The Color of Blood: John Brown, Jean Toomer, and the New Negro Movement

The figure of John Brown was represented distinctively in the discourses, political and literary, of the New Negro Movement. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and the “red summer” of 1919, Brown—and radical abolitionism more generally—came to signify present possibilities for revolutionary anti-racism. The paper examines the fear-ridden representation of Brown in Thomas Dixon’s The Man in the Gray (1921) and the inspirational role assigned to Brown in Jean Toomer’s 1922 short story, “Withered Skin of Berries.”