ABSTRACT
Many movements which break with tradition are revealed, upon inspection, to have had anticipatory voices that announced their impending arrival. Three transitional figures, whose writing heralded the coming of a new image of the Negro in the arts, were William S. Braithwaite, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay. Claude McKay travelled a more difficult and a more typical road of a black poet searching for publication in America during the years preceding the Negro Renaissance. McKay's poetry marked a distinct break with the Negro poetic tradition and with the literary projection of middle-class values. In a random and desultory fashion, the Northern Negro press printed a few short stories and poems, mostly by local authors. In the 1880s D. C. Washington had advocated that Negroes should forego any attempts to achieve social, civil, and political equality, as well as intellectual pursuits, and concentrate instead upon laying a sound economic basis for progress as craftsmen and skilled laborers.
