New Negro Movement Rejects Accommodation, Demands Full Citizenship Rights

The 'New Negro' as a political and cultural concept emerged in the mid-1910s, crystallized by the Red Summer of 1919 and the Great Migration. Unlike the accommodationist model associated with Booker T. Washington (who died in 1915), the New Negro demanded full and immediate civil and political rights, embraced armed self-defense, articulated Black pride and Pan-African identity, and rejected the idea that Black Americans should earn rights through respectability or deference. The term appeared in A. Philip Randolph's The Messenger, Marcus Garvey's Negro World, and W.E.B. Du Bois's The Crisis.