Chicago's New Negroes and The New Negro - Similarites and differences

Davarian L. Baldwin's Chicago's New Negroes offers us a different interpretation of the New Negro than that of Alain Locke's interpretation presented in his anthology, The New Negro.  Baldwin looks at the New Negro through a individualist and accomplished lens, while Alain Locke looks at the New Negro through a more symbolic and universal lens.  Baldwin with the examples of Jack Johnson and Madame C.J. Walker and among others, places more of an emphasis on upward mobility and social status, in measuring the work that they have entrepreneur-ed, as the embodiment of the New Negro.  On the other hand, Alain Locke looks more at the art, expression, culture, and creativity that stems from the soul, heart, and emotion of the New Negro as it being a universal language of culture that the New Negro speaks.  None-the-less both these individuals through their work, interpretation and presentation of the Negro Negro give us different ideas, lenses, and understandings of what the New Negro is, can be, and has done in the face of a thwarted history. Nevertheless, the similarities that exist between both Alain Locke's The New Negro's artistic expression and Davarian L. Baldwin's Chicago's New Negroes's entrepreneurial New Negro share the language of resistance to subversion.  Both bring to live the nature of necessity, in doing what is necessary in maintaining and surviving in a racist and degrading social structure.  In  both voicing art and expressing skill, both take part in a dialectic of struggle.  The similarities of being good at something and loving it, because of the joy and happiness that it brings to you, whether it was a smile on the face of Jack Johnson, the community build by Madame C.J. Walker or the theory and poetry of individuals who express themselves in a foreign and assimilated English or Spanish tongue.  The similarities of sharing the words, thoughts, and stories of Negroes, Blacks, Africans, African-Americans, Pan-Africans, etc. is a movement in motion to prevent the genocide of diaspora.