The two sessions at the conference specifically devoted to the “Black” experience in the United States encompass a disparate range of topics. The first involves the centennial of the publication of the New Negro in 1925. The subject of the New Negro has been touched upon in earlier blogs along with the New Negro Woman and Negroland (The Destruction of Negro Communities and the Birth of the African American, February 28, 2023. It was the time of the founding of the Negro Baseball League. It was a time when Italian immigrants from Italy and Negro immigrants from the Great Migration both sought to establish their identity nationally.
The second session was about reparations. This session intends to become an umbrella session or clearing house on the various efforts under way in different state and local municipalities on the topic of reparations. It is not so much a history session as a political session survey what is going on in the present.
Plenary: 100th Anniversary of The New Negro
Friday, January 3, 2025: 8:00 PM-9:30 PM
Chair: Jelani Cobb, Columbia Journalism School
Speakers:
A’Lelia P. Bundles, Madam Walker Family Archives
Gene Andrew Jarrett, Princeton University
David Levering Lewis, New York University
Denise Murrell, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Jeffrey Stewart, University of California, Santa Barbara
Session Abstract
This session commemorates the New Negro, an anthology of essays edited by Alain Locke and published in 1925. In March of that year, Survey Graphic, a monthly unillustrated magazine of the social work journal, Survey, published “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” a special issue dedicated to “The New Negro.” Also edited by Locke, it featured essays by such important writers as W. A. Domingo, W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Elise Johnson McDougald, Arthur Schomburg, Walter White, J.A. Rogers, and Eunice Roberta Hunton Carter. Later that year the enormously influential anthology, the New Negro, appeared. Building on the special issue in Survey Graphic and with new essays by like Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer and others, the New Negro came to be seen as the manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance.
On the 100th anniversary of The New Negro, our conversation will situate the New Negro in the context of the time in which it was published and the century that followed. Panelists and audience will engage the ideas about Black freedom that Locke and the other contributors to the volume envisioned and how over time, Black people have continued, in the words of Locke’s recent biographer Jeffrey Stewart, to find ways to “reinvent” themselves “even in the worst of times.”
1. radical optimism
2. new national and international culture
3. fundamentally political conservative
4. break from the past
5. masculine text
6. boot-black Anglo-Saxon criticism of him by another black
AHA Session 161 Historians and Reparations: A Roundtable
Saturday, January 4, 2025: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Chair: Kerri K. Greenidge, Tufts University
Panel:
Leslie Alexander, University of Oregon
Kellie Carter Jackson, Wellesley College
Kerri K. Greenidge, Tufts University
Kyera Singleton, Tufts University
This roundtable, “Historians and Reparations,” will convene historians currently engaged in city or state-initiated studies of slavery and reparations. Roundtable speakers are currently engaged in studies commissioned by the City of Boston’s Task Force and the New Jersey Reparations Council. The roundtable will engage the challenges and opportunities of this work together and how historical research might shape policymakers reckoning with the past.
