Restoring Black Dignity: The Role of African Heritage in New Negro Identity
Restoring Black Dignity The Role of African Heritage in New Negro Identity According to Alain Locke, the concept of the New Negro which emerged during the Harlem Renaissance finds its cornerstone in Black individuals’ and communities’ “renewed self-respect and self-dependence” (as compared with the Old Negro’s “protective social mimicry forced upon him by the adverse circumstances of dependence”) (Locke 3-4). In this essay, I explore how representations of the New Negro’s African culture and heritage in Harlem Renaissance poetry (more specifically Helene Johnson’s “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” and Gwendolyn Bennett’s “To a Dark Girl”) enforce and facilitate the restoration of Black dignity in the United States. Helene Johnson’s “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” exemplifies the newfound self-respect and self-sufficiency of the New Negro through its depiction of its central subject (the titular “Negro in Harlem”). Throughout the poem, the subject is represented as more “magnificent” than h...