African Americans on the Great Plains: An Anthology

9. The New Negro Arts and Letters Movement among Black University Students in the Midwest, 1914–1940

The 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were an exciting time for black artists and writers in the United States. Much of the historical literature highlights the so-called Harlem Renaissance or its successor, the Black Chicago Renaissance. Few studies, however, document the inmuence of these artistic movements outside major urban cities such as New York, Chicago, or Washington dc. In his 1988 essay on black education, historian Ronald Butchart argued that the educational effects of black social movements such as the Harlem Renaissance on black schooling are unclear and underexplored.1 This article explores the inmuence of the New Negro arts and letters movement on black students at four midwestern state universities from 1914 to 1940. Black students on white midwestern campuses like the University of Kansas (ku), University of Iowa (ui), University of Nebraska (unl), and University of Minnesota (umn) aligned themselves with various New Negro philosophies that marked the onset of the New Negro arts and letters movement, or the Harlem Renaissance. The New Negro arts and letters movement had a profound inmuence on black college students. Black students expressed a New Negro consciousness in at least two ways: (1) they indirectly engaged in the discourses that surrounded the New Negro movement through black scholarly and popular publications, and (2) they engaged in racial The New Negro Arts and Letters Movement among Black University Students in the Midwest, 1914–1940 richard m. breaux chapter 9 The New Negro Arts and Letters Movement 205 vindication through classroom assignments, research, and other intellectual products that challenged prevailing myths of blacks’ intellectual and cultural inferiority to whites. Interestingly, black students at ku, ui, unl, and umn seemed less interested in who lnanced the arts movement than in casting their creative works into the growing sea of black literature and art. Newspapers such as the Topeka Plaindealer, the Iowa Bystander, and the Omaha Monitor, along with Opportunity and Crisis magazines, artistically and politically inspired black students at ku, umn, ui, and unl to behave, dress, and research issues relevant to black people like never before. National black fraternity and sorority publications such as Alpha Kappa Alpha’s Ivy Leaf provided young people the opportunity to publish their creative works. Literary scholars and historians largely ignore such publications, yet these sources offer a different view of the work produced by those associated with various New Negro arts and letters movements outside Harlem. In fact, black students and alumni did not simply follow the lead of black performing and visual artists in Harlem. These students created their own movement replete with its own poetry, music, and means of expression. Black students from all four universities left their distinct mark on the New Negro arts and letters movement. As scores of black men returned from World War I, they and many other blacks began to articulate a new militancy. If whites in the United States thought that they would continue to ignore blacks’ political, social, cultural, and economic concerns and contributions , they were wrong. An editorial in the Messenger, a black socialist magazine, said it best when it announced, “As among other peoples, the New Crowd [Negro] must be composed of young men who are educated, radical, and fearless. . . . The New Crowd would have no armistice with lynch law; no truce with Jim-Crowism, and disfranchisement; no peace until the Negro receives his complete social, economic, and political justice.”2 This and other New Negro 206 breaux philosophies permeated the minds of black students at ui, umn, ku, unl, and other universities. To a small degree, the very presence of these black students on predominantly white college and university campuses signaled their endorsement of one of the basic tenets of New Negroism—to demonstrate, consciously or unconsciously, that they were whites’ intellectual equals. When Alain Locke’s anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation, appeared in 1925, those blacks who subscribed to the black intelligentsia ’s New Negro philosophies lnally had their printed manifesto. Of course, in earlier decades Booker T. Washington, William Pickens, and a growing number of Black Nationalist and black socialist magazines had used the term “New Negro,” but this term took on new meaning for blacks during and after World War I. “In the last decade,” opened Locke’s essay in the lrst section, “something beyond the watch and guard of statistics has happened in the life of the American Negro.”3 Locke asserted that the “Old Negro” and the so...