The Development of Personal Black Identity

 Timani Bowens

African American Lit I

Jaleesa Harris

December 7, 2025

The Development of Personal Black Identity

The decades between the Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance were marked by African Americans looking for ways to elevate their economic and intellectual life, fueling debate among the different intellectuals with visions of progress.  Scholars such as Booker T. Washington advocated for vocational uplift and social accommodation to achieve progress, while W. E. B. Du Bois believed in liberal education and political activism. By the twenties these controversies had yielded to a cultural shift in which artists and writers of the New Negro took on the focus of expressive independence and inner freedom. This essay looks at how this transition of respectability being forced externally to self-determination is reflected in the second chapter of  Zora Neale Hurston’s, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Whereas Washington approached Black progress in terms of work and discipline, Hurston depicts the development of self-sufficient Black existence. The Black self-hood defined by Hurston is representative of the emotional and creative freedom that formed the core of Harlem Renaissance, that was echoed by Hughes, Locke, and Hurston.

In the post-Reconstruction period, Black intellectual life was predetermined by a radically different paradigm of racial progression. The program, presented by Booker T. Washington through the Atlanta Compromise and The Awakening of the Negro, was focused on industrial education, disciplined labor, and strategic social accommodation. His reasoning was that Black citizenship would somehow be guaranteed overtime by economic self-reliance despite a short-time concession to segregation. W. E. B. Du Bois strongly opposed this paradigm arguing that Washington’s program gave up too much ground politically. In Of the Training of Black Men, he states that liberal education, civic engagement and development of intellectual leadership “the Talented Tenth” were crucial conditions before significant racial progress could be achieved. By the twentieth century, the ideologies exploded into realities represented in the Harlem Renaissance. Scholars such as Alain Locke in New Negro, summed up this change and issued cultural self-expression, aesthetic independence, and inner freedom, as the main elements of a new image of Black identity. In this context, even creativity was considered a place of political and psychological freedom as it was a radical shift out of the externally imposed respectability to self-fashioning and control over artistic production.

Hurston’s second chapter serves as a bright literary personification of this ideological change in the form of a life-altering experience that Janie undergoes under the pear tree. The symbolic resonance of the scene is significant, as the tree represents desire, growth, and the awakening of self-consciousness. Through her imagery, Hurston creates an image of being unhurried, sensuous, almost ritualistic, inviting the reader to Janie’s inner world and making her realization look like an aesthetic experience. The use of the narrative voice that switches softly between omniscience and Janie’s viewpoint ensures the feeling that her awareness is developing on its own without external influence. Janie’s awakening is a pivotal point of self-development. Her perception of lust is not just sexual but existential. It is a manifestation of an awakening based on emotional authenticity. In this way, Hurston aligns Janie with the New Negro ethos, which glorify interior life and self-definition as resistance practices. Janie emerges as a literary embodiment of Hughes’ urgency to have freedom in self-expression and Hurston herself in the context of her writing and her words in How It Feels to Be Colored Me that identity is a performance, not a burden.

The representation of Janie by Hurston is close to some of the most influential Harlem Renaissance philosophers who attempted to redefine the potential of Black artistic and personal expression. The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain by Langston Hughes is an argument against the necessity to fit Black artists into the aesthetics of white middle classes, and the genuine creativity is presented as a rebellion. Janie’s awakening is opposed forced expectations. Her self-realization is based on pure emotive reality instead of social acceptability. This ethos is further enforced in a work by Alain Locke titled The New Negro in which cultural production is cited as a means of group self-assertion. The arts in the Lockean model are a path to psychological and civic rejuvenation, which Hurston fiercely puts into action by letting Janie progress to the stage of self-possession.

Hurston further represents this in How It Feels to Be Colored Me, where she writes that she feels most colored and most herself when allowed freedom for self-expression. This is represented by the internal fire that lights up in Janie under the pear tree. This is further represented in works such as George Schuyler’s “The New Negro Art Hokum,” which offer the skeptical position that challenge essentialist notions of racial art, who argue that art is not just racial but rather a representation of personal diversity. Collectively, these works contextualize the story of Hurston as an expression of New Negro ideas that are based on creativity, self-awareness, and aesthetic independence.

Hurston’s second chapter shows the progress of intellectualization of Black progress. Washington was focused on vocational discipline and Du Bois on liberal education, both of which were aimed at achieving some model of external validation, economic security, professional accomplishment, and civic recognition. Contrarily, interior life, expressive agency and cultural creativity were the essential aspects of liberation that the New Negro thinkers and artists predicted. This development is combined in the narrative by Hurston that places emotional awakening of Janie at the heart of her forming identity. This change is noteworthy since it is also a bigger change in African American cultural awareness. According to Hurston, the way to self-realization cannot be traced through work, decency, or intellectual achievements. Rather she exposes the influence of personal desire, imagination and aesthetic experience on a more comprehensive model of autonomy. It prioritizes recognition of internal power and the role it plays in achieving external success. Hurston, therefore, can be considered the quintessential example of the ideological shift that took place in expressive freedom during the Harlem renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance was a manifestation of the debate between Washington’s vocational discipline and Du Bois’s liberal educational advocacy as Black people embraced cultural self-definition. Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is a representation of the self-awakening and emergence of selfhood defined by these ideological debates. Janie’s awakening represents the need for cultural re-orientation toward autonomy. The awakening next to Hughes’ rejection of conformity, racial consciousness defined by Locke and Hurston’s articulation of unrestrained identity represent what it means to be Black and free.

Works Cited

Alain, Locke. New Negro: An Interpretation. Dreamscape Media., 1901.

Du Bois, William EB. The souls of black folk [1903]. na, 1989.

George, Schuyler. "The Negro-Art Hokum." Nation 122.3180 (1926): 662-63.

Hughes, Langston. "The Negro artist and the racial mountain." The Langston Hughes Review 4.1 (1985): 1-4.

Hurston, Zora Neale. "How it feels to be colored me." 11 May 1928,

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Narrated by Ruby Dee, Recorded Books, 1994. Audiobook. 

Washington, Booker T. "“Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are”: Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise Speech." History Matters (1895).