AfricanAmerican History Chapter 19 Flashcards
Richard Wright
Richard Wright (1908-1960) The first black writer to command serious attention in mainstream American literature. In Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) Richard Wright provided incisive critiques of American racism. In his early works he poignantly portrayed the pathos of black southern migrants to the urban industrial north.
Native Son
In 1940 Richard Wright (1908-1960) published Native Son, black authors. Reviewers hailed it as “the new American tragedy.” Its tale of the downfall of the young Bigger Thomas tragedy.”
• Its tale of the downfall of the young Bigger Thomas could be read as a warning about how economic hardship combined with segregation and discrimination could lead young black men to lash out in violence and rage.
James Baldwin
- He was the first African-American writer to enjoy an international reputation and showed that success and militancy were not mutually exclusive.
- James Baldwin (1924-1987), took issue with Wright. African Americans, they argued, need not all be portrayed as hapless victims of American racism.
- Short essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in 1949, Baldwin argued that Bigger’s tragedy was not that he was black, poor, and scared. It was that he had accepted “a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those b brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth.” Baldwin concluded, “The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, thde denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”
Ralph Ellison
1914-1994
The most intricate novel about the black experience in America written during this era was Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man, which wc won the National Book Award for fiction in 1952. Partially autobiographical, it traces the life of a young black man from his early years in a southern school (a thinly disguised Tuskegee Institute) through his migration to New York City.
The novel explores class tensions within American society and within the black community. It illuminates the interaction 1 between white and black Americans with a balanced incisive perspective.
The Nation of Islam
The Nation of Islam taught that black people were the earth’s original human inhabitants who had lived, according to Elijah Muhammad, in the Nile Valley. Approximately six thousand years ago, a magician named Yakub produced white people. These white people proved so troublesome that they were banished to Europe where they began to spread evil. Their worst crime was their enslavement of black people.
The Nation of Islam emerged in 1929, the year Timothy Drew died. After his death, a modified version of the Moorish Science Temple emerged in 1930 in Detroit. He wrote two manuals of instruction, The Secret Ritual of the Nation of Islam and Teaching for the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in a Mathematical Way.
His teachings that black people were the true Muslims attracted many poor residents in Depression-era Detroit.
Elijah Muhammad
In 1934, after establishing a Temple of Islam, Fard disappeared. One of his disciples, Elijah Poole (1897-1975), renamed Elijah Muhammad by Fard, became leader of the Detroit temple and then of a second temple in Chicago.
- The Nation attracted the attention of fed- eral authorities during World War II when its members refused to serve in the military.
- Muhammad was arrested in May 1942 on charges of inciting his followers to resist the draft and was imprisoned in Milan, Michigan, until 1946.
Langston Hughes
• Langston Hughes identified with poor and working Class black people. He used his poetry, prose and play writing skills to make the dignity and beauty of black people visible and known.
• During his career he produced 50 volumes of poetry, to collection of short stories, one novel two volumes about autobiography “the big sea in 1940” and “I wander as I wander in 1956” as well as 15 plays along with the
libretto, scripts, essays, songs, translations, anthologies, children’s stories, biographies and histories for the young, and two decades of weekly newspaper columns.
• With the publication of The weary blues in 1926, his career took off. .
