Harlem Renasissance
During the Harlem Renaissance a new feeling of racial pride emerged in the Black Intelligential. The Black Intelligential consisted of African-American writers, poets, philosophers, historians, and artists whose expertise conveyed five central themes according to Sterling Brown, a writer of that time: "1) Africa as a source of race pride, 2) Black American heroes 3) racial political propaganda, 4) the "Black folk" tradition, and 5) candid self-revelation." Two of the main people responsible for this new consciousness were W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Du Bois laid a foundation for this dawn of racial pride in his essays. Locke took Du Bois' initial idea one step further with his writings and aiding younger writers and artists that appeared during the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes was one of the writers that Locke mentored. Hughes was a devote believer of exhibiting pride in the Black race; this theme was often exhibited in his writing. These three men have each contributed and advanced the sentiment of racial pride in their own unique way during the Harlem Renaissance. In order to fully understand the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes it is imperative to know their backgrounds. William Edwar
In Locke's essay The New Negro, he spoke of a new generation of African-Americans that had ". Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter formed the Niagara Movement in 1905. "Therefore the Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not. Alain Locke was born on September 13, 1886 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Locke, like Du Bois, wanted African-Americans to believe in themselves and realize how beautiful and intelligent they were. However, it remained for Alain Locke to stress to Blacks of post-World War I America that whites were not really paying much attention, and that the time had come for Blacks to cease propagandizing and reach into themselves to express their suffering throughout art rather than pamphleteering. After Harvard, Du Bois traveled to Europe and studied in Berlin for a year. They must stand alone clothed only in their brilliance and pride, pride in their race and pride in themselves, for that is the only way that they can become a true artist; "We younger Negro artists who create now intended to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. He enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee where he was an editor for the school newspaper. He believed that the most promising African-Americans (roughly 10% of the population), which he called "The Talented Tenth," should be educated in order to guide and teach the uneducated Blacks; "The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the mass away from the contamination and the death of the Worst, in their own and other races. " Du Bois wanted The Crisis to be a magazine of great substance that published issues related to the Caucasian and African-American public, but he had a special interest in African-American racial problems and their solutions. In his essay "The Talented Tenth" Du Bois stressed the importance of education amongst the Black race.
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Acceptance Essays
