The New Negro emerged most prominently during the Harlem Renaissance, especially through the influence of Alain Locke, as a concept describing a modern African American identity marked by dignity, self-determination, artistic ambition, and political consciousness. In poetry, the term appears in works asserting racial pride, urban sophistication, resistance to caricature, and cultural renewal. It often signals a break from accommodationist narratives and reflects aspirations toward social transformation through art, intellect, and public voice.

The New Negro ideal, most fully articulated in Alain Locke's foundational 1925 anthology "The New Negro," represented a significant shift in African American self-representation: away from the accommodationist posture associated with Booker T. Washington and toward a confident assertion of Black intellectual, artistic, and political capacity. Students should understand both the achievements and the limitations of the New Negro ideal: its investment in bourgeois respectability politics, its complicated relationships with Black working-class and folk culture, and its often fraught negotiations of gender and sexuality. Related terms include Harlem Renaissance (as context), Black Aesthetic, Black consciousness, and vernacular tradition. The tension between Locke's integrationist aesthetics and the more vernacular claims of Hughes and Hurston is a foundational debate in African American literary history.