NEGRO ART IN AMERICA

"The Negro is a poet by birth.... "Poetry is religion brought down to earth and it is the essence of the Negro soul. He carries it with him always and everywhere ; he lives it in the field, the shop, the factory. His daily habits of thought, speech, movements are flavored with the picturesque, the rhythmic, the euphonious. "The white man in the mass cannot compete with the Negro in spiritual endowment. Many centuries of civilization have attenuated his original gifts and have made his mind dominate his spirit. He has wandered too far from elementary human needs and their easy means of natural satisfaction.... "Of the tremendous growth and prosperity achieved by America since emancipation day, the Negro has had scarcely a pittance. The changed times did, however, give him an opportunity to develop and strengthen the native indomitable courage and the keen powers of mind which were not suspected during the days of slavery. The character of his song changed under the new civilization and his mental and moral stature now stands measurement with those of white men of equal educational civilizing opportunities. That growth he owes chiefly to his own efforts; the attendant strife has left unspoiled his native gift of song. We have in his poetry and music a true, infallible record of what the struggle has meant to his inner life. It is art of which America can well be proud ... "The Negro renascence dates from about 1895 when two men, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Booker T. Washington, began to attract the world 's attention. Dunbar was a poet, Washington was an educator in the practical business of life. They lived in widely distant parts of America, each working independently of the other. The leavening power of each upon the Negro spirit was tremendous; each fitted into and reinforced the other; their combined influences brought to birth a new epoch for the American Negro. Washington showed that by a new kind of education the Negro could attain to an economic condition that enables him to preserve his identity, free his soul and make himself an important factor in American life. Dunbar revealed the virgin field which the Negro's own talents and conditions of life offered for creating new forms of beauty .... "A host of living Negroes, better educated and unalterably faithful to their race, are still building, and each with some human value which is an added guarantee that the tradition will be strengthened and made serviceable for the new era that is sure to come when more of the principles of humanity and rationality become the white man's guides....Through the compelling powers of his poetry and music the American Negro is revealing to the rest of the world the essential oneness of all human beings.... "We have to acknowledge not only that our civilization has done practically nothing to help the Negro create his art but that our unjust oppression has been powerless to prevent the black man from realizing in a rich measure the expressions of his own rare gifts." P. 20-24, "Negro Art and America," by Albert C. Barnes, THE NEW NEGRO AN INTERPRETATION by Alain Locke (1925, 2015)