ABSTRACT
Decades of scholarly research and debate have brought us a wide range of perspectives regarding what Hubert Harrison’s newspaper, The Voice, recognized in 1917 as the “New Negro Movement.” Explorers of diversity and restorers of lost history have demonstrated that blacks, even while slaves, were intellectually astute and aesthetically proficient; that “from Emancipation” on, Washington, DC was the locus of “a proto-Harlem Renaissance” culture (Pierpont, 99); that the so-called “Renaissance” concept “overlooked,” as Harrison himself argued in 1927 in the Pittsburgh Courier, “the stream of literary and artistic products that had flowed uninterruptedly from Negro writers from 1850 to the present” (“Harlem Renaissance”).
