SOURCE: "The New Black Aesthetic and W. E. B. Du Bois, or Hephaestus, Limping," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, Summer, 1994, pp. 249-82.

In the following essay, Judy relates Du Bois's concept of black consciousness as expressed in The Souls of Black Folk to the New Black Aesthetic.

Such is Beauty. Its variety is infinite, its possibility is endless. In normal life all may have it and have it yet again. The world is full of it…. Who shall let this world be beautiful?… We black folk may help for we have within us as a race a new stirrings; stirrings of the beginning of the new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be;… and there has come the conviction that the Youth that is here today, the Negro Youth, is a different kind of Youth, because in some...