The New Negroes: Collaborative Histories and the Queerness of Black Sociality

With The New Negro, Jeffrey C. Stewart has penned a definitive biography of Alain Locke, “the mother of the New Negro Movement” (p. 13). Exceeding the contours of formulaic and patrilineal histories of founding fathers, Stewart expertly, and courageously, proffers a portrait of an artist who led a black cultural movement with blackmaternal attention and care. Arguing that the death of Alain LeRoy Locke’s mother, Mary Hawkins Locke, both devastated Locke and catalyzed his leadership in the world of black arts and culture, Stewart situates Locke’s life and letters within the provocative claim that “in his mother’s end was his beginning . . . now he would mother a movement” (p. 13). Gesturing toward Locke’s own queerness and the queer nature of black life itself, Stewart offers a complex and nuanced portrait of Alain Locke that foregrounds queerblackness as the organizing thematic of the New Negro Movement. Stewart’s biography orders Locke’s life in three movements: (1) The Education of Alain Locke, (2) Enter the New Negro, and (3) Metamorphosis. In doing so, Stewart foregrounds Locke’s maternal formation and implicitly argues that the New Negro Movement was a blackmaternal movement. Stewart documents Locke’s life in its various iterations, tracing his movements through the United States, Europe, and Africa.

On March 27, 1916, Alain Locke delivered, for a second time, the first lecture in series of five lectures at Howard University’s Carnegie Library. These lectures, “The Race Contacts Lectures,” were, according to Stewart, Locke’s “bold attempt to provide a clear sociological argument for the emergence of the New Negro” (pp. 264-265). In these lectures, Locke proffered the idea that race is not a biological phenomenon, but an historical one. Putting his own theory of race in conversation with the ideas of the not-yet-famed anthropologist Franz Boaz, Locke argued that there are no static factors of race, and even what were perceived as the most reliable physical characteristics of race were subject to changes in the social and cultural environment. These lectures most closely resemble the core of Locke’s own philosophy for living. Locke, as Stewart reminds in his epilogue, was adamant about black artists being able to pursue beauty for its own sake without “having to reference continually the struggle in the streets for citizenship rights seemingly always denied them” (p. 876). Nevertheless, Stewart writes an impeccably researched, and deeply personal, narrative of a complex subject who spent much of his life wrestling with his deepest desires even as he maintained an unwavering sense of self. Stewart limns a person who was determined to find freedom in the beauty and care of blackness and black people, but one who also found it difficult to wrest himself from his commitments to the white normative Victorian conventions of his childhood. As a result, Locke too often rejected intimacy with black people and with black women in particular, but he was nevertheless attracted to aspects of the maternal that he detected in men and women alike.

At the center of Stewart’s award-winning biography is a portrait of Locke as a blackmaternal figure whose relationship with his own mother was the cornerstone for the ways in which he would go on to nurture and develop the young writers of the Harlem Renaissance. As a blackmaternal philosopher, Locke developed one-on-one relationships with emerging artists, such as Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Stewart’s careful reading of Locke’s archive reveals Locke’s desire to “reproduce the confessional relationship he had with his mother” as a way to unlock, and unleash, the emotional depth he considered necessary for authentic creative expression (p. 337). As well, this blackmaternal approach to mentorship often created a sense of safety for young black men artists who were struggling with, or discovering, their sexualities. Stewart notes one instance in which Locke recommended Carpenter’s Iolaus: An Anthology of Friendship to Cullen. The young Cullen responded with delight at having discovered a global tradition of deep intimacy between men. Locke and Cullen continued a deeply intimate and mutually caring relationship, even as Cullen wrestled with how his own sexuality affected his role in the black bourgeoisie community. Eventually, against the advice of Locke, Cullen married Yolanda Du Bois, daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois. That decision precipitated the decline of the relationship between Locke and Cullen. However, it was Cullen who facilitated the meeting between Locke and Langston Hughes, a relationship that was ultimately hampered by what Stewart describes as Locke’s desire for an unconditional and unqualified love (p. 344).

Stewart shines as a biographer and theorist in his depiction of Locke as the mother of the New Negro Movement. He closely attends to the ways in which blackmaternity emerges as an impulse and a set of relational practices for Locke after the death of his own mother in 1922. Stewart concludes that Locke subverts the typical psychoanalytic model that posits separation from the mother as the essential component of independence. Instead, Stewart argues that Locke sought after blackmaternity—in both men and women—and he became a practitioner of blackmaternity himself. This attachment to the black mother (as figure and as emotional/intellectual impulse) allowed Locke to demonstrate for his community the range and capaciousness of blackmaternity in its ability to cultivate the New Negro in twentieth-century black people. Stewart’s biography of Alain Locke is a rigorous and stunning literary achievement. It is an historical theory of black life that reminds readers that blackness and queerness are always and already in inextricable symbiosis and that blackqueer histories are histories that have demonstrated for the world what it means to “constantly reinvent ourselves over decades and centuries, creating new forms of art and life, despite the current state of race” (p. 878).

Ten years after Alain Locke’s death in 1954 and two years before James Meredith’s March Against Fear, Sargeant Gerald Westbrook penned “The Essence of Soul” for Negro Digest in May 1964. Westbrook, echoing Du Bois, describes [black] soul as a complex ambivalence, a disposition that is forever dual: strength and helplessness, living and suffering, tears and laughter. This, he says, is “to each of us what it is unto itself, a reflection of life’s miseries and a mirror for its joys” (Perry, 167). It is this soul that Imani Perry limns in her book May We Forever Stand. Arguing that the Negro National Hymn Lift Every Voice and Sing was a key feature in the rituals and practices of black formalism, Perry traces the social and cultural histories of the song, an homage to blackness, gifted to the culture by brothers James Weldon Johnson (lyricist) and John Rosamond Johnson (composer). The anthem was initially written as a poem in celebration of president Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, but, as Perry notes, it became something else as the brothers continued their collaboration (p. 6). The song, Perry argues, became one of the most important features of a cultural practice that she coins “black formalism.”

Distinguishing black formalism from the politics of respectability, and noting its defining characteristic as its disinterest in aspirational white acceptance, Perry argues that Lift Every Voice and Sing became a feature element of the rituals and behaviors of black formalism. She argues that black formalism included an array of black participants, including the poor and working class, and therefore challenges longstanding ideas that black associational life was the purview of the elite. As Perry documents these rituals, what emerges are histories of the many lives of Lift Every Voice and Sing. She traces the song’s movements throughout black histories—from the first time it is ushered into the world in 1900 by the children of the Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida, to Joseph Lowery’s benediction at the 2008 inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States. Perry’s careful documentation of the lives, and afterlives, of the song reveals a complex and storied narrative of black loss and black triumph. For Perry, the Black National Anthem is a guide, perhaps even a blackmaternal one, that takes readers into the sacred spaces of black living where the struggle for black freedom is made and remade. For instance, Perry describes the song in terms of its impact on the late Martin Luther King Jr., citing its influence on the ways that King began to call into question the black assimilationist impulse (p. 170).

Perry’s penultimate chapter is punctuated by testimonies from the Black Arts and Black Power movements, demonstrating the historical life and longevity of the Black National Anthem. She demonstrates that the Black National Anthem is, indeed, the National Anthem, describing the ways in which black life and struggle are inextricable from the ongoing histories of the United States. Perry traces the ways in which the song lead “the spillover of black consciousness and black power politics into the public sphere . . .” (p. 190). As well, Perry illumines the myriad ways Lift Every Voice and Sing has traveled through black organizations, black literature, black sermons, black music, and black protest since its inception.

Imani Perry has made a tremendous contribution to Black Studies. She authors a well-researched and impressive biography of a poem, a song—a black anthem—that chronicles the ways in which black sonic practice has remained central to the black freedom project. A testament to her a keen theoretical eye, Perry’s May We Forever Stand is a celebration of the communal nature of blackness. In a touching afterword, Perry reminds readers that a sentimental attachment to the Black National Anthem (or Negro National Hymn) Lift Every Voice and Sing is insufficient. Her book is not simply a call to revive the song by singing it in our most sacred spaces, during our most sacred times. Rather, Perry reminds readers that the “ways of being that appear in the traditions of singing the anthem continue to matter” (p. 225). She avers that Lift Every Voice and Sing is, at its core, the poetry of black sociality. And black sociality is, as Perry concludes, the process of being who we are “through the regularity of our doings” (p. 225). In this spirit, Perry calls for a return to associational life, which is, as she deftly demonstrates through her book, the intentional and deliberate practice of being, and doing, together.

In Black Freethinkers, the first history of African-American freethought from the early nineteenth century to the civil rights era, Christopher Cameron explores one such way of black being together. Building upon work from black humanist theologians and black freethinkers like Anthony Pinn, Sikivu Hutchinson, Candace Gorham, and others, Cameron argues that the secular traditions of atheism, agnosticism, and secular humanism have been central practices in black political and intellectual life since the early nineteenth century. In this path-creating history, Cameron challenges the well-worn idea that freethought has its origins in Enlightenment philosophy and Newtonian science, and he argues that the origin of freethought in early America originated in the institution of slavery. Provocatively, Cameron suggests that the violence of the peculiar institution was the catalyst for many enslaved persons to not only refuse Christianity as their primary religious system, but to refuse the idea of God altogether. Furthermore, Cameron creates an intellectual path that exists alongside arguments that posit black secularism as inextricable from the rise of industrialization and urbanization and arguments like that of Jonathan Kahn and Vincent Lloyd, who claim that black secularism emerges because of a managerial shift between the secular and the religious. Cameron documents the ways that urbanization and industrialization created conditions for African Americans to feel comfortable expressing alternative—and often critical—religious perspectives and to make those perspectives part and parcel of black sociality.

Beginning with Frederick Douglass, Cameron’s work examines notable African American figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who, he argues, became freethinkers during the course of their lives. Turning to the great period of black cultural production known as the Harlem Renaissance and/or The New Negro Renaissance, Cameron posits that writers like Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, Langston Hughes, and others introduced the black masses to ideas that “undermined orthodox Christianity and displayed their diverse freethought perspectives . . .” (p. xii). Cameron illustrates the connections between geographic change brought about by The Great Migration and shifting religious ideas. Noting that the urban architectural environment of the city was in distinct contrast to the southern pastoral, Cameron contends that the man-made landscape of the city created affective distance between the everyday realities of urban blacks and the religious stories that spoke of the connection between God and pastoral grandeur, making it easier for blacks to consider alternative religious views (p. 46).

Positing Alain Locke and Claude McKay as examples par excellence, Cameron proffers a brief history of these two leaders of the New Negro Movement. He asserts that Locke was already an avid believer in freethought by the time he left home for Harvard in 1904. Likewise, although his father was a Baptist minister, Cameron argues that the Jamaica-born McKay was deeply influenced by the intellectual leadership of his elder brother U. Theo McKay. The younger McKay was raised by his older brother from ages seven to fourteen, and during that time, he showed interest in agnosticism under his brother’s tutelage.

Cameron suggests that it is Locke’s seminal The New Negro that outlines Locke’s “secular vision for African American freedom” (p. 61). In contrast to visions for a freedom movement in which black clergy and laymen would lead the charge, Locke’s blackmaternal New Negro vision placed black writers and black artists at the forefront of the freedom movement. Locke rejected Christianity on the grounds that it, and other institutionalized religions, had done irreparable harm to the world (p. 63). According to Cameron, this position was the catalyst for Locke eventually joining the Baha’i faith in 1918 and remaining a member for almost thirty years.

Cameron also peruses the poetry of Langston Hughes for evidence of his conversion to freethought. He argues that Hughes’s concern with questions of politics, black identity, heritage, and culture led him to address religious/Christian themes of evil, goodness, and the nature and existence of God. Cameron finds such evidence in one of Hughes’s earliest poems Song for a Dark Girl, in which Hughes questions the utility of prayer in a world in which black people are subject to gratuitous violence at the hands of white people (p. 64). In Goodbye Christ (1932), Hughes argues that the social need for Jesus Christ has run its course, that the commercialization and commodification of “the savior” has been replaced with a need for secular ideologies that have the potential to improve the material conditions of black and other poor people. Cameron posits that Hughes’s poem Goodbye Christ reveals one of the central reasons for Hughes’s rejection of Christianity: “the monetary value that people have placed on religious belief and the prosperity that it has brought to religious and political leaders throughout human history, especially at the expense of the working classes” (p. 67).

Cameron goes on to argue that Zora Neale Hurston, a prominent black woman writer and anthropologist during the Harlem Renaissance, was a deist. He argues that Hurston’s writings reveal that she was inclined to think of God as a limited power, and throughout her life, she questioned the assertion that there is a benevolent and loving plan for the world. Instead, Cameron argues, Hurston apprehended her world through a materialist lens, preferring to understand herself as matter, “ever changing, ever moving, but never lost . . .” (p. 69). Cameron highlights that unlike her predecessors, Hurston maintained a deep respect for black Christian traditions, noting Hurston’s own words that she “would not by word or deed attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords” (p. 71).

Describing both Hurston and Nella Larsen as models of black feminist freethought, Cameron places his depictions of these black renaissance women in conversation with other noted historians and theorists like Tera Hunter and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., concluding that black feminist freethinkers were drawn to freethought because of the ways in which it fostered black women’s independence and participation in black sociality in ways that were often in contrast to the gender reinforcing protocols of Christianity. ¹ Cameron closes this chapter with the assertion that black people of the New Negro Movement turned away from religion because of its political inefficacy. Religion, he argues, proved insufficient to address the political socioeconomic conditions of blacks in the United States and in the African diaspora more generally, and therefore, the black cultural producers of The New Negro Movement ushered in a more community-focused mutual-aid plan for racial uplift. The remaining chapters of Cameron’s book document the ways in which freethought became a key commonality among many black practitioners of radical left politics. He argues that the Communist and Socialist parties became primary sites of freethought and often became hubs for well-known black leaders, such as Richard Wright, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others. As well, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements became outlets for black freethought. In his final chapter, Cameron chronicles the freethought of movement leaders like Stokely Carmichael and James Forman.

Cameron’s afterword is an homage to the Pulitzer-prize-winning author Alice Walker (although he briefly mentions Octavia Estelle Butler) and the black humanist theologian Anthony B. Pinn. Cameron’s praise of Walker as a freethinker is particularly notable because of the ways in which Walker’s term “womanism” has been used, since the late twentieth century, almost exclusively in a black Christian context by black womanist theologians and Biblical scholars such as Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie Townes, Delores S. Williams, Jacquelyn Grant, and others. Cameron argues that Walker, “one of the most important writers of the twentieth century,” was an atheist and a pagan (p. 166). Asserting that Walker’s pagan atheist beliefs can be found in her earliest writings, Cameron proffers cursory readings of Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) and The Color Purple (1982), concluding that Walker has always argued for the prominence of freethought in the lives of black people (p. 170). Concluding with a brief history of the ways in which Anthony B. Pinn’s work on humanism has influenced the field, Cameron highlights the shift to institutionalization of freethought in the 1980s and determines that such institutionalization has had a positive impact on the field.

Cameron’s exploration of black humanist and freethought sociality makes a significant and precise contribution to the fields of History, Religion, and Black Studies. His well-researched interdisciplinary study of black humanism and freethought brings a necessary perspective to black humanist discourse. He has written a complex history of black secular life that rejects claims of monolithic black religiosity and proffers a nuanced documentation of black humanism that foregrounds blackness as the starting point for thinking with, and against, God-talk.

Taken together, Cameron, Perry, and Stewart proffer collaborative histories of black life that make excellent companion texts for anyone who wishes to think deeply about black sociality and the relation between the secular and the sacred in black life. These outstanding works depict ways of black being (together) that exceed the expectations of (hetero)normativity. What the three authors make exceptionally clear is that the distinction between the black secular and the black sacred is gossamer—if it exists at all—and that black life, and the black freedom project more generally, has always depended upon what Imani Perry calls “ritual community.”