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1. “Brightest Africa” in the New Negro Imagination
- University of Minnesota Press
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“Brightest Africa” in the New Negro Imagination JEANNETTE EILEEN JONES 1 In 1894, Reverend W. E. C. Wright declared, “We are making a new Negro.” This Negro would differ from the “American Negro of thirty years ago [who] was a product of African paganism and American slavery that called itself Christian.” A prominent clergyman from Cleveland, Ohio, Wright gave credit to missionary schools for educating a new generation of African Americans that would challenge the images of the Negro forged during slavery and Reconstruction that justified the political disenfranchisement and social segregation of the “race.” His “New Negroes” would contribute to the capitalist economy, participate in the “nation’s life,” and help propagate the Gospel around the world.1 Six years later, Booker T. Washington, Norman Barton Wood, and Fannie Barrier Williams would echo Wright’s sentiments in their book A New Negro for a New Century. The text catalogs the struggles of African Americans and their most important achievements made since emancipation and includes several portraits of distinguished men and women who exemplified the qualities of the New Negro for the twentieth century : educated, Christian, refined, business savvy, patriotic, and proud of their heritage. The volume highlights “the superb heroism” of soldiers who served in the Spanish–American War, male and female educators, clergymen, and clubwomen . Collectively, the essays in the volume discuss the roles that black men and women should play in uplifting and regenerating “the race” in the coming century. Arguably, the New Negroes featured are, for the most part, presented as apolitical. The women are noted for their dedication to education and “social betterment ,” the soldiers for their duty to the United States (perhaps the most political stance), the clergy for propagating the Gospel, and men like W. E. B. Du Bois for furthering the higher education of “Afro-Americans.”2 Of particular significance to this essay is the image of Africa that both fin de siècle visions of the New Negro described previously engage. For Wright, Africa is a site of “paganism” and, as such, one source of the “Old Negro’s” backwardness . Although not stating so outright, his essay alludes to a worldwide Christian 31 32 JEANNETTE EILEEN JONES evangelization that will include New Negro missionary work in Africa. A New Negro for a New Century confines its discussion of Africa to historical explications of the transatlantic slave trade, American slavery, colonization and emigration, missionary activities, and European imperialism. The various essays in the text assert that the New Negro’s relationship to Africa is remote, except for his duty to spread the Gospel and prevent the importation of rum onto the continent. However , as this essay will demonstrate, for a cadre of self-fashioned New Negroes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their relationship to Africa was anything but “remote.” This New Negro consciousness and identity that directly engaged Africa was both international and transnational in character. It involved people of African descent from across the diaspora, and within the United States, those New Negroes who occupied spaces outside Harlem, which had become the iconic site of the 1920s and 1930s New Negro movement and black activism. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett point out that the trope of the New Negro emerged in the nineteenth century and was inextricably linked to debates about the destiny of African Americans postemancipation. Indeed, much of the discussion of the New Negro in late-nineteenth-century literature reads the New Negro against the Old Negro supposedly benighted as a result of centuries of enslavement. Declaring that they were free New Negroes was to some extent a rhetorical move to reject rationales for Jim Crow legislation and white supremacy based on the logic of the Old Negro mythology. However, this should not distract us from the real political and social expressions of New Negro-ness that emerged during that same time period, particularly among blacks committed to Negro liberation and invested in Africa as a site of both redemption and black colonization. If we use their experiences as lenses through which to reinterpret the New Negro, we are forced not only to expand New Negro studies back into the late nineteenth century but to continue extending our discussions of the New Negro beyond that of a “movement” and consciousness associated with the Harlem Renaissance. One can locate the transnational New Negro preoccupation with Africa in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference (Kongokonferenz) in 1884. When Europeans met in Germany to carve up...