Enter the ‘New Negro’
Following the East St. Louis, Ill., massacre of 1917 and the Red Summer of 1919, which saw dozens of racist attacks across the country, disparate groups of Black people again voiced displeasure with the status quo, and Du Bois continued to question the viability of African Americans within the Republican Party. After he became a founding member of the NAACP, Du Bois moved to New York and established the Crisis, a monthly magazine he edited that quickly became a staple in African American communities.
Du Bois turned to a more established publication, the Nation, to write an op-ed ahead of the 1920 presidential election. Titled “The Republicans and the Black Voter,” the piece anticipated a future in which African Americans abandoned the party.
In the midst of the Great Migration, Du Bois wrote, “the Negroes as a mass have done more thinking in the last four years than ever before. Second, they have long-standing grievances against the Republican Party, and it cannot therefore count on the absolute necessity of a black man voting Republican.”
In her 2020 book “The Great Migration and the Democratic Party,” Howard University political scientist Keneshia N. Grant argues that politically excluded African Americans from the South arrived in the North without attachments to the Republican Party. “Therefore,” she writes, “what looks like a wholesale defection from the Republican Party by the Black electorate can also be understood as the Democratic Party’s mobilization of newly arrived Black migrants.”
The stark realities of industrial centers primed new arrivals for new politics. While Du Bois sought to shock Republicans to act, a competing faction in Harlem preached more radical politics.
In August 1920, the Socialist magazine the Messenger declared that the emergent “New Negro” would “repudiate and discard both of the old parties — Republican and Democratic.” The editors’ vision for the New Negro was fearless yet progressive — one that endorsed the recently ratified 19th Amendment and “stands for universal suffrage.” With Black women gaining the right to vote, the political parties would be appealing to a completely different Black vote in the 1920s.