r
to participate in the vigorous cultural exchange which took place there.
The artists of the "Negro Renaissance", as important as they might be
themselves, were merely symbolic of the new life which was electrifying
the Afro-American community. This new life was also evident in the large
urban centers of the North and particularly in Harlem.

Locke pointed out the significance of the great northward migration when
he said that the Negro "in the very process of being transplanted," was
also being "transformed." This migration was usually explained either in
economic terms--jobs pulling Negroes northward--or in social
terms--discrimination pushing them out. In both cases, the Afro-American
was represented as the passive victim of external socioeconomic forces.
Locke insisted that, to the contrary, it was more accurate to understand
this migration as a result of a decision made by the Negro himself. For
the first time in history, thousands upon thousands of individual
Afro-Americans had made a basic choice concerning their own existence.
They refused to remain victims of an impersonal and oppressive system,
and, as the result, they deliberately pulled up their roots, left their
friends and neighbors and moved north to what they hoped would be "the
promised land."

From this decision emerged the new Negro. If he was less polite and more
aggressive than before, he was also more self-reliant and less dependent
on pity and charity. This change, however, did not occur suddenly. The
passive, well-behaved Negro, content to stay in his place, had largely
been a myth. In part, he, had been the product of a guilt-ridden white
stereotype which found this myth comforting. The Negro himself had also
contributed to this fiction by his custom of social mimicry, his habit of
appearing to fill the role which whites expected of him. By the end of
slavery, however, a spirit of individuality had been growing within the
Negro consciousness. The opportunity for industrial employment in the
North which had resulted from war and from the slowdown in European
immigration along with the increase of racism and segregation in the
South combined to open the way for the development of the growing spirit
of determination.

The new Negro was doing more than asserting his own individuality; the
entire Afro-American community was developing a new sense of solidarity.
The racist attitudes of mainstream America, both North and South, made
it almost imp