What does “New Negro” mean?

A Black American who refuses deference — first a political stance, later an artistic one.

Entry · catalog no. 1116

New Negro

/ /ˌnu ˈniɡɹoʊ/ /noo NEE-groh

noun · First attested in Cleveland, Ohio; later centered on Harlem, New York · 1890s

✓ Verified

A Black person of the post-Reconstruction generations who declines the performance of submission that Jim Crow demanded, and who claims full citizenship as a matter of bearing rather than petition. In its first thirty years the term was overwhelmingly political: it meant literacy, property, self-defense, and a willingness to answer back or shoot back. After 1925 it was redefined toward culture — the artist, the migrant, the Harlem intellectual — and that later sense has largely swallowed the earlier one.

“My grandfather came up in Tulsa a New Negro — he owned his shop, he owned his gun, and he did not step off the sidewalk.”

Origin & Attribution

The term rises out of the Black press and Black civic life in the 1890s, as Reconstruction's gains were being systematically stripped and lynching peaked. Scholarship traces its first documented appearance to an editorial in the Cleveland Gazette, a Black-owned weekly, on June 28, 1895, describing a class of Black people who had come up since the war and would not accept the old terms. Booker T. Washington, Fannie Barrier Williams, and N.B. Wood put it on a book cover in 1900. Alain Locke did not coin it — he inherited a thirty-year-old political term and repurposed it for the arts in 'Enter the New Negro' in 1925 and the anthology that followed. Treating 1925 as the origin erases the generation of Black editors, veterans, and businesspeople who built the phrase out of self-defense rather than self-expression.

1895

Cleveland Gazette editorial of June 28 uses 'the New Negro' for a postwar class of Black Americans

1900

Washington, Williams and Wood publish 'A New Negro for a New Century'

1925

Locke's 'Enter the New Negro' and his anthology recast the term as cultural

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

Nationwide / diaspora

First attested in Cleveland, Ohio; later centered on Harlem, New York · 1890s

Spoken by

Black newspaper editors, clubwomen, veterans, and educators of the post-Reconstruction generation

$NEWNEGThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Historical

131 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

90/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1895

in the culture

Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.

Hear it spoken

By region — how it actually sounds

@auntiereg

Atlanta, GA

@deltasoul

Memphis, TN

Contribute your pronunciation

Citations & Sources

■

Booker T. Washington, Fannie Barrier Williams and N.B. Wood, 'A New Negro for a New Century,' American Publishing House, Chicago — 1900

book · documented

■

Alain Locke, 'Enter the New Negro,' Survey Graphic — March 1925

magazine · documented

■

Henry Louis Gates Jr., 'The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,' Representations no. 24, which dates the term to the Cleveland Gazette of June 28, 1895 — 1988

journal · documented

+ Cite a source