Harlem Renaissance

Dissatisfied with a 1934 exhibition sponsored by the Citizen's Committee of Harlem, six local graphic artists organized the Harlem Artists' Guild. Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Henry W. Bannarn, and Gwendolyn Bennett combined to forge cooperation among black artists and to tell the nation that blacks were "destined to play an important part in the art of America."

An examination of how the New Negro movement, also known as the Harlem Renaissance, provoked and sustained public discourse and deliberation about black culture and identity in the early twentieth century. Borrowing its title from a W. E. B. Du Bois essay, Hearing the Hurt explores the nature of rhetorical invention, performance, and mutation by focusing on the multifaceted issues brought forth in the New Negro movement, which Watts treats as a rhetorical struggle over what it means to be properly black and at the same time properly American. Who determines the meaning of blackness? How should African Americans fit in with American public culture? In what way should black communities and families be structured?

Mary White Ovington was born into relative privilege and comfort at the end of the Civil War and like other members of her class had a "hatred of dirt, odor, [and] ill health." But unlike most of her peers, rather than avoid these problems she dedicated her life to doing something about them. Through her work in settlement houses, she saw that the problems facing poor African Americans were different from those facing their white counterparts. Other settlement workers either failed to recognize or failed to act on America's "race problem," but Ovington made it her life's work. As a founding member of the NAACP and a lifelong advocate of integration, she distinguished herself as a leader in the fight for social, racial, and economic equality. Wedin also explores Ovington's lifelong relationship to the organization she helped found and with such notable figures as W.E.B. DuBois and the journalist Oswald Garrison Villard. -Library Journal

This collection of essays by American philosopher Alain Locke (1885-1954) makes readily available for the first time his important writings on cultural pluralism, value relativism, and critical relativism. As a black philosopher early in this century, Locke was a pioneer: having earned both undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Harvard, he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, studied at the University of Berlin, and chaired the Philosophy Department at Howard University for almost four decades. He was perhaps best known as a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Locke's works conceptually frame the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro movement and provide an Afro-American critique of pragmatism and value absolutism, and also offer a view of identity, communicative competency, and contextualism.