  In the judgment of many scholars of the Renaissance, The New Negro became, in the words of one, “virtually the central text of the Harlem Renaissance.” The title was taken from the collection’s lead essay, “The New Negro,” which was written by Locke. In the essay Locke endeavored to characterize the “New” Negro, the circumstances of the emergence of this character-type, the nature of its shared pride-of-race character, its psychology and mission and relation to the Negro masses, and the consequences of the emergence of the New Negro for race relations in the United States and for developments in Africa and the African Diaspora for which this new group-figure would serve as the avant garde. The anthology, then, is a gateway to an important selection of articulations by figures who were seminal contributors to, as well as beneficiaries of, the Harlem Renaissance, and to the vast and still growing multidisciplinary body of works that explore various aspects, figures, contributions, and consequences of the Renaissance. And Locke’s lead essay is a poignant gateway into his career of philosophizing as well as an adept example of an attempt to simultaneously characterize and give agenda-setting character and guidance to an extraordinary praxis-guiding artistic and intellectual revolution the focal points of which were determined efforts of racial-group self-affirmation and self-determination, beginning with the radical ontological work of redefining and revaluing on progressive terms the meaning of the Negro, then setting the tasks by which the New Negro—the “thinking Negro,” as Locke characterized the group in his essay—would lead through decidedly Negro Africanist-inspired, philosophically-minded cultural creativity and articulate expressions of philosophizings born of struggles…