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26. Literature There are three drafts of this chapter in the IWP papers at the Harsh Research Collection, including the most recent version which appears here. One labeled “2nd Draft” has Jack Conroy’s name on the first page, indicating he was the author of the chapter. There is a fifty-three-page draft with corrections in Conroy’s handwriting. This was reduced to a twelvepage final draft, copies of which are also at Syracuse University and Newberry Library. Earlier writings on African American literature in Illinois were drawn upon. One was an essay by Fenton Johnson written for a booklet prepared for the American Negro Exposition in 1940. Also utilized was a lengthy series of writings by Katherine “Kitty” de la Chapelle, including the essay “Development of Negro Culture in Chicago” and several manuscripts under the heading “Colored Culture in Chicago” that were produced between May 1937 and June 1938. The Cairo (Illinois) Bulletin noted in 1875 that . . . the colored people of a literary turn of mind, of Charlestown, Missouri, have a flourishing debating society; and now a number of the young colored people of Cairo, not wishing to be outdone in this respect, are organizing an institution of the same kind. Actually, the Illinois Negro’s interest in literature had been recorded almost a decade before the Civil War by the organization of the Chicago Literary Society. It passed resolutions condemning the Fugitive Slave Law, assisted in resistance to colonizers and kidnappers , and sent a number of its members to fight with the Union Army for emancipation. None of the books, pamphlets, and impassioned handbills written and distributed by these pioneers achieved permanent recognition, but one must bear in mind it was not until 1889 that the right of colored children to attend public schools in Illinois was finally affirmed by an act of the legislature. Indeed, equal facilities have not yet been made available. The Negro’s cultural development after the Civil War was rapid, but the color problem, perforce, has engaged the Negro writers’ attention, not necessarily to the detriment of his art, but inevitably to the limitation of its scope. Prior to 1861, there had been thirty-five works of Afro-American authorship published and sold in the United States; at the time of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 Dolinar_Text.indd 217 3/14/13 9:59 AM 218 Chapter twenty-six more than one hundred had been issued. A number of these were written by Illinoisans or by men and women who had lived in the state at one time or another. John Sella Martin, the first Negro writer in Illinois to emerge from anonymity, born a slave, made his way in 1856 from New Orleans to Chicago. He soon figured as a popular lecturer and contributor of prose and poetry to the press. His poem, “The Hero and the Slave,” for years enjoyed a favored position on the repertoires of public entertainers. Martin Robinson Delany, an examining surgeon with the United States Army in Chicago during the Civil War, had written for the Anglo-African several chapters of an unfinished novel, Blake, or the Huts of America, one of the first works of fiction essayed by an American Negro, and several scholarly treatises. The era marked by the World’s Columbian Exposition, which opened in 1893 on Chicago ’s lake front, ushered in a new trend among Negro writers. Hitherto, they had had little time for training in such literary forms as poetry, fiction, and the essay (other than political tracts). Biographies of slaves, who had escaped from bondage, predominated their writing for many years, while orations which could be comprehended by illiterate listeners and later printed for the more leisurely contemplation of readers were in demand. Frederick Douglass attended the Columbian Exposition as a representative of the Haitian government, to which he formerly had been assigned as United States minister. Foremost race champion and still regarded by many as the greatest of American Negroes, the leonine orator was also a powerful writer. His biographical volumes, Narrative of Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, are believed to have played a definite role in the liberation of his people. Another representative writer-orator, Richard T. Greener, moved to Chicago after 1907. First Negro graduate of Harvard, Greener was an implacable adversary of Douglass on the question of mass migration of Negroes from the South. His best-known oration is Charles Sumner, published in...

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