McKendree Professor of English Set to Publish Two New Books

by Tina Tebbe

Lebanon, IL (01/23/2024) — (LEBANON, Ill.) - Dr. Martha Patterson, professor of English at McKendree University, has been offered an advanced contract with Princeton University Press for The New Negro: A History, 1887-1933. She will be the lead co-editor with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for a groundbreaking anthology of period essays tracing the evolution of arguably the most important anti-racist figure in African American history. She began working on this book during her sabbatical in the 2018-2019 academic year.

Dr. Patterson has also been offered a contract for The Harlem Renaissance Weekly: Reading the New Negro in Jazz Age Black Newspapers with Cambridge University Press. Her book, which has been a labor of love off and on again for the past 20 years, traces the figure of the New Negro in popular African American fiction published in Black newspapers during the 1920s. She shows that it was not Alain Locke's implicitly male New Negro who defined the Harlem Renaissance Weekly, but rather the New Negro Woman, who, almost invariably in the context of a heteronormative love plot, propelled narratives, spurred sales, and defined a distinctly modern Black socio-political consciousness.

A native of Green Bay, Wis., and resident of O'Fallon, Ill., Dr. Patterson's impending publications are a product of her passion and fascination with the "new," when marginalized groups feel like they must assume a new persona to combat stereotypes. Her first two books centered on the history of the American New Woman; however, she discovered that no one had traced the history of the American New Negro, so she decided to take the reins and pursue the topic.

"After hearing an interview with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., I decided to contact him to see if he would support the project. We are now co-editing the volume of period essays tracing the evolution of the New Negro figure, the first anti-racist media campaign in African American history," Dr. Patterson said.

Dr. Patterson's colleagues also encouraged her to continue her important research and pointed her toward an important source: periodicals.

"When I published my collection of essays on the history of the American New Woman in 2008, one of the faculty members who read my work encouraged me to continue research in periodicals," she said. "Once I started to read 1920s issues of The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most popular and nationally-circulating Black newspapers in the country, I became fascinated by the fiction it published. I wondered how that fiction compared to the Black fiction I regularly taught as part of the Harlem Renaissance, the great literary outpouring of Black literature and art in the 1920s. In my book, I argue that in Black newspapers, we find a completely different Harlem Renaissance, one far more politically engaged and female-centered."

Both books are slated to be published in 2025.

"The greatest honor of my life has been working with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Alphonse Fletcher, university professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, host of Finding Your Roots, and one of the most esteemed public intellectuals in African American history," Dr. Patterson said.