Some African-American Writers Past and Present:

Pre and Post Civil War,Harlem Renaissance,

Civil Rights Movement and Beyond

Pre-Civil WarThe Civil War was also known as “the war between the states.” This was the war in which the North or the Union fought against the South or the Confederacy. One of the most important issues in this war was that of slavery. The Northern states were opposed to slavery and the Southern states whose economy was dependent upon agriculture supported it.

Prior to the end of the Civil War, it was against the law for Blacks in the South to be educated. Plantation owners feared that if the slaves were able to read and write they would be more likely to organize and rebel.

Acquiring an education as an African-American was an extremely risky and difficult task , yet many people were willing to go to great lengths in order to gain knowledge. As a result, we have had strong and brilliant African-American writers since some of the earliest days of our nation’s existence.

Phyllis Wheatley, 1753-1784Phyllis Wheatley was born in Africa in what is now the country of Senegal. When she was only seven years old, she was kidnapped and transported to North America where she was sold into slavery.

She was purchased by the Wheatley family of Boston* who taught her to read and write. Very early on, they noticed her great intelligence and gift for writing poetry. Her first poem was published when she was only twelve years old, and she later became the first African-American and only the second American female writer of any race to have her poems published in a book.Sadly, she died at age 31 after the

birth of her last child, who also died shortly after his mother passed away. *Prior to the year 1800, slavery was legal in both

the North and South.

Frederick Douglas, circa 1818- 1895Frederick Douglas was born into slavery in the state of Maryland sometime around the year 1818. (The exact year and date of his birth is unknown.) At a young age, he was sent to live in the plantation house, most likely because one of the men there was his father. After the death of his mother when he was around ten years old, he was sent to live with another family.

The wife in this household taught him the alphabet, despite the laws forbidding the education of slaves. From there he learned to read and write with the help of other children and neighbors.

He would grow up to become one of the greatest intellectuals of his time, although almost entirely self-educated. He advised presidents and often spoke before audiences of thousands on a wide variety of topics. His writings usually focused on human rights and moral issues, including women’s rights, the abolition of slavery and other types of civil injustice.

Booker T. Washington, 1856-1915Another remarkable African-American writer who was born into slavery, yet rose to become one of the most influential men of his time period was Booker T. Washington. Washington was nine years old when given his freedom at the end of the Civil War.

As a young man, Washington taught himself to read and write. He passionately believed in the importance of education and founded Tuskegee Institute, which would eventually become Tuskegee University, in a single small building in Tuskegee, Alabama.

He wrote 14 books in his lifetime, including his autobiography Up from Slavery, which is still widely read today. He was also the first African-American invited to dine at the White House as a guest of a president and the first one to appear on a postage stamp.

Post Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance

After the Civil War, even though slavery had ended, things were still very difficult for African-Americans. There were virtually no laws in place to protect them from the discrimination and hatred that many individuals still had towards blacks and other minorities. It was extremely difficult for African-Americans to find decent jobs, and they often were forced to take positions far beneath their education level and ability.

In addition, the practice of segregation, or the separation of people by race, was common in many areas, especially in the South. And while the law said that segregation was acceptable as long as conditions were “separate but equal,” the reality was that conditions for Blacks were almost always far worse than those for Whites.

In the early part of the twentieth century many African-Americans moved from the rural South to big cities in the industrial North in search of jobs and in hopes of being treated more fairly. This became known as the “Great Migration,” and it resulted in the coming together of African-Americans in places such as Harlem, New York; Detroit, Michigan;and Chicago, Illinois.

This, in turn, led to a tremendous flowering of culture and the arts within the African-American community, especially in and around the area of Harlem, New York. This period would later become known as the Harlem Renaissance.

In addition to contributions to the visual and performing arts (drawing, painting, sculpture, and drama) and music (jazz, the blues, boogie-woogie and ragtime), African-Americans also made significant additions to and innovations in literature during the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Some of the talented writers from this time period include Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, and Wallace Thurman.

W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868-1963

W. E. B. Du Bois was the first African –American to earn a doctorate from Harvard University. He was one of the founders of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). A prolific author, he wrote on such diverse topics as sociology, race, equality, politics and history. He published three autobiographies and edited The Crisis, the NAACP’s monthly magazine.

Paul Laurence DunbarJune 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872. His parents had been born into slavery in Kentucky. His father escaped slavery and later fought in the Civil War, while his mother was emancipated (or freed) at the end of the war. He wrote his first poem when he was only six years old, and gave his first recital when he was nine.

Dunbar was the only Black student at his high school, yet he still managed to be elected class president, editor of the school newspaper and president of the school literary society, as well as class poet. Dunbar attended school with and was lifelong friends with Orville and Wilbur Wright, the famous inventers of the airplane. Though he wanted to be a lawyer, he was unable to attend college due to racial discrimination and family financial circumstances. He eventually took a job as an elevator operator, which, at least, gave him the opportunity to write in his free time. It is said that he distributed and sometimes sold copies of his poetry to people who rode the elevator.

Dunbar is recognized for both his poems that are written in standard English and his poems written in Black dialect, though he came to prefer the ones written in “proper English” because he felt that some Whites used the ones written in dialect to reinforce their own negative stereotypes of Blacks.Dunbar also wrote short stories, novels, and even dramas. He is often credited with being the first African-American poet to gain national and even international popularity and acclaim. Sadly, his life was cut short at the age of 33 when he died of tuberculosis. Even today he is recognized as one of the greatest American poets of all time.

We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while        We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise,        We wear the mask!

-Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872–1906

We Wear the Mask

Zora Neale Hurston, 1891-1960Zora Neale Hurston was one of eight children born to a carpenter/preacher father and a school teacher mother. The family moved to Eatonville, Florida, an all Black town, when Zora was three. She would spend the rest of her youth in this town which she loved and considered her only true “home.” A graduate of Howard University and Columbia University, she studied anthropology and ethnography, and she traveled extensively throughout the South as well as the Caribbean Islands where she studied each culture and interviewed the elders. As a result she was uniquely and very highly qualified for her career in preserving black folk history and folklore; however, after a brief period of popularity, she fell into obscurity.

At the time that she was writing, African-Americans were struggling to get past stereotypes and negative depictions of blacks in films and the media. Many African-Americans felt the need to distance themselves from her stories of rural blacks which contained authentic dialect and traditional beliefs. They felt that her stories fed into some of these negative stereotypes.

After she was wrongfully accused of molesting a ten year old boy (she later was able to prove that she wasn’t even in the country at the time the incident occurred), she began to fall into a deep decline. While it is almost entirely thanks to her work that we have accurate and authentic historical records of rural black life in early America, near the end of her lifetime she was living in poverty and working as a household servant. She was ultimately forced to live in a county welfare home where she suffered a massive stroke which led to her death in 1960.

Richard Wright, 1908 - 1960Another extremely important writer of the Harlem Renaissance was Richard Wright. Wright was born in Mississippi and, after his mother became seriously ill, he was raised primarily by his aunt and grandmother. The two women were deeply religious and tried to impose their beliefs on the young boy, who resisted their efforts.

Wright excelled in school becoming valedictorian of his primarily white elementary school, but he was never able to complete his education because he was forced to work to help support his family.

As a young man Wright looked to the socialist movement as a possible means of achieving racial and economic equality for blacks, but he later became disillusioned with the internal politics of the Communist Party when they, too, proved discriminatory. He eventually moved to Paris, France, where he joined a number of other African-American expatriates (or people who live in a country other than where they were born). Two of his most important works were Native Son and his autobiography, Black Boy.

“The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.”

-Richard Wright

Civil Rights Movement and BeyondIn the early 1950’s several important events occurred that set the stage for a renewed struggle to try to gain equal rights under the law for African-Americans. In 1954, the US Supreme Court made a ruling saying that “separate but equal” was inherently unequal. This ruling outlawed the practice of school segregation in the South. This angered many Southern whites and resulted in heightened violence against African-Americans, including the murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen year old boy from Chicago who was visiting Mississippi and allegedly whistled at a white woman.

This same year Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. This in turned resulted in the bombings of four African-American churches and the home of Martin Luther King, Jr. By this time, television had become the primary means of disseminating information in the United States. This was important because, through the news, for the first time people of other races were able to see with their own eyes the acts of violence and hatred that were being perpetrated against Blacks in the South. Finally, there was an atmosphere of support of equal rights for African-Americans from outside the Black community as well as from within it.

Gwendolyn Brooks, 1917 -2000Born in Topeka, Kansas, Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks moved to Chicago with her family as a part of the Great Migration when she was only six weeks old. Though her father worked as a janitor, it had been his dream to become a doctor. Her mother was a musician (pianist) and school teacher. As she grew, both of her parents supported her love of reading and writing, and, as a result, she published her first poem when she was only thirteen years old.

By the time she was sixteen years old, she had already had over 75 of her poems appear in a wide variety of publications. She did not favor any one type of poem, but instead experimented with many different styles and forms. Like many African-American writers of the time, her subject matter often dealt with the daily struggles of being black in a racist society.

Brooks would later become the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1950. She was also given many, many additional awards and recognitions. Though primarily a poet, Brooks also published two autobiographies and a novel. She died of cancer at age 83 in December of 2000.

“Books are meat and medicineand flame and flight and flower,steel, stitch, and cloud and clout,and drumbeats on the air.”       

Gwendolyn Brooks

Alex Haley, 1921-1992Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, NY, in 1921. As a young man, at the urging of his father who felt he needed discipline, he joined the military where he served for twenty years in the Coast Guard. While serving in the Pacific during WWII, he began writing as a means of alleviating boredom. It is said that other sailors would often pay him to write love letters to their girls back home. After the war, the Coast Guard allowed him to transfer to the field of journalism.

In 1965 his first book was published when he collaborated with Malcolm X on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He later published his most famous work Roots: The Saga of an American Family which documented seven generations of his family history and was based on over ten years of research across several continents. He won a Pulitzer Prize for this book in 1977, the same year that it was made into an ABC television mini-series which broke the previously held record for most viewed program of all time.

Maya Angelou, 1928 –May 28, 2014Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. Born Marguerite Johnson, her brother Bailey who was only a year older quickly nicknamed her “Maya,” his way of trying to say “my sister.” When Maya and Bailey were ages three and four, respectively, their parents divorced. Their father put them on a train and sent them to Arkansas to live with his mother. Four years later he returned and took them away from their grandmother to return them to their mother’s care. That same year Maya was molested by her mother’s boyfriend, a Mr. Freeman. She told her brother Bailey what had happened, and he in turn told other family members. The man was arrested and put on trial. He was found guilty of the crime, but only served a single day in prison for his crime.

Four days later, he was found dead, most likely murdered by the little girl’s uncles. In her child’s mind, Maya felt that she was the one responsible for his death because she had “told.” As a result, she spent almost five years of her life mute, fearing that her “voice” would kill someone else. During this time period she developed her extraordinary memory, her great powers of observation, and a tremendous love of reading and writing. As an young adult, she studied dance and became a singer, dancer, and actress for a time. She later moved to New York to focus on her writing career.

In her lifetime, she had personal friendships with Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Nelson Mandela, Desmund Tutu, and Oprah Winfrey, to name just a few of her noteworthy connections. She was asked to perform her poetry at President Clinton’s inauguration, and she has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of the Arts, three Grammies, a Tony Award, the Lincoln Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, as well as over 30 honorary degrees from universities across the nation.

Toni Morrison February 18, 1931 - Present

Born in 1931 in Lorrain, Ohio, Toni Morrison was originally named Chloe Ardelia Wofford by her parents. She was raised with her three siblings in a middle class family where storytelling was an important part of her daily life.

Her father, George Wofford, was a welder by profession, but during most of the time that she was growing up, he held multiple jobs to support his family. Her mother, Ramah Wofford, worked cleaning houses. Her parents instilled a love of music, reading, and folk tales in their daughter.

An excellent overall student, Toni Morrison graduated high school with honors in 1949. She then went on to attend Howard University.

After graduating from college, she went on to complete her master’s degree at Cornell. She then became a professor of English at various institutions of higher learning, including her alma mater Howard University, where she met her husband, Howard Morrison. They had two sons together, but later divorced.

She published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970, followed shortly thereafter by several others, all of which received positive reviews.

The book Beloved, considered by many to be her greatest work, was published in 1987. The following year it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Ten years later it would be made in a movie by Oprah Winfrey.

In 1993 she became the first African-American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her contributions to the field.

In 1999 she began working with her son Slade, an artist, to create children’s books. His death in December of 2010 was, understandably, devastating to her.

Now in her 80’s Toni Morrison continues to write in a wide variety of genres. One of her most recent works was a drama performed in London in 2012. It was inspired in part by William Shakespeare’s play Othello.

Alice Walker, 1944 - Present Alice Walker was born in Eatonville, Georgia, on February 9, 1944. She was the youngest of eight children. Her father was a sharecropper and her mother worked as a maid. A firm believer in the power of education, her mother enrolled her in first grade when she was only four years old. At the age of eight, her brother shot her in the right eye with a BB gun, which resulted in her becoming blind in that eye. After scar tissue formed over the injury, she became extremely self-conscious and shy. She turned to reading and writing for comfort and companionship. Later on the scar tissue was removed, and she not only became valedictorian of her class, but was also voted most popular and queen.

She credits her childhood “tragedy” with showing her how to really and truly see people and relationships in a deeper, more meaningful way. In 1961 she entered Spelman College on a full academic scholarship. There she became interested in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1967 she married fellow political activist, Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a lawyer and Jewish Civil Rights leader. Their marriage faced tremendous pressure since they were the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi, and they divorced in 1976. Walker’s most famous work, The Color Purple, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and The National Book Award for Fiction in 1983.

Some African-American Authors of Books for Children and Teens

Christopher Paul Curtis, Sharon Draper, Eloise Greenfield, Nikki Grimes, Virginia Hamilton, Angela Johnson, Julius Lester, Patricia McKissack, Walter Dean Myers, Kadir Nelson, Andrea DavisPinkney, Brian Pinkney, Mildred D. Taylor, Rita Williams-Garcia