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Négritude, a concept developed in the 1930s by a group that included the future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor and the French poet Aimé Césaire, is the belief that one should identify one's blackness without reference to one's homeland, native language, religion or spatial/geographical location.
It was designed to help all those with black heritage to celebrate their blackness without confining this celebration to a single nation, geographical location or cultural group. Definitions of this concept have varied as have those who have embraced it. American Langston Hughes was one of the first Americans to adhere to the concept of négritude, and in his poetry and short stories, the feeling of blackness is everpresent. He argued that those people who did not want to be black, who were ashamed of their heritage, were no better than racists.
The term négritude was first used in 1935 by Aimé Césaire in the 3rd issue of the magazine L'Étudiant noir.