A Magazine That Named a Movement

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1935, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aime Cesaire and Leon Damas, all students in Paris at the time, helped launch L'Etudiant noir, a small student journal aimed at Black students from France's African and Caribbean colonies. The magazine ran for only a handful of issues, but it is conventionally remembered as the founding venue where the three writers began articulating the shared ideas that became Negritude, a rejection of French colonial assimilation policy in favor of an affirmed, shared Black cultural and literary identity across Africa and its diaspora.