This dissertation looks at the cultural politics of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the early 20 th century. Founded in 1909, this heterosocial and interracial reform organization sought to reclaim African American civic rights and challenge the predominant racial hierarchies that supported segregation and other forms of oppression. Through both specific campaigns against racial discrimination and through the promotion of creative expression in the organization's journal, The Crisis , the NAACP offered up the "modern" or "New Negro" as a symbol of revitalized democracy and individual autonomy in the early 20 th century. Although notions of the "New Negro" appeared regularly in early 20 th century African American political discourse, the NAACP's emphasis on modern self-creation encouraged broader debates about the meanings of freedom, democracy, and individual expression.
Gender lay at the heart of the NAACP's vision of black freedom, shaping not only political claims but also patterns of social activism. NAACP officials used the masculine image of the "modern" or New Negro man to assert black vitality and preparation for civic rights in the early 20 th century, attempting to replace dominant stereotypes of blacks as servile laborers with the new images of black cosmopolitanism. But if the rhetoric of "manhood rights" supported the NAACP's efforts to claim institutional authority on the "Negro problem," the emphasis on modern black self-realization facilitated debates over New Negro womanhood ideologies. Through visual and fictional work in the Crisis as well as through NAACP women's auxiliary work, the New Negro woman frequently appeared as a figure of liberation, desire, and self-expression. Such images participated in refashioning Victorian-era racial uplift ideologies while exposing creative tensions between collective reform interests and individual self-creation that have circulated within 20 th century civil rights activism. By the 1930s, the NAACP's emphasis on self-realization and civil liberties seemed less resonant within the larger context of the Great Depression but while the organization struggled to assert the currency of its reform agenda, it also supported the emergence of a new generation of professional female activists within its ranks.
