Inspired by our struggles and successes

The New Black Film Collective's name is inspired by 'The New Negro' movement.

In 1916–17, Hubert Harrison founded the New Negro Movement. In 1917, he established the first organisation - The Liberty League - and the first newspaper (The Voice) of the "New Negro Movement" and this movement energised Harlem and beyond with its race-conscious and class-conscious demands for political equality, an end to segregation and lynching as well as calls for armed self-defense when appropriate. Therefore, Harrison, who also edited The New Negro in 1919 and authored When Africa Awakes: The 'Inside Story' of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World in 1920, is called the "father of Harlem Radicalism."

In several essays included in the anthology The New Negro (1925), which grew out of the 1924 special issue of Survey Graphic on Harlem, editor Alain Locke contrasted the "Old Negro" with the "New Negro" by stressing African American assertiveness and self-confidence during the years following World War I and the Great Migration. Race pride had already been part of literary and political self-expression among African Americans in the nineteenth century, as reflected in the writings of Martin Delany, Bishop Henry Turner, Frances E.W. Harper, Frederick Douglass and Pauline Hopkins. However, it found a new purpose and definition in the journalism, fiction, poetry, music, sculpture and paintings of a host of figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

The term "New Negro" inspired a wide variety of responses from its diverse participants and promoters. A militant African American editor indicated in 1920 how this "new line of thought, a new method of approach" included the possibility that "the intrinsic standard of Beauty and aesthetics does not rest in the white race" and that "a new racial love, respect and consciousness may be created." It was felt that African Americans were poised to assert their own agency in culture and politics instead of just remaining a "problem" or "formula" for others to debate about.

The New Negroes of the 1920s, the "talented tenth," included poets, novelists and Blues singers creating their art out of Negro folk heritage and history; black political leaders fighting against corruption and for expanded opportunities for African Americans; businessmen working toward the possibilities of a "black metropolis" and Garveyites dreaming of a homeland in Africa. All of them shared in their desire to shed the image of servility and inferiority of the shuffling "Old Negro" and achieve a new image of pride and dignity.