In Chapter 6, I examine George Schuyler’s 1928 serial “Chocolate Baby: A Story of Ambition, Deception, and Success,” which first appeared in the popular white-owned Black newspaper supplement the Illustrated Feature Section. In “Chocolate Baby,” Schuyler crafts his protagonist Martha Hastings as a sexually assertive version of the New Negro Woman modeled after increasingly popular light-skinned chorus girls. Schuyler, who had married a prominent white woman, depicts his New Negro male protagonist invoking the Mann Act against Martha’s “handsome and crafty” seducer, Gordon Johnson. Also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, the Mann Act banned the interstate transportation of women “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” Rather than protecting all women regardless of skin color, the Act had been deployed to police consensual relationships between Black men and white women – most famously in the prosecution of boxer Jack Johnson. In a startling reversal of his cautionary tale, Schuyler turns from his warning about the sexual vulnerability and commodification of Black women whose passions hold sway, to arguably the most politically charged issue in the history of race relations, his endorsement of decriminalizing sexual unions between Black men and white women.

In Chapter 4, I consider the third and most controversial and canonical novel in the Pittsburgh Courier’s anti-lynching trilogy, Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint (1924). Rather than presenting white transformation, the novel ends with the bitterness of a failed cooperative initiative and the lynching of both of its New Negro protagonists. When the New Negro physician’s culminating gesture of selfless professionalism is misconstrued by the town’s Klansmen, a white mob – another such mob had already murdered his more radical New Negro brother – ambushes and kills him. Loosely based on White’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lynching investigations of the 1919 Elaine massacre, the novel is the only work of fiction I examine that generated a published letter to the editor criticizing it. Considered within the montaged paratextual elements that surrounded it, women’s voices gain significantly more agency. In particular, the advertisements for guns around the serial installments emphasize the “ghostly” presence of Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching militance. In addition, just one month before the serialization of White’s novel appeared in January of 1926, the Courier began publishing a column by anti-lynching activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

The Harlem Renaissance Weekly asks that we consider the largely overlooked newspaper serial fiction of the 1920s in relation to, and sometimes in direct response to, events of daily interest to Black people, and especially Black women, who likely constituted its primary readers. By recentering Black newspapers and by reading them as part of a reader-generated weekly montage, I show how this broad-based popular form helped readers renegotiate the cultural work of New Negroes, refiguring civil rights protest as they navigated the pleasures and dangers of the Jazz Age. At the same time, I demonstrate how the twenties New Negro Woman featured in the Pittsburgh Courier increasingly dominated racial representation and contested patriarchal Black leadership. If the New Negro Man led the race on the editorial page, the New Negro Woman represented the race on the front page. It was not Alain Locke’s implicitly male New Negro who defined the Harlem Renaissance week to week, but rather the New Negro Woman, who, almost invariably in the context of a heterosexual love plot, propelled narratives, spurred sales, and defined a distinctly modern Black sociopolitical consciousness.