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 his surroundings, with his “shoulders towering high above the throng” and with his “laughter arrogant and bold” (Johnson 1, 6, 13). His inner self is “too splendid for this city street” which he walks, setting him above the urban setting of Harlem and dismissing the tiresome and difficult features of everyday life, such as the daily pursuit of wealth demanded by New York’s capitalist social structure (Johnson 14). In this way, Johnson incorporates into the poem the New Negro Movement ideal of rich personal identity and personality, defying the convention of the Old Negro, whose “shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality” (Locke 4).

This “splendidness” which the subject possesses, Johnson seems to posit, originates from his heritage and cultural history as a descendant of Africans. For example, between the lines describing the Negro in Harlem’s aloofness to the city life around him, she describes his “head thrown back in rich, barbaric song / Palm trees and mangoes stretch[ing] before your eyes” (Johnson 7-8). By invoking the “palm trees and mangoes” presumably emblematic of Africa, Johnson presents the image of a New Negro whose gaze transcends the toil and suffering of the Northern Black laborer and instead looks toward a vision of lush African abundance; additionally, the “rich, barbaric song” the poem’s subject sings represents his creative expression of his own heritage as music becomes a way to connect with his African ancestors from generations ago. Africa, then, becomes a source of cultural, spiritual and economic fullness, healing a generational wound where before the racism and oppression of the United States created loss and deprivation in all three spheres.

A similar message of reclaiming one’s dignity through embracing African heritage appears in Gwendolyn Bennett’s “To a Dark Girl.” Like Johnson, Bennett addresses a Black subject (the “Dark Girl”) and describes the warring sides of her identity as both a person who has suffered from American oppression and the heiress to a rich cultural heritage passed down by her African ancestors. For example, the first stanza of the poem describes the Dark Girl’s “breaking sadness” as the victim of racism and oppression, whereas the second stanza at first counters that image by revealing that “Something of old forgotten queens / Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk” before going back to the image of oppression in slavery by describing the “shackled slave / … in the rhythm of your walk” (Bennett 3-8). The third and final stanza finally appears to “decide” between the two, imploring the girl to “Keep all you have of queenliness, / Forgetting that you once were slave” (Bennett 10-11). By representing the struggle for dominance of the two sides of the Dark Girl’s identity before the “queenliness” wins out, Bennett suggests a triumphant victory of the dignity granted to her by her ancestors over the oppression that shackles her by the hands of American slavery.

The last stanza of “To a Dark Girl” also crucially answers a question posed by various other authors in the Harlem Renaissance, such as Countee Cullen, who asks “three centuries removed … What is Africa to me?”, and Claude McKay, who believes that “Something in me is lost, forever lost” due to the cultural theft of the slave trade (Cullen 7-10; McKay 9). Bennett responds to these sentiments, declaring that Black people, in order to become the aspirational New Negro, must “forget” the trauma of slavery (not literally, but spiritually and emotionally) and “keep” the dignity passed down by their ancestors from Africa. Only through embracing their African heritage and allowing it to triumph over the more recent and traumatizing history of slavery, Bennett argues, can Black American individuals begin to reclaim their self-respect and dignity.

Both Helene Johnson’s “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” and Gwendolyn Bennett’s “To a Dark Girl” address the title figure’s African heritage as contrasted with their American life experience and cultural history. By presenting the former’s supersession of the latter, the two authors advocate for a reimagination of Black American identity in which the Old Negro stereotypes of “Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed” and given way to what Alain Locke calls “Negro life[’s] first chances for group expression and self-determination” (Locke 5, 7). Within the context of the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance, Africa represents, by way of its prevailing remnant in each of its diasporic children, a chance for Black American individuals and communities to once more access at once the economic prosperity, rich cultural heritage, and spiritual dignity that had previously been stolen from them by European imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

Works Cited

Bennett, Gwendolyn. “To a Dark Girl.” The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922.

Cullen, Countee. “Heritage.” My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Anchor Books, 1991.

Johnson, Helene. “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem.” Poem-a-Day, Academy of American Poets, February 23, 2023.

Locke, Alain. “The New Negro.” The New Negro: Voice from the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Alain Locke, Touchstone, 1997.

McKay, Claude. “Outcast.” Poem-a-Day, Academy of American Poets, July 7, 2019.