The Harlem Renaissance And The New Negro Movement

In a time when the United States was hurling into a decade full of change with regards to society, with flappers and the New Negro Movement, many American citizens change the idea of themselves. Women turned their modest, Victorian image of themselves into a modern Flapper. African American citizens began to challenge the second class position given to them by fellow white Americans. With the New Negro Movement and the First Great Migration came the Jazz age, the explosion of a new musical and cultural phenomenon, from which the Harlem Renaissance sprouted from. However, the explosion of change brought about by women and African Americans was met with resistance led by the resurged Ku Klux Klan, which specifically targeted African Americans.

With the Harlem Renaissance and the First Great Migration, the concept of the New Negro emerged, rejecting the submissive and accepting lives of “old negroes” and pushing for more assertive African Americans that would not accept racism, segregation, and second-class treatment. African American women participated in both the New Women Movement and the New Negro Movement, simultaneously fighting women traditional expectations and abandoning the old expectations of the African American populations given to them by their white counterparts (Zeitz. 2016, 1-2). Some members of the New Negro movement so strongly followed the ideas put forth that members, such as Marcus Garvey, who believed in Black Nationalism. Marcus Garvey wanted to develop both the United States and Africa in this regard of black nationalism. Along with the ideas developed from the Harlem Renaissance and the First Great Migration, the Jazz Age also represented social change for African Americans with the explosion of a new musical and cultural phenomenon. The Jazz music was often associated with other new ideas that came to light within the 1920s such as illegal bars or speakeasies, flappers and the more open and liberal culture of urban