Chicago or Harlem

Both Baldwin’s Chicago’s New Negro and Locke’s The New Negro ,based on blacks in New York , focus on the cultural revelation that is the “New Negro” and the specific aspects of what qualifies as the “New Negro.” However where this renaissance and how are slightly different between the two scholars. As we discussed earlier in the course the Negro Renaissance is readily associated with New York and more specifically Harlem. The Harlem Renaissance was a remarkable boom of creativity in the arts, literature and music. Baldwin too agrees that this is pivotal to the Renaissance but it is not central to Harlem and it is also not central to the arts. Baldwin brings into account that those like Jack Johnson are also critical characters responsible for the emergence of the new negro. Johnson, a Black boxer would subvert notions of black inferiority by pummeling his white opponents essentially destroying ideas of white dominance . Baldwin writes: “what jack Johnson seeks to do to Jefferies in the roped arena will be more the ambition of Negros in every domain of human endeavor.” He prophetically asserted that alongside Johnson the Negro poet, sculptor, and scholar, would “keep the white race busy for the next few hundred years.” Those like Johnson, who were not necessarily the intellectual or “artsy type,” created a wider spectrum to blacks and allowed more then just intellectuals to be part of the movement is allowed businessmen, as well as other innovators and black inventers to be recognized as part of the greater movement. Baldwin credits the notion of the new negro to the mass consumer market looking outside the spectrum of the Harlem negro.