A Short Digest on Reading and Understanding the Development of African-American Literature.

This is an on-going work trying to make sense of the chronology of the upsurge of literature from African-Americans through harnessing their lost African culture from which they were uprooted through slavery. It is also like a thread holding and piecing together the various disparate articles that I have written or about to write on individuals mentioned only briefly here who have contributed much to this development.

One of the gains from participating in the seminar on Contemporary American Literature in the US in 2006 was that I deepened my interest and understanding of African American literature thus giving me the added zest and insight to pursue research into the field.

One key fact to bear in mind in trying to understand African American literature, is that one has of necessity to go back to the period when trading in slaves was legal in America and even further down in time to its genesis in Africa from where the slaves were captured. On board the ships which carried the slaves from their homeland to different shores around the world it was that the slave narratives that eventually became the roots of African-American literature began.

Brought to America, the slaves were taken to plantations to work as labourers. The plantations supplied the most essential items like sugar, coffee, cotton, tobacco, rice and gold to Europe. African American literature then started taking roots in the plantations and on board the slave ships.

Therefore, African American literature could be better studied in relation to these events and analysed in relation to the contradictions and conflicts which affected the relations of the enslaved with those who enslaved them and eventually owned them.

African American history and literature could also not be isolated from the existing power relations then. The white settlers and slave traders in America enslaved the Africans,and exploited them to multiply and accaelerate their economic gains from their plantations.

Slavery then is a major phenomenon in human history. Many writers and political figures had philosophically rejected the inherent corruption of slavery and yet believed that Negroes were on a lower evolutionary plane or of a specy less than whites.

As slavery in America became wholly identified with the Negro, the justification for color caste was grounded on concepts of the mental and moral inferiority of the Negro race. For Negroes were described as created by nature in the likeness of beasts, a subhuman work force, contemptible in appearance, wretched in manner, lowly in mind,and hopelessly incapable of assimilation into civilized American society. The Blacks were thus conveniently tucked at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, as they were seen as much closer to the ape than the white man.

The Whiteman came to Africa to discover new lands in the process coming into contact with another being that was black, that dwelt in huts and that worked in groups. He immediately arrived at the notion that he had found another being little more than a beast. The white man in regarding the Africans as backward and uncivilized beasts of burden then saw in them the perfect tools to work on his extensive plantations in the new world. The slave trade thus began, with thousands of Africans exported to America to work on the American plantations.

The Slave Trade involved exchanging of gifts between slave dealers and African chiefs. Slave dealers used rum, gunpowder, clothes to purchase slaves and the chiefs in turn looked for culprits or captives within their communities to sell to the slave buyers. Young energetic men and women were thus transported to the US and Europe to work as slaves.

In this way Africa was robbed of its able-bodied young men and women who could have formed the backbone of its development. The resulting African slaves became the largest immigrant group arriving in the Americas. As they mostly did not come willingly, they were chained to prevent them from escaping. Those who would not submit to this were thrown out to sea. There were cases of some who were so resolutely defiant that they chose death over forced submission to an alien faith and culture.

Now in the American plantations, the slaves were treated as beasts, being overworked and chained. Most enslaved families were even separated to allow them to live with different slave owners. They were refused education and anything that would make them live like decent humans. Agony and death by hanging were what would befall any slave who was seen with any written material

The American Slave Trade was indeed a terrible and a shocking reality. Men were examined like beasts and the forms of women were rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave buyers. The slave owners regarded the slaves as their personal property and therefore treated them as brutes. They thus robbed them of their liberty and dignity. They were kept working ceaselessly and mercilessly without wages, sold at auctions like goods and worst of all, kept ignorant of their relations to their fellow men.

But there were masters who whilst depriving them of their liberties, in an effort to impart their western culture in order to effectively control them and communicate with them encouraged the reading of the Bible. Many slaves were thus attracted to the stories about Jesus Christ and his followers.

Such was the lot of a notable woman slave Phillis Wheatley, who born in Senegal, Africa, was captured and sold into slavery at the early age of seven and brought to America, where she was bought by a Boston merchant. Even though she initially spoke no English, by the time she was sixteen she had mastered the language. She read widely and caught the infection of literature, and was soon wruiting her own poetry which were mostly reflective of the geography and minds of New England, especially the eminent people there. Her elegy "On the Death of the Reverend Mr George Whitefield" which earned her a considerable status in Boston and London. Her poetry was praised by many of the leading figures of the American Revolution, including George Washington, who personally thanked her for a poem she wrote in his honor.

She published her book Poems on Various Subjects in 1773, three years before American independence. Despite this, many white people found it hard to believe that a Black woman could be so intelligent as to write poetry. Her writings were thought to be forgeries since Blacks were thought incapable of the higher cognitive and affective skills of creativity and analysis. For then education was prohibited to them in fear that they might use it as a medium for revolt. But they still pursued literacy stealthily. As a result, Wheatley had to defend herself in court that she actually wrote her own poetry, which she did successfully.

Wheatley''s successful defense of her artistry is in fact seen as the first recognition of African American literature. Written African-American literature could therefore be said to have started with her being brought to court to defend her art and talent.

All her writings are based on her understanding of the Bible. But the agony of slavery are still evident in her early songs and writings in which she portrayed slavery as stigmatizing and subjugating the African Americans into hollowness.

Many slaves were not allowed to learn or even to seek any kind of skill. But slave narratives were somehow nurtured. The slave narratives were strongly rooted in African oral literature thus enabling the slaves to reclaim their cultural identity and pride, though, Christian references were implied and indicated.

The early periods before slavery were exploited by African Americans through the vernacular tradition of folklore, songs and poems. These stories, poems and songs were used by the slaves in the plantations to express their frustrations, rekindle their spirits whilst working and during their leisure hours or whilst resting. The slaves thus worked out a feasible medium through which they overcame the barriers of communication amongst them created by their heterogeneity representative of the diversity of ethnicities of the African continent from which they all came.

Some of them started expressing and celebrating through prose their lost heritage and their suffering under their white masters. The message these writings carried were a clear reflection of their former lives in Africa and their bondage in America. Some of them were written independently and some with the assistance of white abolitionists.

There were a series of narratives by African American slave writers, notably the female slaves; Harriet Jacobs'' Incidents on the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Elizabeth Keckley''s Behind the Scene, or Thirty Year a Slave and Four Year in the White House (1868). In actual fact the literature of slavery and freedom began with literary pioneers such as Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown and Harriet Wilson.

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born into slavery round about the year 1813 in Edenton, Northern Carolina. Her most celebrated literary contribution in the fight against racism, is her slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl where, she tells of the happy family life that she enjoyed until the death of her mother. For after her mother''s death, she was sent into the home of a Dr. James Norcom, where, she endured the pain of sexual harassment at his hands. Tired of being her master''s concubine she gets herself involved with a white man from the white neighbourhood, an affair which results to the birth of her two children, Joseph and Louisa. But even this action did not succeed in deterring her master''s maniacal attempts on her.

Fearing that her master will make her children plantation slaves, she runs away to save them. By running away, she hopes that her master will sell the children and their father will buy and free them. She vividly chronicles her flight in 1835 and her seven years in hiding in the tiny attic crawlspace in the home of her grandmother. After so many incidents, she is purchased from the Norcoms by her employer Cornelia Grinnel Willis. Her narrative then ends with her attaining the freedom that she had always been longing for.

Harriet Jacobs'' slave narrative an engaging and honest account of a young woman navigating the daunting daily life of women in slavery honestly deals with the most sinister aspect of slavery -- rape. Jacobs included this oppressive aspect of slavery in her narrative at a time when even abolitionists thought it inappropriate. But according to Mary Easter , "When the veil is not drawn over these events the narrative become very important documents of actual people."

Another slave narrative often read as well as studied is Olaudah Equiano''s. Equiano(c.1745-1797) who was born in what is now Nigeria was kidnapped and sold into slavery in childhood, quickly learning several other African dialects beside his native Ibo before being sold to white slave dealers and transported across the Atlantic. He survived the middle passage and was taken as a slave to the New World. As a slave to a captain in the Royal Navy, and later to a Quaker merchant, his intelligence and willingness to learn got him to quickly learn to write and read and quickly grasped the art of navigation as well as business and a host of other trades which were to be immensely useful to his prosperity later. He eventually earned enough money with which he bought his own freedom by careful trading and saving. As a seaman, he travelled the world, including the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Atlantic and the Arctic, the latter in an abortive attempt to reach the North Pole.

Coming to London, Equiano lived in England and was taught to read and write by two kind ladies who were friends to his first master. Equiano''s struggles were familiar to many others who taken from Africa had to endure tragic upheavals.

Equiano eventually became involved in the movement to abolish the slave trade which led to his writing and publishing The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789) a strongly abolitionist autobiography that created quite an impact on the anti-slavery movement. It''s appeal extended from America to Europe bolstering the efforts of Anti-Slavers. While not radical in its approach, it called on Whites to come to understand the perils slaves go through and try to find the means of ending the practice. The book became a bestseller, as well as furthered the anti-slavery cause, and made Equiano a wealthy man.

Harriet E. Wilson born on the 15th of March 1825 as a slave is generally celebrated as the first female African American novelist and the first female American to publish a novel on the North American continent. Wilson''s first work was her autobiographical novel, Our Nig published in 1859 which reveals the cruelty and bitterness she suffered at the hands of the Northern whites of the United States. The Bellmont family in Our Nig held Wilson in indentured servitude from her late teens, abusing her physically and mentally from the age of six to eighteen. After the end of her indenture, Wilson worked as a domestic servant and seamstress in many homes in Southern New Hampshire and in central and Western Massachusetts where she continued to suffer abuse and ill-treatment from racist whites.

A very good example of an independently written slave narrative is Frederick Douglass'' Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) in which he often raises the question of freedom and liberty in a predominantly white and racist country.

His was one of the most artful and engaging slave narratives ever written.


In the first of three autobiographies, Narrative of Frederick Douglass, Douglass vividly recalls how, as a youth, he was inspired and intrigued when he overheard his master''s wife Sophia Auld, reading the bible.

Mrs. Auld began instructing young Douglass. But when Douglass'' master, Hugh Auld, discovered his wife teaching the young slave to read, he admonished her against it.

He told her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. For as he said, "If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master -- to do as he is told to do. Learning would SPOIL the best nigger in the world. He went on to claim that"if you teach that nigger how to read, it would be worthless keeping him as it would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy."

The wife thus learned that literacy had the potential to shake the foundations of the slave system. But for Douglas, this enlightened him about the dangers of that system as he reveals below:

"These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty -- to wit, the white man''s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I the least expected it. Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read."

-Frederick Douglass, Narrative of Frederick Douglass

Reading fueled Douglass'' flight to freedom. Once in the North, his writing became a great weapon against the system of slavery.

Born into slavery in Maryland, Douglass eventually escaped and worked for numerous abolitionist causes.and edited a number of newspapers. Douglass'' best-known work is his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Even though some critics attacked the book, not believing that a black man could have written such an eloquent work, it was an immediate bestseller. Douglas later revised and expanded it and republished it as My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).

Frederick Douglass eventually came to public attention as one of the best known Americans of the nineteenth century, serving in a number of political posts, writing numerous influential articles and essays, newspaper editor, orator, American Ambassador, Presidential advisor and one of the most influential lecturers and authors in American history whose literature and speeches remain eloquent and effective records of slavery and the efforts to end it.

Today, the themes and patterns of slave narratives could be easily traced in many works of American Americans. Ralph Ellison''s Invisible Man (1952), Malclom X''s Autobiography (1965), Toni Morrison''s Beloved (1987), Charles Johnson''s Middle Passage (1990) and many contemporary African American writingsall draw much inspiration as well as references from them.

The earliest works of fiction by African American writers were by William Wells Brown (1814?84) and Victor Séjour (1817?74). Séjour was born free in New Orleans and moved to France at the age of 19. There in 1837 he published his short story "The Mulatto" which is the first known fiction by an African American. But since it was written in French and published in a French journal, it had apparently no influence on later American literature. Séjour never returned to African American themes in his subsequent works.

William Wells Brown, on the other hand, was a prominent abolitionist, lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian that was born into slavery in the Southern United States, but escaped to the North in 1834,worked in Buffalo from where he helped slaves escape and also appealed to politically active women who championed the cause of abolition and women''s right. He worked for abolitionist causes and became a prolific writer, writing what is considered to be the first novel by an African American, Clotel; or, The President''s Daughter (1853) based on what was then considered a rumor about Thomas Jefferson fathering a daughter with his slave, Sally Hemings. However, because the novel was published in England, the book is not considered the first African American novel published in the United States a honor which instead goes to Harriet Wilson, whose novel Our Nig (1859) details the difficult lives of Northern free Blacks.

His work, The Narratives of William W. Brown (autobiography), rejected the heroic resistance and eloquent outrage of Frederick Douglass. His style was one of rhetorical strategy involving telling stories of individuals and individual encounters in which the art of simple understatement and self-presentation prevailed over bullying and hypocrisy.

During the Reconstruction Era, other prominent African American writers emerged amongst whom was William Edward Burghardt DuBois, an American Civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet and scholar. Unlike other African American scholars who were born into slavery, DuBois was born free in February 23, 1863. But like every other Negro then, he felt the pangs of alienation and realised that though the physical chains of slavery were off the African American was still in psyschological bondage. He therefore invested much time as a civil rights activist and an outspoken and fearless advocate for a race-free America that will demonstrate the true quality of Liberty, Freedom and Equality on which principles the nation itself was established. Dubois was an exceptionally versatile scholar who excelled and taught in various institutions. He wrote many books including three major autobiographies which were always concerned with the negro''s strife for emancipation and his life experiences. His most outstanding works were The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), John Brown (1901), Black Reconstruction (1935), Black Folk, Now and Then (1939). DuBois founded the Phylon Magazine at Altanta University in 1940. He wrote The World and Africa, an inquiry into the part that Africa played in world history and development in 1946. In it he strongly condemned colonialism under whose grip the whole of Africa was then under.

While prominent white voices were shouting about Negro crime, DuBois explained that "Negro crime is caused by the strain of the ''social revolution'', experienced by black Americans as they began to adapt to their new found freedom and position in the nation". He explained that Negro crime will decline as the black population moves upwards in society. He finally urged the exceptional men of the black race to sway their race from criminal problems. He also made it known to the whites that, if they had not used racism to condition the Negro, the level of Negro crimes would have been very low. The only solution to the Negro problem he stated, was for the Whites to recognize African Americans as their equals rather than as their inferior.

DuBois, with others founded the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) in 1909 and worked as its Publication Director. He also wrote weekly columns in various African-American newspapers, including the Chicago Defender, The Pittsburgh Courier and The New York Amsterdan News. He eventually became the editor-in-chief for the NAACP Publication The Crisis, and published Harlem Renaissance Writers such as Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer.

DuBois''s great belief'' in education led him to urge Southern Blacks to seek higher education in order to be able to challenge Whites on every aspect of life. The first African American PhD graduate from Harvard, he is believed to have set the pace for the black renaissance that eventually became known as the Harlem Renaissance principally through his publications and his political activism as a Civil Rights leader. His seminal book on Black nationalism, The Souls of Black Folk has become the Bible and is still taught at most African American schools today.

Dubois''contemporary, Booker T. Washington, was born a slave on 5th April 1856 in Virginia. In the first of three autobiographies Up From Slavery he reflects on his slavery days and his emancipation at the age of nine. Through hard work, Washington became a tower of strength for African Americans. As a foremost educator and race leader he founded the first higher institution for Blacks,Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama and put all his efforts into teaching eager young Blacks in all fields of life. For unlike DuBois, Washington believed in vocational training as the ladder to being assimilated and fitting into the American society. Unlike DuBois who saw teaching as a calling, Washington felt it was a duty. Washington also supported civil rights groups such as the Afro-American league and later the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.He was a prolific writer whose numerous articles were published in Negro journals and magazines as well as a powerful orator.

Another writer the Jamaican, Marcus Garvey, (1887?1940), a newspaper publisher, journalist, and crusader for Black Nationalism through his organization the UNIA and the "back-to-Africa" movement, encouraged people of African descent to return to their ancestral homeland. A number of his essays were published as editorials in the UNIA house organ The Negro World Newspaper. Some of his lectures and other writings were compiled and published as nonfiction books by his second wife as the Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey Or, Africa for the Africans (1924) and More Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1977).

Paul Laurence Dumbar, who often wrote in the rural, African- American Vernacular English of the day, was the first African American poet to gain national prominence. His first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy, was published in 1893. Much of his work, such as When Malindy Sings (1906), and Joggin'' Erlong (1906) provide revealing glimpses into the lives of rural African-Americans of the day. Though Dunbar died young, he was a prolific poet, essayist, novelist and short story writer. Among his novels are The Uncalled, 1898 and The Fanatics, 1901.

Other African American writers rose to prominence among whom were Charles W.Chestnut, a well-known essayist.

But the most important and significant period in the development of African American literature happened during the great migration of the black Americans from the South to the cities of the North particularly to New York in Harlem and became known as the Harlem Renaissance lasting from 1920 to 1940. It was a great African American cultural movement which stimulated a rebirth of black culture, black poetry and prose as well as developments in African American music, theatre, art and politics. While it was based in the African American community in New York city and existed as a larger flowering of social thought and culture?with numerous Black artists, musicians, and others producing classic works from jazz to theater?the renaissance is perhaps best known for the literature that came out of it. For the first time in history, mainstream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously, and African American literature and art started attracting significant attention from the nation at large.

The Harlem Renaissance was a turning point for prior to this time, books by African Americans were primarily read by only other Black people. With the renaissance African American literature?as well as fine art and performing art?began to be absorbed into mainstream American culture.

Black writers now began to emerge and dominate New York with their cries for equality. Langston Hughes who had emerged as poet laureate of the era first received attention in the 1922 poetry collection, The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson, featuring the works of the period''s most talented poets like Claude M ckay, who also published three novels, Home to Harlem, Banjo and Banana Bottom and a collection of short stories. In 1926, Hughes published a collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, and in 1930 a novel, Not Without Laughter. He borrowed his material and his idiom from the streets of Harlem where he lived longest and which he knew best. His work incorporating the sights and sounds of the ghetto, celebrated a Negro folk tradition transformed from that of the rural south from which it had sprung.

Later he took up the cause of the working class people during the Great Depression and wrote on race relations and the problems of the poor. He remained a writer of protest who cried out against the condition of the Negro.

The diverse literary expression of the Harlem Renaissance ranged from Langston Hughes'' weaving of the rhythms of African American music into his poems of ghetto life, as in ''The Weary Blues''(1926), to Claude McKay''s use of the sonnet form as the vehicle for the impassioned poems attacking racial violence in''If We Must Die'' (1919). McKay also presented glimpses of the glamour and the glits of Harlem life in ''Harlem Shadows''. McKay''s volume of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922) became one of the first works by a black writer to be published by a mainstream, national publisher (Harcourt Brace).

Jean Toomer''s work Cane (1923) a famous experimental novel which is a collection of stories, poems, and sketches documents the life of American Blacks in the rural south and urban north. Writer and editor, Jessie Fauset depicted middle class life among black Americans from a woman''s perspective in her work Confusion (1924).

With these early works as the foundation, several other works followed between 1924 to 1926 through the stimulating efforts of a group of young black writers who produced Fire, their own literary magazine. With Fire, a new generation of young writers and artists, including Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston took ownership of the literary renaissance.

Countee Cullen, described everyday black life such as a trip he made to Baltimore, which was ruined by a racial insult in his poems in collections such as Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927) using traditional poetic forms. He combined both African and European images to explore the African roots of black American life. In the poem, ''Heritage'' (1925), Cullen brings out the dilemma of being both a Christian and an African, yet not belonging fully to either tradition.

Quicksand (1928) by novelist Nella Larsen offered a powerful psychological study of an African American woman''s loss of identity.

Zora Neale Hurston''s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) used the folk life of the black rural south to create a brilliant study of race and gender in which a woman finds her true identity. Altogether, Hurston wrote 14 books ranging from anthropology to short stories and novel-length fiction. Because of her gender and that her work was not seen as socially or politically relevant, her writings fell into obscurity for decades until it was rediscovered in the 1970s in a famous essay by Alice Walker,who found in Hurston a role model for all female African American writers.

A number of other writers also became well known including Dorothy West, author of the novel The Living is Easy, which examined the life of an Upper class Black family. Frank Marshall Davis''s poetry collections Black Man''s Verse (1935) and I am the American Negro (1937), published by BLACK Cat Press, earned him critical acclaim. William Thurman also made an impact with his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which focused on intraracial prejudice between lighter-skinned and darker-skinned African-Americans.

A large migration of African Americans began during World War I, hitting its high point during World War II. During this Great Migration Black people left the racism and lack of opportunities in the American South and settled in northern cities like Chicago, where they found work in factories and other sectors of the economy.

This massive migration produced a new sense of independence in the Black community and contributed to the vibrant Black urban culture seen during the Harlem Renaissance. The migration also empowered the growing American Civil Rights movement, which made a powerful impression on Black writers during the 1940s, ''50s and ''60s. Just as Black activists were pushing to end segregation and racism and create a new sense of Black nationalism, so too were Black authors attempting to address these issues with their writings.

Baldwin, whose fiction and essays dealt not only with race but sexuality, family,and the expatriate life, and his childhood in the Church, returned from many years in Paris to participate in the burgeoning movement. Many of Baldwin''s most significant works were written in the 60s, including Another Country and The Fire Next Time. Best known for his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, he wrote deeply personal and sharp stories and essays on sensitive issues such as racism and the quest for self-identity while examining what it was like to be both Black and homosexual at a time when neither of these identities was accepted by American culture. In all, Baldwin wrote nearly 20 books, including such classics as Another Country and The Fire Next Time.

Baldwin''s friend, Richard Wright, whom Baldwin called "the greatest Black writer in the world for me" is best known for his novel Native Son (1940), which tells the story of a Black man, Bigger Thomas, struggling for acceptance in Chicago. Baldwin was so impressed by the novel that he titled a collection of his own essays Notes of a Native Son, in reference to Wright''s novel. However, their friendship fell apart due to one of the book''s essays, "Everybody''s Protest Novel," which criticized Native Son for lacking credible characters and psychological complexity. Among Wright''s other books are the autobiographical novel Black Boy (1945), The Outsider (1953), and White Man, Listen! (1957). Richard Wright captured the moment with his two most significant novels, Black Boy and Native Son,in which he reflects on the struggles and sufferings of black Americans especially in the racially segregated and violent American South.

The other great novelist of this period,Ralph Ellison, in his novel Invisible Man (1952), which won the National Book Award in 1953 discussed the issues of racism and the search for self-identity that dominated the lives of African Americans. Even though Ellison did not complete another novel during his lifetime, Invisible Man was so influential that it secured his place in literary history.

Apart from the literature, civil right groups, fought to alleviate the plight of the Negro. The civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister and one of America''s greatest orators started with the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to comply with the Jim Crow laws requiring blacks to give up their seats to white people in public transports. This action led to the United States Supreme Court decision, outlawing racial segregation on all public transports.

Martin Luther King organized non-violent protests against the system of southern segregation known as Jim Crowism. He organized marches advocating for blacks'' right to vote, and for labour rights and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the United States law with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965.

The march on Washington, another important event in the history of African Americans made specific demands: such as an end to segregation in public schools, meaningful civil rights legislation including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment,and protection of civil rights activists from police brutality. King will always be remembered in the history of America as someone who tried to "feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and love and serve humanity"

The Civil Rights movement made a powerful impression on black voices in the 1960s.

Baldwin, whose fiction and essays dealt not only with race but sexuality, family, the ex-patriate life, and his childhood in the Church, returned from many years in Paris to participate in the burgeoning movement.

The Civil Rights period also saw the rise of female Black poets, most notably Gwendolyn Brooks, who became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize awarded for her 1949 book of poetry, Annie Allen. Along with Brooks, other female poets who became well known during the 1950s and ''60s are Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez.

During this time, a number of activists became playwrights notably Lorraine Hansberry, the most significant black woman writer of the period who broke new ground with her play, A Raising in the Sun,in which she explores the frustrations and disappointments that African Americans undergo as a result of racism. Focusing on the struggles of a poor Black family living in Chicago trying to transcend their circumscribed life, it won the 1959 New York Drama Critics'' Circle Award.

Another playwright who gained attention was Amiri Baraka, who wrote controversial off-Broadway plays though in more recent years, he has become known for his poetry and music criticism.

Beginning in the 1970s, African American literature reached the mainstream as books by Black writers continually achieved best-selling and award-winning status and began to be accepted by academia as a legitimate genre of American literature.

Malcolm X, a black Muslim minister and national spokesman for the Nation of Islam, was considered by some as a martyr and a champion of equality. As a militant leader, Malcolm X advocated black pride, economic self-reliance and equality in politics ultimately rising to become a world renowned African-American, Pan-Africanist and human rights activist.

The Black Arts Movement emerged during the late 1960s to the early 1970s,with, African American writers, performing artists, and visual artists hailing black culture and the political struggle of black people worldwide. They initiated slogans like ''Black is Beautiful'', and ''Black Power'' whioch all made Jazz and soul music, the entertainment and pride of the period.

Jeff Donaldson, a co-founder of the Chicago-based black artist collective Afri-Cobrra wrote important manifestos and helped secure international recognition of black artists in Africa and North America. Many artists of the 1930s and 1940s resurfaced during the Black Arts Movement with a new sense of solidarity to promote black culture. They joined hands with the younger generation of artists, creating works that showed their shared interest in African design sensibilities, the black figure and the continuing struggle for civil rights. The Washington painter Alma Thomas at the age of eighty, was the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at New York''s Whitney''s Museum of American Art in 1972.

There was no clear cut distinction between the period of the Black Arts Movement and the emergence of writers such as Sonia Sauchez, Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni.

Sonia Sanchez was an eminent African American poet with more than a dozen books of poetry to her name. A poet, playwright and educator, she became in the late 1960s, interested in the black political activism of the times for which she has become particularly noted. She published poetry in journals such as The Liberator, The Journal of Black Poetry, Black Dialogue and Negro Digest. Her first book published in (1969) condemns white Americans'' attitude towards blacks. After this publication, she continued to write on what she termed as the "neoslavery" of blacks, who remain socially and psychologically unfree. She also wrote about child abuse, sexisms and generational class conflicts. A good number of her poems are written in the typical black American speech pattern, refusing to use formal English grammar and pronunciation. She also joined other activists in promoting Black Studies in schools.

As part of the larger Black Arts Movement, which was inspired by the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, African American literature began to be defined and analyzed. A number of scholars and writers helped to promote and define it as a genre during this period, including fiction writers Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and poet James Emanuel.

James Emanuel took a major step toward defining African American literature when he edited (with Theodore Gross) Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, the first collection of black writings released by a major publisher. This anthology, and Emanuel''s work as an educator at the City College of New York (where he is credited with introducing the study of African-American poetry, heavily influenced the birth of the genre.

Other influential African American anthologies of this time included Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal in 1968 and The Negro Caravan, co-edited by Sterling Brown, Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee in 1969.

Toni Morrison, meanwhile, also helped promote Black literature and authors when she was working as an editor for Random House in the 1960s and ''70s, where she edited books by such authors as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones. Morrison herself would later emerge as one of the most important African American writers of the 20th century.

Since the 1970s also, African American women have taken a dominant role in the literature of their age resulting in African American women such as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison leaving their footprints in the sands of time.

Maya Angelon, one of American''s greatest black female writers experienced racism at first hand as manifested in her poems. Lynn Bloom in Afro-American Writers After 1955 states that, "in stamps Angelon learrned what it was like to be a black girl in a world whose boundaries were set by whites". "but she learned also, that blacks would not only endure, but prevail". Maya Angelou''s work I Know Why the Caged Bind Sings reflects on her early life when she had to deal with complicated issues such as her rape and her identity as a black person. According to Bloom, "her poetry draws heavily on her personal history but employs the points of various personae. Much of Angelou''s poetry, almost entirely short lyrics, expresses in strong, often jazzy rhythms, themes common to the life experiences of many American blacks ? discrimination, exploitation, being on welfare" whilst, "other poems deal with social issues and problems which though not unique to blacks, are explored from a black perspective"

Angelou''s poetry covers a wide range of other issues. In her poem "Born That Way" the persona deals with the issues of prostitution, sexual abuse and incest. In, "Phenomenal Woman", "Woman Work", "Seven Women Blessed Assurance", she deals with women''s issues. "To Beat the Child was Bad Enough" and "A Kind of Love" addresses Child Abuse and domestic abuse respectively.

Her other poems, "The Memory" and "We Saw Beyond our Seeming" looks into the institution of slavery, black pride, drug abuse and a lot of other issues. Joanne Braston in Modern American Women Writers states that, "Readers of her poetry appreciate its rhythm, lyric imagery, and realism". She goes on that, Angelou has achieved a measure of true sainthood in the eyes of both critics and lay readers,some of the people who read her work by transcending brutal racism, sexual abuse and poverty to become one of America''s most celebrated contemporary writers".

Alice Walker, another female African American writer of the late 1970s to mid 1980s typically 1focuses her works on the sufferings of African Americans especially women and their struggles to define themselves in a racist, sexist and violent society. She has written several novels including The Temple of My Familiar, and Possessing the Secret of Joy as well as a number of short stories and collections of poetry. However, her most celebrated work is her novel The Color Purple, an epistolary novel which tells the story of a young black woman Celie who is struggling to define herself through racist white culture and oppressive black culture. Celie, is sexually abused by her stepfather and then is forced to marry a man who also physically abuses her.

The novel was later made into a film by Steven Spielberg. Alice Walker has won several awards for her writings including the prestigious Pulitzer prize for fiction making her the first African American woman to win this award.

Toni Morrison, one of America''s most famous contemporary writers, grew up among a family of story tellers, musicians and artists and therefore develops an early passion for language, folk wisdom and literature. Morrison''s works, her novels in particular, reflect both the pessimism that racism produces and the optimism that has empowered African Americans to survive and thrive in spite of racism. Morrison''s The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Jazz deal with the concept of racism to a greater extent. Among her most famous novels is Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. This story describes a slave who found freedom but killed her infant daughter to save her from a life of slavery.

Song of Solomon, is a tale about materialism and brotherhood. She also deals with the issues of female friendship, gender and the effect of slavery in the lives of African Americans. She has won several awards herself including the Robert F. Kennedy award for Beloved and her most prestigious award, the Nobel Prize in literature, in 1993 after the publication of Jazz in 1992, thus becoming the first African American woman to have won it.

Dr. David Anderson from University of Louisville who led this particular session on African American literature in that 2006 semina touched on the issue of slavery and its dramatic effect on the mind of African American writers today. According to Dr. Andersen, slavery can be studied today as an historical legacy but its indelible effects, its haunting associations are still rooted deep in the mind of African Americans.

For as he emphasized, slavery constitutes an inseparable link with the unforgettable past. For, the white historians portrayed the slaves and their life in plantations as distorted images and pictures. But African culture and civilization could be also linked not to the first contact with the white man in America, but to the African soil. Hence Professor Gates''s reference to the trickster monkey as an embodiment of the African image of Esu-Elegbna.

FURTHER READINGS

BOOKS

?Andrews, W., Foster, F., and Harris, T. (Editors).The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Oxford, 1997.

?Davis, M., Graham, M., and Pineault-Burke, S. (Editors). Teaching African American Literature: Theory and Practice. Routledge, 1998.

?Jay, G. American Literature and the Culture Wars. Cornell University Press, 1997.

?McKay, N., and Gates, H. (Editors). The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Second Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.

?John Callahan, Ph.D., In the African-American Grain: Call and Response in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction, University of Illinois Press, reprint ed., 2001.

.Darryl Dickson-Carr, The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction, Columbia University Press, 2005.

. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism by Oxford, 1988.

? Valerie Sweeney Prince, Burnin'' Down the House: Home in African American Literature, Columbia University Press, 2005.


Articles:

?Brodhead, R. "An Anatomy of Multiculturalism". Yale Alumni Magazine, April 1994.

?Cashmore, E. "Review of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature" New Statesman, April 25, 1997.

?Dalrymple, T. "An Imaginary ''Scandal''" The New Criterion, May 2005.

?Gilyard, K., and Wardi, A. African American Literature. Penguin, 2004.

?Greenberg, P. "I hate that (The rise of identity journalism)". Townhall.com, June 15, 2005.

?Groden, M., and Krieswirth, M. (Editors). "African-American Theory and Criticism" from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.

?Grossman, J. "Historical Research and Narrative of Chicago and the Great Migration".

?Hamilton, K. "Writers'' Retreat: Despite the proliferation of Black authors and titles in today''s marketplace, many look to literary journals to carry on the torch for the written word". Black Issues in Higher Education, November 6, 2003.

?Lowney, J. "Haiti and Black Transnationalism: Remapping the Migrant Geography of Home to Harlem" African American Review, Fall, 2000.

?Mitchem, S. "No Longer Nailed to the Floor". Cross Currents, spring, 2003.

?Nishikawa, K. "African American Critical Theory." The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. 5 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.

?Nishikawa, K. "Crime and Mystery Fiction." The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, Jr. 5 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.

?Roach, R. "Powerful pages: Unprecedented Public Impact of W.W. Norton and Co''s Norton Anthology of African American Literature". Black Issues in Higher Education, September 18, 1997.

?African American Literature University of California at Santa Barbara: The Voice of the Shuttle

?African American Literature Syllabi Prepared by Georgetown University Crossroads Project

?African Americans in History Biographies prepared by the African American Institute at the University of Georgia

?African American Literature A USC library definition and link resource

?African American Women Writers: Critical and Biographical Resources Rutgers University

?African American Women Writers: Dissertation Abstracts General and Specific: Vinette Carroll, Alice Childress, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Shirley Graham (DuBois), Angela Weld Grimke, Lorraine Hansberry, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Anna Devere Smith

?African American Voices: A Booklist of Recent Titles By and About African-America

Arthur E Smith is Senior Lecturer of English at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone. His articles, stories and essays have appeared in many venues. He was born and grew up in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He holds a Masters in African Literature from Fourah Bay College. He has taught English at Prince of Wales, Milton Margai College of Education and Technology. Mr. Smith is widely published. He was one of 17 international scholars who participated in a seminar on contemporary American Literature sponsored by the U.S. State Department in 2006. His thoughts and reflections on this trip could be read at www.lisnews.org and ezinearticles.com His other publications include: Folktales From Freetown, Langston Hughes: Life and Works Celebrating Black Dignity, and ''The Struggle of the Book in Sierra Leone''