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African American Literature The African American southern literary tradition is rooted in the voices of enslavement. Writers such as Oladuah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriett Jacobs, Henry Box Brown, William Wells Brown, and Sojourner Truth set the foundation for a tradition that analyzes the climate of the South, describes the distinct cultural practices found among African American southerners, and offers deliverance from oppressive southern conditions. While most African American southern literature produced during American enslavement is autobiographical and designed to expose the atrocities of enslavement, Phyllis Wheatley and George Moses Horton choose poetic lyrics to write their visions of the South. Between 1865 and 1900, African American southern writers describe life in the South while its citizens grapple with the economic and social shadows of enslavement. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s poetry and her novel Iola Leroy (1892) stand as testament to African American women’s concerns in the late 19th century, while Charles Chesnutt explores masculine concerns as he masterfully manipulates both the short story and the novel. Paul Laurence Dunbar and Joseph Seamon Cotter excel in poetry, along with post–Civil War poets Albery A. Whitman, George M. McClellan, and Joseph S. Cotter Sr., who wrote skillfully about racial and nonracial topics in conventional poetic forms. The eclectic Alice Dunbar Nelson proves herself as journalist, poet, and shortstory craftsperson. Many African American southerners of this period, however , choose to treat the South through autobiographical statements that build on the traditions of the slave narrative: Elizabeth Keckley’s Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868), Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, William Sanders Scarborough’s An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship, and Amanda Berry Smith’s An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith, the Colored Evangelist (1893). Also in the 19th century, Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892) presents rousing essays challenging women to live without gendered limitations . Journalist Ida B. Wells’s A Red Record (1895) exposes the gruesome practice of lynching. Joan Sherman’s Invisible Poets (1976) identifies 130 African American poets of the 19th century, many of whom are rooted in the South. Southern African Americans emerged as dominant voices in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s and thereafter continued to remain in the vanguard of African American poets in America. One wing of the Harlem Renaissance arts movement looked to the African American South for aesthetic inspiration and artistic direction. Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues (1926) and James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE 19 Verse (1927) drew heavily from southern African American folk culture and the experiences of the African American masses within and outside the South. Hughes tapped an essentially secularcomponent of southern African American life—its music. Grounding his poetic technique in musical forms whose origins were southern and African American and which, to a large extent, had evolved from the religious orientation of southern African Americans, Hughes used blues and jazz to shape the form and meaning of his poetry. Johnson tapped the sacred side of the southern African American experience. Choosing the African American folk sermon as the embodiment of a southern African American world view and as an indigenous art form, Johnson elevated folk art to the level of high art. Poets, novelists, and playwrights after the 1920s (blacks and whites) followed the example of Hughes, Johnson, and others of the Harlem Renaissance by deriving artistic inspiration from the social and cultural life of the African American South. In the 1920s African American poets’ use of dialects became more refined as poetic form merged with content. African American dialect gaveway to African American idiom, and poets made even more extensive uses of features from the southern African American oral tradition. Many southern African American poets of the Harlem Renaissance also built their poetic canons with forms and themes not exclusively or predominantly African American or southern. The lyricism of Jean Toomer’s poetry and the intricate patterns of imagery drawn from nature by Anne Spencer revealed that a poetic voice originating from the African American South could adopt the European American literary heritage and yet remain relatively free of its constraints. In the decades following the Harlem Renaissance, southern African Americans continued to be major influences on black American poetry. Southerners Sterling Brown, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, and Melvin B. Tolson were among black America’s...
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