| Summary: | "The New Negro in the Old South redefines our understanding of the idea of the New Negro by following its genealogy back to its historical and geographical origins in the post-Reconstruction nineteenth-century South, where it looks at the literary and cultural factors that influenced the development of a modern African American, and ultimately, a New Negro identity. In this context, Briggs makes a compelling case that nineteenth-century, postbellum Nashville provided the locus of the economic, intellectual, social, and political concepts that shaped the strands of African American cultural and intellectual identity that consolidated around the term 'the New Negro' in the early twentieth century. In addition to fresh critical perspectives on such figures as W.E.B. Du Bois and Sutton Griggs, The New Negro in the Old South reexamines forgotten strands of New Negro cultural history, including turn-of-the-century southern streetcar strikes and black college rebellions. He demonstrates that post-Reconstruction Nashville, therefore, rather than New York or Chicago, was the formative site in the emergence of a New Negro, whose identity stood in vivid contrast to the compliant, rural and under-educated African American who preceded it"--
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