Exalting Negro Womanhood: Black Women Poets and Harlem Renaissance Magazines

Abstract

New Negro magazines such as The Messenger, Opportunity, and The Crisis regularly featured photographs and short descriptions of Black women designed to highlight their role as both moral centers and aspirational figures. These images tended to imply that the ideal New Negro woman would challenge racist stereotypes of Black women not only through her behavior but also through her looks. For instance, a feature in the January 1924 issue of The Messenger called “Exalting Negro Womanhood” seeks to counter the overrepresentation of “[t]he buffoon, the clown, the criminal Negro” in white media with portraits of Black “achievement, culture, refinement, beauty, genius, and talent”. But of the twenty women featured in the centerfold of photographs, all are light skinned. Importantly, however, Black women poets of the era, including Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Gladys May Casely-Hayford, Anita Scott Coleman, Jessie Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Helene Johnson, Anne Spencer, and Octavia B. Wynbush, provide a counter to this coding of light skin as desirable through poems that emphasize the beauty of dark-skinned bodies. This essay places their poetry alongside the visuals of the New Negro movement and the larger white supremacist culture of the 1920s. In poems such as Bennett’s “To a Dark Girl”, Grimké’s “The Black Hand”, Johnson’s “Poem”, and Spencer’s “Lady, Lady”, an emphasis on beautiful and powerful Blackness provides a steady counterpoint to the prevailing color standards surrounding Black female beauty and respectability.