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The Harlem Renaissance was a liberating response to the restrictive standards of the Racial Uplift agenda.
Rather than responding to the hostile climate by simply presenting positive representations of African Americans, writers of the Harlem Renaissance attempted to expose the racist oppression in American society.
Alain Locke wrote in his foreword to the literary collection The New Negro, “ We turn therefore in the other direction to the elements of truest social portraiture … we shall let the Negro speak for himself .” Locke believed that African Americans lived in a world with political realities, and thus needed to respond with a deliberate politics in their work.
Yet other members of the Harlem Renaissance resented what they saw as lingering prescriptions and constraints on their work.
Wallace Thurman rejected both the traditional Uplift politics and the agenda of the " New Negro ".
He organized a group of authors including Hurston to create their own magazine, FIRE!
!, that would publish the African American experience without any filters or censors.
Hurston ’ s contributions, like her novel Their Eyes, used vernacular southern African American English.
Completely rejecting the Uplift agenda of the time, the magazine also included homoerotic work as well as portrayals of prostitution.
Foreshadowing the African American community ’ s response to Their Eyes Were Watching God, FIRE !!
sold very poorly and was condemned as maligning the image of the community.
The Baltimore Afro-American reviewer wrote that he " just tossed the first issue of FIRE !!
into the fire ".

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