The New Negro and the Black Church

I am examining how the Black Baptist church aided in the construction of the New Negro identity. The Great Migration afforded the Black churches of the North a challenge because they had to accommodate and help the influx of Southerners. In Bound For the Promised Land, Milton Sernett, observes the church as the most central institute in the African American experience.  The Reverend Lacey Kirk Williams of Olivet Baptist Church was mentioned as a church that quickly responded to the migrants needs. Reverend Williams sent church members to the train stations to direct migrants and he soon transformed the church into a social service center. The church became an agent of self-help and economic self-determination. These two elements represented the New Negro movement. Because there were few entities that catered to the needs of the Black community the Black church was expected to help themselves. The Black church was an independent institute that had the ability and finances to be self-sufficient.  The Olivet Baptist Church was able to feed, clothe, and assist migrants in finding housing and employment. Furthermore, they hosted educational, social, and recreational activities. They were financially independent and able to use their money in ways that empowered and helped the Black community. Olivet’s reputation as an important social center rapidly spread and increased the church numbers. The bigger the church grew the more influential the church became in the community. The church was transforming from the “old tradition” to a New Negro church that was exhibiting social and economic power while also producing intellectual leaders and productive workers for the community.  The Northerner churches began to make it a priority to teach migrants how to obtain industrial jobs. This was part of the attempt to remove the “seasonal rhythms of farm work” ingrained in the South.  The churches goal was to focus not only on the spiritual but the “Gospel of Efficiency” in order to begin to transform Blacks into productive workers who can become financially stable and contribute back to the Black community to continue to grow the church and the social services started.

The New Negro vs The Chicago's New Negro

Alain Locke looked at the New Negro experience through mostly Harlem renaissance scholars, artists, and poets. Baldwin analyzed the New Negro experience through Chicago’s cultural marketplace intellectual life, which included the working-class and leisure-based labor as contribution to the New Negro experience.  Baldwin argues that the musicians, beauty culturists, athletes, gamblers, and film directors were all part of Chicago’s New Negro intellectual life. Baldwin says we need to look at the reconstruction of the Black Metropolis in Chicago as both a built environment and an ideal to help understand a more comprehensive New Negro movement. Baldwin argues that the night life of vice in the Black Metropolis could be considered as the basis or foundation for the New Negro experience. Many race leaders did not see music clubs, beauty salons, and theater spaces as venues for the articulation of the metropolis model of race pride that the New Negro resembled.  Baldwin created another narrative for these people and sites of nightlife that traditionally have not been looked at for intellectual life. Baldwin starts with Jack Johnson as a figure who embodied the New Negro because he is examining the mass consumer marketplace as a significant site for the New Negro (p. 5). Jack Johnson defeat of Jeffries meant that scientific theories were challenged, and white supremacy denied.  Johnson’s victory lead to race riots and economic losses in the Black community, but Blacks actually retaliated and fought back collectively. These acts of resistance resembled the New Negro spirit that Baldwin examined. Baldwin continues to argue that, “to place a Chicago migrant and mass cultural icon like Johnson at the center of the ‘New Negro’ movement forces a serious rethinking of the relationship between consumer culture and intellectual life” (p.5).  This “rethinking” enables a full understanding of the New Negro experience.

 Alain Locke interpretation of the New Negro does not include the working-class members that were not part of the so called elite group of intellectuals. Locke focused more on the artistic self-expression of the New Negro. The book emphasized the achievements of Blacks in the arts and focused on the New Negro experience as a cultural revolution taking place out of the Harlem Renaissance.  Both Locke and Baldwin expressed that Black business and Black entrepreneurs were a symbol or race pride and embodied the New Negro. For example, Madame C.J. Walker beauty enterprise emphasized race pride and respectability. Locke emphasized that part of the New Negro identity was uplifting the Black race and keeping their respectability or dignity. Furthermore, both men understood that part of the New Negro experience was to challenge the ideas of beauty which revolved around the emulation of White beauty standards. Furthermore, Locke expressed that the spirit of African expressions and art was disciplined and sophisticated. He expressed artists should gain the “lesson of a classic background, the lesson of discipline, of style, of technical control pushed to the limits of technical mastery” (The New Negro, p. 256). In Chicago’s New Negroes, Baldwin expressed how within the beauty culture Blacks were able to create their own discipline and style for beauty that represented the New Negro.

The New Negro Connection to The Warmth of Other Suns

The poem The Road by Helene Johnson illuminates the fight Blacks needed to keep their pride in the face of racism. Helene Johnson expresses a road that is “brown as my race is brown, your trodden beauty like our trodden pride”.  The road symbolic of Blacks dignity is an intangible that many were searching for up North.  In The Warmth of Other Suns,  Ida Mae fought to keep her dignity. She exemplified the spirit of the New Negro in her early years by her fearless attitude and ability to think for herself.  Ida Mae understood there was a Southern caste system that kept everyone confined to certain rules.  Ida Mae was fearless and worked to keep her pride despite this caste system which imprisoned both Blacks and Whites.  For example, Ida was placed in an extremely dangerous position when she was desperate for money, but she still had the courage to walk away with the situation with her dignity. Ida took a one week job cleaning a wealthy White couple’s apartment and she was unaware that the husband would demand sex. Ida expressed that,  “ He didn’t say no  more’ cause he seen I wasn’t that type of person” (p 336).  Ida Mae understood from the stories she heard in the South that this type of incident was common but some new fire inside of her would not allow her to be stripped of her self-worth. She was fearless and demanded by her presence that she was going to as Helene Johnson exclaimed “rise to one brimming golden” and not allow her pride to be bruised down.  

The caste system’s unwritten or invisible rules allowed for Black women to be stripped of liberties and for the ruling class to not face any consequences. The militant spirit in the New Negro allowed for Ida to break away from these invisible rules and stand her ground.

A Self-Assessment

I came into UCSB as a Business Economics major. I was deceived by the title and thought I would be engaging in rigorous Business courses, but I soon found out that was not the case. I was struck by an unnecessary amount of Economics courses packed with theory and no practical application. I felt something was missing and that empty hole was soon filled by my fascination with the Black Studies courses.

In high school I was rarely exposed to Black history and most history books shrunk the Black experience to a couple of pages. I first encountered an insightful elaboration of Black history through Black Studies 1 Introduction to Afro-American Studies with Professor Lipsitz. After the first week of class I was so excited I was calling everybody and telling them about the distortions and missing pieces of history that had been unknown to me. I was showing off my new vocabulary and throwing words like epistemology and hegemony in my conversations to sound smart. I felt compelled to take more Black Studies courses such as critical intro to race (Black Studies 4) and intro to Caribbean studies (Black Studies 7).  After taking these two classes I decided my career at UCSB would not be complete unless I doubled majored with Black Studies. My perspective on everything changed dramatically. I began to question every part of history and relook at historical events through the critical lens I developed by taking Black Studies classes. Until I took Black Studies 4 I had not realized the patterns of systematic racism and did not understand how much racism still existed.   

One of the classes I enjoyed the most was the education of Black children taught by Professor Johnson. This class was extraordinary because Professor Johnson pulled together almost every discipline into one class to express the savage disparities in education for Black children. This class enhanced my critical thinking skills and allowed me to analyze harmful ideologies and their effects. Furthermore, this class instilled in me the philosophy of education for freedom and inspired me to be successful.  More importantly I’ve learned that knowledge is powerful. Now that I’m equipped with the tools to better understand the injustices pertaining to the Black experience, I feel more complete and competent to understand the world around me.