"new Negro": The past and the crisis, The

At the turn of the century Booker T. Washington had written about the "New Negro," the black man of the twentieth century. Though his vision was clear, his timing was off. It was not until the cataclysmic changes and unprecedented imputs of World World I transformed hundreds of thousands of blacks from peons to cosmopolities that the New Negro emerged. He made his greatest impact on the consciousness of white Americans in the postwar period, in new voices, new leaders, new attitudes and new strength. It became apparent that the blacks had developed a spine.

The New Negro did not burst upon the American scene fully formed like some genie from Aladdin's lamp. Rather, his outlines, his strengths, his potential were revealed as much by his reaction to virulent white racism av by his own positive acts. In the year 1919, the perverse persecutions of white American; served to form and reveal a New Negro in much the way a lapidary brings out the inne reality of a rough gemstone by shipping and honing its surfaces. Nineteen nineteen was the year that the nation dedicated to making the world safe foi democracy demonstrated what it meant in practice by flaying, burning alive, lynching, massacring, driving from their homes and farms, jobs and schools, burning the houses and possessions of hundreds of American citizens because they were black.

Returning regiments of Negro veterans were cheered as heroes as they paraded up Main Street and were berated, insulted, beaten and lynched for being "uppity" and not "knowing their place" as individuals on the side streets.

Black workmen, who during the pressure of war production had been hailed as vital workers for victory, became, as war contracts were canceled and jobs were eliminated, a menace to "labor peace."

The tensions and inconvenience of overcrowding and underloaded facilities in the major industrial cities had been endured as patriotic during the war; with peace, and continued black migration to the cities, patience-by both blacks and whites-wore thin. Extemporaneous inter-racial violence and crimes of passion were augmented by the fruits of organized white racism, such as the bombing of Negro homes on Chicago's South Side by "patriotic" young white men.

Far-sighted citizens realized that it would take organization to prevent widespread race conflicts. The blacks with such vision enlisted in the efforts of the NAACP to eradicate lynching and disfranchisement, in the development of Urban League efforts to provide a vehicle for black progress and communication across the barricade of skin color, and in efforts of organizations such as the Association of Colored Women's Clubs, black Masons, Elks and fraternal societies and business groups.

Far-seeing whites went two different routes. The primary example of the ameliorative route was the formation and operation of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. The antithesis was the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan, with its gory Christian hypocrisy of "uniting native born white Christian for concerted action in the preservation of American institutions and the supremacy of the white race."

Examining the record of 1919, one might conclude that mob action against blacks had become the new national sport, replacing baseball and boxing. In addition to the lynching, there were twenty-five riots logged in the last half of 1919.

Much of the bloodiness of that year was caused by Negro adaptability and gullibility. The blacks had proven highly adaptable. They quickly learned to run the unfamiliar machines of American industry and the lethal devices of the American military. New literacy and new exposure to freedom and new ways of life in the industrial centers had taught by word and influence that black men were meant to share in the benefits of American democracy. They read the basic documents of America and heard the Wilsonian pronouncements and were gullible enough to believe that they applied to black Americans as well as white. They had shown similar gullibility after the Emancipation Proclamation nearly sixty years before.

Or were they gullible? Were they not rather the product of America's highest aspiration and expectations? With no allegiance to imported "isms" or nations, their beliefs and views had been taught by Americans and experienced in America alone. Their God-fearing faith in a higher destiny had sustained them, and the experience of being wanted and needed as free men in large numbers by industry and armed services tended to justify their belief in the system. Up until this time the major thrust of black thinking and leadership had been centripetal-moving toward the centers of American life, working for, believing in, demanding inclusion, even integration, in the system, in the society if not in social life. In spite of the contrary efforts and examples, the mass of black Americans held the ideal of eventual integration as an article of deepest faith. Thus the wartime evidence of a new degree of acceptance of blacks gave a new sense of self, of realization that they were on the threshold of a bold and truly democratic era.