Alain Locke's The New Negro: Aspects of Negro Culture

Alain Locke, in "The New Negro," suggests that the "old Negro" is really nothing more than a myth or an ideal. He talks about the fact that there are aspects of Negro culture - such as the spiritual - that were beaten down but were accepted when finally allowed to emerge. Locke then takes a look at some trends, including the tendency toward moving "city-ward," and says these are not because of poor or even violent conditions in the south nor of the industry in the north. Instead, he attributes this migration to "a new vision of opportunity." Locke then points out that the Negro is willing to work for better conditions and that this migration is not only toward the city and away from the country life, but also away from the old ways and toward the new.

New Negro is a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation. The term "New Negro" was made popular by Alain LeRoy Locke.

The New Negro," Locke described the landscape of Harlem as filled by different notions of what it meant to be a black American.

-Old Negro" as "more myth than a man" and the blind acceptance of this "formula" against ideas of "the thinking Negro" and the true diversity of actual human beings
This move is significant because Locke uses this idea to create space for a more accurate representation of the Negro community in light of the antecedent ideological poles of the moral leadership and imaged blackness.

Locke's primary goal in the essay "The New Negro" is to migrate from monolithic notions of an "Old Negro", as well as from the exhausted frameworks of bourgeois intellectual black leadership toward an idea that gives creative agency and credibility to the "rank and file" of Negro life (Locke, New Negro: 6).

-New Negro" as a means of rediscovering individuality of voice in the context of community.
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