According to New York Times art critic William Zimmer, Allen's work helped "underscored the emergence" of the "The New Negro" philosophy of the time.
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.
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Soon after her husband's death, Johnson began to host what became forty years of weekly "Saturday Salons", for friends and authors, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer, Richard Bruce Nugent, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimke and Eulalie Spence— all major contributors to the New Negro Movement, which is better known today as the Harlem Renaissance.
Davis's career as a civil-rights activist began in 1933, when he formed the New Negro Alliance with Belford Lawson, Jr. and N. Franklin Thorne in response to the white-owned businesses in African-American neighborhoods that would fire and/or refuse to hire African-American workers.
Books like A New Negro for a New Century (1900) edited by Booker T. Washington, Fannie Barrier Williams and N. B. Wood or William Pickens' The New Negro (1916), represent the concept.