¹²⁷

Perhaps what is most striking about all of these female literary journalists, however, is that, unlike the New Negro (Man) and Locke’s vision, these women writers reclaim a grandmotherly, domestic, or, in Hurston’s case, defiantly folk Black woman, associated with a southern rural past. These “old” Negro Women auntie or mammy figures nurture Black women and restore Black marriages or relationships fractured by urban temptation. When Locke declared in his anthology that “[t]he day of ‘aunties,’ ‘uncles’ and ‘mammies’ is … gone,” he effaced a Black female tradition in popular newspapers where Black-centered and affirming versions of these figures emerge to provide a crucial healing function. Refusing to indulge in the shaming of the light-skinned elite New Negro Woman, these mammy or auntie figures do not represent the race as “progressive and race conscious” modern New Negro mothers, but, rather, they nurture and console the Black female protagonist suffering trauma associated with the Great Migration, or, in the case of Hurston, they draw on a Black signifying tradition for empowerment.¹²⁸

In Chapter 6, my final chapter, I examine George Schuyler’s 1928 serial “Chocolate Baby: A Story of Ambition, Deception, and Success,” which first appeared in the popular white-owned Black newspaper supplement the Illustrated Feature Section, which Schuyler edited. Following pulp conventions of the beautiful young woman in distress – the virtuous heroine is continually on the verge of being sexually assaulted before the “to be continued” – he defies these conventions by crafting her as a sexually assertive version of the New Negro Woman, modeled after increasingly popular light-skinned female entertainers. Even though the narrative does not include the chorus girls alluded to in the title – the title evokes the sexual desirability, transgression, and commodification of Black women in the “sex-race marketplace.” As the social and religious mores that protect the heroine appear outmoded – quaint, southern, and ultimately inimical to the modern age – the “tragic” mulatta in “Chocolate Baby,” Martha Hastings, becomes both active agent in her seduction and victim of male predation. Schuyler, who had married a prominent white woman, has his New Negro protagonist invoke the Mann Act against her “handsome and crafty” seducer, Gordon Johnson. Also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, the Mann Act banned the interstate transportation of women “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” As the Black press frequently reported, however, rather than protecting all women regardless of skin color, the Act had been deployed to police consensual relationships between Black men and white women – most famously in the prosecution of boxer Jack Johnson. Ultimately, Martha marries her New Negro, but drops the charges against her seducer, a plotting decision on Schuyler’s part that within the serial’s montaged printscape moved the seemingly apolitical intraracial romance to a deeply political critique of racism in the selective prosecution of interracial relationships. In this startling reversal of his cautionary tale, Schuyler turns from his warning about the sexual vulnerability and commodification of Black women whose passions hold sway, to arguably the most politically charged issue in the history of race relations, his endorsement of decriminalizing sexual unions between Black men and white women.

Ultimately, the Harlem Renaissance Weekly charts the evolution of four interconnected arguments: within the montaged Black newspaper reading experience, the trope of the New Negro in these works helped readers reconceive and synthesize opposing and sometimes deeply divisive sociopolitical issues in daily life; twenties Black newspaper serial fiction centered the fight for anti-lynching federal legislation as the decade’s primary political imperative; contrary to Locke’s assertion, some Black writers, in this case only female ones, reclaimed Old Negro figures as essential to the New Negro Woman’s emergence; and although a New Negro (man) claimed political leadership, an increasingly predominant New Negro Woman—representing modern dynamism and assertiveness—refused to be confined to the Woman’s Page. If we take the twenties literary journalism of the Afro-American and Pittsburgh Courier, rather than Locke’s New Negro as the ur-texts defining the movement, what emerges is a shared recognition of certain civic, cultural, and literary leaders, but, at the same time, a far greater political engagement and female-centeredness. As this 1920s weekly New Negro Renaissance is inextricably tied to Black newspapers’ function and characteristics, it acknowledged and sometimes reconciled tensions between a number of seemingly irreconcilable Black political and social world views: Black nationalist and integrationist, liberal (even, at times, radical) and conservative, Northern and Southern, Black and white, religious and secular, folk and urban, masculine and feminine, church and cabaret, communal activism and individual expression. In the Courier’s literary journalism, romance becomes a means of interracial, sectional, and personal reconciliation, a guard against selfish individualism in favor of race-work activism, a means of negotiating urban pleasure and danger while healing from the betrayal and loss migration wrought. That literary journalism also reflects a still unfolding history of one of the most important tropes in the social media campaign for Black civil rights: the New Negro.¹²⁹