ABSTRACT
The desire of the black middle class to see what it regarded as the finer aspects of African American life depicted in literature and art was derived partly from class consciousness and partly from strong feelings of race consciousness. In the 1920s race consciousness among African Americans was largely an attitudinal response to decades of Negro-white friction. Proponents of the image of the New Negro recognized that the cultural heritage of the American Negro contained elements which made the Negro half-ashamed of himself and which increased his sensitivity to the treatment of racial subjects in art. The "harmless child of nature" and minstrel stereotype of the Negro was prominent in the fiction of a group of white post-bellum writers whose number included Walter Hines Page, F. Hopkinson Smith, Grace Elizabeth King, Thomas Nelson Page, and well Edwards. Negro painters either avoided painting Negro types or Nordicized Negro features in order to minimize any resemblance to prevalent stereotypes.
