Arthur P. Davis: Forging the Way for the Formation of the Canon

Contrary to the belief that all the tools an anthologist needs are a pair of scissors and a pot of glue, anthologizing is an exacting art/science. A great anthologist needs an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject matter, the critical skill to determine which artists and texts are both great and/or representative, the patience to assure accuracy and clean copy, and the tact to discourage the many friends, relatives and acquaintances who press to have their work memorialized. Amiri Baraka, despite a previously expressed disdain for Black American anthologies (Home 125), found how rare these skills are when he edited Black Fire (1968) with Larry Neal. Their problem of selection seemed to be resolved by including every Black male writer of nationalist persuasion on the East coast. The editors still had to issue an apology in the paperback edition for leaving out the movers and shakers of the Midwest movement, such as Don L. Lee / Haki Madhubuti, Carolyn Rodgers, Ron Milner and Jewel Latimore, and for ignoring the brilliant woman poet, Jayne Cortez of New York City. In the end Baraka blamed the omissions on “accidents” and the white “devils” of the William Morrow Company (xvi).

Such “accidents” are possible even when an anthology such as Black Fire has as its goal the relatively limited objective of gathering together like-minded souls in an ideological and/or aesthetic assault on the literary mainstream. Mistakes can be made even when one has the benefit of a number of distinguished prototypes. One thinks immediately of Alain Locke’s New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance journal, Fire, which probably inspired the name of the Baraka/Neal collaboration and which shares its sort of in-your-face aggressiveness. Such anthologies, when they fill a cultural vacuum with vibrant yet overlooked art or trumpet the arrival of a significant literary and political moment, are important. But they do not call for the same kind of talents necessary to edit an anthology that purports to be an accurate record of the entire literary output of a whole race of people.

Arthur P. Davis has always understood how much work and skill such a record requires and the importance of anthologies in preserving African-American literature—a literature cultivated in struggle and sown in improbably infertile ground. Laws existed to prevent its birth, and neglect tried to insure its death. So when Arthur Paul Davis, then of Virginia Union, Sterling Brown of Howard University, and Ulysses Lee of Lincoln University (PA) produced The Negro Caravan (1941), they were engaged in a war to establish a literary tradition and to prevent its perversion by either cultural provincialism or racist distortion. Theirs was not the first anthology of Black literature, but, as they explained in the preface to Caravan, the preceding collections, such as James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry (1922; rev. ed. 1931) and Benjamin Brawley’s Early Negro American Writers (1935), were usually limited to a single genre or to a specific time frame. The editors of The Negro Caravan were interested in producing an anthology that would be a scholarly and complete presentation of the literary and folk production of African Americans. This meant unearthing early novels long out of print and including material that seemed in those days outside the limits of literature, such as speeches and general essays.

Brown, Davis, and Lee had a definite critical perspective based on a desire to apply aesthetic standards to their analysis of the texts, an insistence on including a fair sampling of the available material, and a belief in the essential Americanism of African-American literature (“Introduction”). However, this critical position was not used as a tool of exclusion and censorship. The result was a catholicity that made The Negro Caravan far superior to two earlier collections of Black literature that claimed to be comprehensive—V.F. Calverton’s Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929) and Readings from Negro Authors for Schools and Colleges (1931), edited by Otelia Cromwell of Miner Teachers College (subsequently D.C. Teachers), Lorenzo Dow Turner of Fisk, and Eva B...