The New Negro by Jeffrey C. Stewart

Author:Jeffrey C. Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190652852
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Here Locke put his foot down. “Let’s leave them out of this issue,” he wrote on February 17. “There is no use bringing in through the back-door what we have so ceremoniously bowed out of the front. You see their very names raise the issue. Moton is in the heat of the Tuskegee-Hampton campaign with more hat-in-hand arguments than ever. Indeed he would be publicly embarrassed with our platform. Let’s just stick to our original plan and put it over big.” Kellogg agreed “that we ought to stick to our original last—a fresh one—and I have been staving off the pressure of the philanthropic-economic-education group who thought we were neglecting them.”43

When the issue finally did appear on March 1, 1925, it was a stunning success. Some have claimed that the Harlem issue’s popularity was largely due to advance purchase of copies by philanthropists. The Survey Graphic records tell a different story. While Albert Barnes ordered one thousand copies to distribute personally in Philadelphia, George Foster Peabody ordered one thousand copies to be sent out to his friends in the United States and abroad, and Amy and Joel Spingarn ordered another one thousand for Locke to distribute to Negro schools and universities, by the time those copies had been delivered, the first edition of twelve thousand copies had sold out. The Survey Graphic ordered second and third editions of twelve thousand copies each, and within two more months those were sold out. More than forty thousand copies were sold in the final tally, making it the largest sales ever for a Survey Graphic issue. The Survey Graphic received record numbers of requests for new subscriptions as a result of the Harlem number as well.

The Harlem number benefited from great timing, arriving on newsstands just in time to give a newly awakened public the most comprehensive introduction to the movement available. It caught the movement on its ascendance and accelerated it because of Locke’s redefinition of the New Negro as a discursive sign of the future, an as-yet-unfinished subject that the readers of the magazine themselves could participate in constructing.

Also critical to its success was the collaboration between Locke and Kellogg. Locke had achieved something here that was unprecedented—to get a White mainstream journal to create the most powerful representation to date of Negro expression. The interaction among Locke, Kellogg, Reiss, and the staff, as well as the poets, sociologists, short-story writers and anthropologists, self-taught historians and degreed scholars was unique in American magazine history and resulted in an issue above and beyond what they could have done without that collaboration. The Harlem issue nicely embodied the central argument of the issue—that something transcendently beautiful emerged out of diversity, especially a diversity that went beyond simply the racial.

Perhaps, most remarkably, the issue seemed to speak to different, segregated audiences and elicit awe from almost all who picked it up and read it. Black people felt that it spoke for them, without committing them to any fixed position, by suggesting their untapped potential and Beauty.

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