Anthologies of African-American Literature from 1845 to 1994

Although anthologies of African-American literature have appeared mainly in the 20th century, two earlier examples deserve mention. The first was Les Cenelles (1845), a collection of eighty-five poems by seventeen free New Orleans Creoles writing in their native French. Eighteen of these are by the editor Armand Lanusse, who also provides an introduction. Another contributor was Victor Sejour, who subsequently had a successful career as a playwright in Paris. Totally disengaged from issues of slavery and emancipation, these poets, writing of love, friendship, and hedonistic pleasure, are squarely in the French Romantic tradition, prosodically as well as thematically. In contrast, Autographs for Freedom (1853), edited by Julia Griffiths, the English associate of Frederick Douglass, was fully committed to the antislavery cause. In addition to work by white contributors, the volume contained prose by Charles Reason, George Vashon, J. McCune Smith, and John Mercer Langston, poems by William Wells Brown and Vashon, and Douglass’s nonfiction short story “The Heroic Slave.”

Almost all other anthologies, whether general or specialized, were published after 1920. They may be divided into the following categories: multigenre collections, poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction, and folklore. Several anthologies appeared in the 1920s, few in the 1930s and 1940s, almost none in the 1950s. Beginning in the 1960s, the production of anthologies accelerated, and the brisk pace continues to the present. Many can only be mentioned in passing, but the most important will receive brief comment.

The pioneer general anthology in the field is the work of V.F. Calverton, a white Marxist critic. In his introduction to Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929), he relates black art and literature to economic forces, especially slavery, and disputes white racist assumptions, but he is not himself free of racial condescension, especially in his Romantic enthusiasm for emotional spontaneity, even primitivism, in contrast to more cerebral cultural expression. Nevertheless, he had an eye for good writing and helped to bring Toomer, Hughes, McKay, Du Bois, Cullen, and others to wider notice by the white reading public under the imprint of The Modern Library. Except for Frank Horne and Lewis Alexander, the writers Calverton presented would become standard selections in subsequent anthologies.

During the next two decades three collections by black academicians appeared, designed primarily for use in black institutions. Readings from Negro Authors (1931), edited by Otelia Cromwell, Lorenzo Dow Turner, and Eva G. Dykes, operates on a multicultural premise (“true catholicity of experience . . . a significant part of the total American outlook”), but there is strong emphasis on literary technique, believed by the editors to be based on “universal principles.” Less catholic was the residual academic squeamishness that made “excessive realism” (i.e., sex) and racial militancy inappropriate reading for college students. Like Readings from Negro Authors, Herman Dreer’s American Literature by Negro Authors (1950) is arranged by genre and omits “realistic material unsuitable for classroom use,” but its emphasis is on biographical and historical approaches rather than literary technique. Both of these anthologies provide more editorial apparatus than Calverton does, and both include writers seldom anthologized thereafter: Otto Leland Bohanan, Esther Popel, Ethel Caution, Gertrude Parthenia McBrown, Florence Marion Harmon, Caroline Bond Day, William G. Allen, and W. S. Scarborough in Cromwell, Turner, and Dykes; Ophelia Robinson, Florella Howard, Lorenzo D. Blanton, John Adolph Turner, Arthur W. Reason, Alice McGee Smart, and several others in Dreer.

All three of these anthologies are far surpassed by a true classic, The Negro Caravan (1941), edited by Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee, the first two colleagues at Howard and the third a member of the faculty at Lincoln University. No single work has had greater influence in establishing the canon of African-American literature, uncensored by pedagogical prudery. The threefold purpose of The Negro Caravan is stated plainly in the preface: “to present a body of artistically valid writings by American Negro authors, to present a truthful mosaic of Negro character and experience in America, and to collect in one volume certain key literary works that have greatly influenced the thinking of American Negroes. . . .” These aims are richly fulfilled in the...