Unit 5: Vocabulary from Readings

Although the phrase “New Negro” dates to the late nineteenth century, it was not until the 1920s that this label gained currency as a description for middle-class African Americans who advocated a new sense of militancy and racial pride.

Indeed, Alain Locke, an African-American philosopher, critic, and editor, titles his Harlem Renaissance literary anthology The New Negro (1925) in order to signal these powerful currents of black artistic consciousness, renewed civil rights advocacy, and racial solidarity.

Above all, “New Negroes” attempted to assert their own agency and participate fully in American culture, while resisting white America's attempts to cast them as a “problem” that somehow needed to be solved.

The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toil, a chance for the improvement of conditions.

Proscription and prejudice have thrown these dissimilar elements into a common area of contact and interaction.

That is why our comparison is taken with those nascent centers of folk-expression and self-determination which are playing a creative part in the world to-day.

Oh let them sing
Before the urgency of Youth's behest!

We claim no part with racial dearth;
We want to sing the songs of birth!

Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less.

In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business.

I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

She went out into the yard and returned with a galvanized tub and set it on the washbench.

She saw that Sykes had kicked all of the clothes together again, and now stood in her way truculently, his whole manner hoping, praying, for an argument.

“Next time, Ah’m gointer kick ’em outdoors,” he threatened as he struck a match along the leg of his corduroy breeches.

She lay awake, gazing upon the debris that cluttered their matrimonial trail.

The money was quickly subscribed and the huge melon brought forth.

She avoided the villagers and meeting places in her efforts to be blind and deaf. But Bertha nullified this to a degree, by coming to Delia’s house to call Sykes out to her at the gate.

The heat streamed down like a million hot arrows, smiting all things living upon the earth.

One day as Delia came down the kitchen steps she saw his chalky-white fangs curved like scimitars hung in the wire meshes.

Yo’ ole black hide don’t look lak nothin’ tuh me, but uh passle uh wrinkled up rubber, wid yo’ big ole yeahs flappin’ on each side lak uh paih uh buzzard wings.

She would expound what Ah felt....

Indeed, from first to last this is a well nigh perfect story—a little sententious at the start, but the rest is simple and beautiful and shining with humor.