The Harlem Renaissance Weekly
Reading the New Negro Movement in 1920s Black Newspapers
Published on 20. November 2025
Book
Hardback
316 pages
978-1-009-56668-1 (ISBN)
Description
Martha H. Patterson's The Harlem Renaissance Weekly offers a groundbreaking study of the Black literary renaissance that appeared in weekly Black newspapers in the 1920s. In her richly contexualized readings, she uncovers a popular Harlem Renaissance deeply committed to political and social issues: the fight against lynching, segregation, and anti-miscegenation laws and to the challenges posed by urban vice, infidelity, and family separation during the Great Migration. Through mostly romantic plots, Black newspaper fiction writers emphasized that the cabaret and church, white and black race leader, flapper and race mother could be bridged on behalf of racial well-being and civil rights justice. As the Ku Klux Klan grew increasingly powerful, this fiction offered readers not only entertainment, but also cautionary advice, political hope, and weekly affirmation of their full humanity. With a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this powerful study revises understanding of an important dimension of the Harlem Renaissance.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
666 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-009-56668-1 (9781009566681)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
An English professor at McKendree University, Martha H. Patterson wrote Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895 -1915 (Illinois, 2005) and edited The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894 -1930 (Rutgers, 2008), and served as co-editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of The New Negro: A History in Documents, 1887 -1937 (Princeton, 2025).
Content
Introduction; 1. Dueling and dancing with demon rum: prohibition during the Harlem renaissance; Part I. Battling the Hydra of Profitable Hate in White Newspapers: Anti-lynching Second Serials in the Black Press: 2. From 'Superman' into cannibal: Joel Augustus Rogers and the '100% American' New Negro; 3. 'It is our land just the same': Joshua Henry Jones Jr. and the nativist New Negro's claim on the melting pot; 4. 'Saving the black man's body and the white man's soul': Walter White, the New Negro man's martyrdom, and the New Negro woman's rise; 5. Wayward husbands, jazzy jezebels, and lost children: the New Negro woman's anguish after the Great Migration; 6. The 'chocolate baby' versus the New Negro 'Roue': revisiting the Mann act in George Schuyler; Conclusion.