The New Negro in the Old South

With precision and economy, literary scholar Briggs delivers a rich African-American history of Nashville, Tenn., to argue that the "New Negro" appeared before the Great Migration of the interwar period. The opening sections of the book establish the history of the changing meaning of the term "New Negro" and of the thriving post%E2%80%93Civil War African-American community in Nashville. As proof of Nashville's centrality to the developing cultural and political autonomy of its black residents, Briggs presents four case studies, two of individuals and two of protest movements. W.E.B. Du Bois attended Fisk University in the 1880s, where he honed his ideas about civil rights. Novelist Sutton Griggs set many of his stories in Nashville, and they provided an important, graphic window into volatile turn-of-the century race relations. Nashville's black residents boycotted the segregated streetcars between 1905 and 1907 in an unsuccessful attempt to enforce racial equality. After Du Bois returned to Fisk in 1924 to deliver the commencement address, attacking the paternalism of the university's white president, students fomented a protest movement that grabbed national attention and blossomed into a riot. The book's scholarly structure and language won't prevent lay readers from reaping the rewards of Briggs's elegantly written history of people and events that remain relevant today. Illus. (Nov.)