The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

"We want you to take a certain role in the movement," wrote Charles S. Johnson to Alain Locke on March 4, 1924, and thereby changed his life and the future of Negro literature forever. "I may have spoken to you of a little group," Johnson continued, "which meets here [at the offices of Opportunity] with some degree of regularity, to talk informally about ‘books and things.' "1 That group included a number of young people Locke already knew well: Countee Cullen, Jamaican-born aesthete Eric Walrond, budding Symbolist poet Gwendolyn Bennett, and Cullen confidant Harold Jackman, as well as Crisis literary editor Jessie Fauset, her friends Eloise Bibb Thompson and New York City Librarian Regina Anderson, along with Johnson himself. On one level, such meetings were little more than a New York version of Georgia Douglas Johnson's "Saturday Nighters." But because Charles S. Johnson hosted the New York meetings, they were something more. Johnson saw the literary group as a new answer to the question, what should the Negro do? Write-without propaganda or special pleading for the Negro cause-but with confidence that creative writing by Black people would ultimately help liberate a people. One way to instill such confidence was to meet regularly.

There have been some very interesting sessions and at the last one it was proposed that something be done to mark the growing self-consciousness of this newer school of writers and as a desirable time the date of the appearance of Jessie Fauset's book [There Is Confusion] was selected, that is, around the twentieth of March. The idea has grown somewhat and it is the present purpose to include as many of the newer school of writers as possible,-Walter White (who in a sense is connected with this group), Jean Toomer, and yourself.