Jim Crow wasn’t dead yet, but the New Negro threw the first telling blows against it. Alain Locke, a black aesthete, critic and unofficial father of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, used “The New Negro” as the title for a groundbreaking anthology of black artwork and writing seeking transformation of the black American image. When Jim Crow reached its nadir 100 years ago - and it was clear that neither Congress nor the courts were going to intervene - black people pushed back. Gates characterizes this opposition using a term that emerged after the First World War: “The New Negro.” He calls this archetype “Black America’s first superhero,” a model for political action, artistic sophistication and racial pride collectively fashioned by black artists, intellectuals, labor leaders and black nationalists.

Widespread fear of blacks’ ''natural’ propensity to rape” justified any number of reactions, many of which are illustrated throughout the book in demeaning cartoons of blackface stereotypes and grisly photographs of racially motivated lynchings.

These holdovers from slavery days, Gates writes, were enhanced by a late-19th-century mass culture debasing black people as, at best, childlike, simple-minded and pathetically dysfunctional and, at worst, mindless sexual predators with unrestrained libidos. Such oppression was enabled by religious superstition (the “curse of Canaan” from Genesis used to endorse slavery) and pseudoscience (assertions that the shape of African skulls and other genetic attributes proved black intellectual inferiority). Once federal troops were withdrawn from the South after the 1876 election, Jim Crow was institutionalized through laws and customs that were rigidly and often violently enforced, making the descendants of slaves “as close as a person can be to being a slave without being legally defined as such.” The ex-slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass identified this contradiction well before the war when he wrote, “Opposing slavery and hating its victims has become a very common form of abolitionism.” This short-lived, but in Gates’ words “monumental effort to create a biracial democracy out of the wreckage of the rebellion,” met violent resistance not just from die-hard Confederate loyalists but from President Andrew Johnson, a white southerner who opposed slavery but remained prejudiced against blacks. Legally enforced segregation, commonly referred to under the rubric “Jim Crow” (the name inspired by a blackface act), is traced to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, when federal troops occupying the vanquished South were charged with enforcing civil rights and greater suffrage for newly freed slaves. By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy.

Gates stony the road