“The New Negro” (1925) Passing (1929) & ‘The Subway’ (1930), Palmer Hayden

We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask! -Paul Laurence Dunbar (1896)

Alain Locke Nella Larsen 1885 - 1954 1891 - 1964

‘Double Consciousness’ “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” -W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

The ‘New Negro’ “In the last decade something beyond the watch and guard of statistics has happened in the life of the American Negro . . . The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.” -Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro” (1925)

Passing (II.1) She said: “It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”