J. Saunders Redding lecture, "19th Century Afro-American Literature and Culture," at the University of Iowa, February 24, 1970

Speaker 1: The broadcasting service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the department of English and the Afro-American studies program at the university, presents a series of lectures by black specialists as material for the university's course, Afro-American Literature. The lecturer for this week is Saunders Redding, professor of American civilization at George Washington University, giving a general survey of 19th century Afro-American literature and culture. Redding is the author of, On Being Negro in America, and They Came in Chains: Americans from Africa. J. Saunders Red...: I have a couple of announcements that I'd to make. The first is the fact that there are copies of the lecture schedule and a bibliography for this course here on the platform, and those of you who do not have them may pick them up at the end of the hour. And the second is that they have given me a temporary shelter in room 366, in the building that houses the American civilization people, where I will be free to see anybody who wants to see me from 10 o'clock in the morning until lunchtime, anyway, through Friday. I want today to finish up what I started yesterday, then to pause for a while and ask if there are any questions or comments before I go into today's lecture. J. Saunders Red...: I think that to begin, we had better do a sort of playback on a statement made by Richard Wright, in his essay on the Literature of the Negro in the United States. I want to quote from that statement, Wright, said that, "The works of the post war writers were characterized by a sharp loss of lyricism, a drastic reduction of the racial content and the rise in preoccupation with urban themes and subject matter both in the novel and the poem." Now, the third part of Wright's statement is the only one that can be taken at its face value. J. Saunders Red...: For surely, there was an increasing preoccupation with urban themes and subject matter in the postwar years. The elements which Wright noted is characteristic of post war black writing, are helpful to an understanding, to understanding the writing which preceded the most recent decades of black expression. For the elements which characterize black American literature in the declining years of the '40s, are to a large extent the same elements that have characterized black writing in the '50s and '60s. The appearance of these is to some extent, explained by socio-historical factors that are still at work. The period between 1945 and 1969 is so close upon us that it would be impossible to set forth with any degree of venality, the socio-historical patterns that have conditioned the black literature of this period. J. Saunders Red...: Nonetheless, certain factors have had an effect on the work of black authors. One of the most important of these was America's assumption of moral and political world leadership following the Second World War. The world was suddenly stretched between the communist East and the democratic West. In order for America to capture the loyalty of the undeclared colored masses of the world, it had to set its racial house in order as a consequence of- and as a consequence of this, greater opportunities were extended to the black American. J. Saunders Red...: As more opportunities became available, black Americans began to demand more and more. They framed their demand in such terms as full citizenship and equality under the law. Supreme Court decisions, the Sit-In Movement, the emergence of a more militant leadership, and the creation of militant strategies among black leaders, all of these have played a role. Have, in fact, led to what has been called the Black Revolution. J. Saunders Red...: This racial revolution, however, is but I can't have a larger American social revolution in which the old verities and the ancient foundations of moral authority have steadily crumbled. American concepts of race, of sex, of education and religion, have been brought in question. Out of this welter, has common increasingly complicated literature, the Kerouacs, the Ginsbergs, the Mailers, the black humor of [Gover] and [Gowin], a complicated literature that appeals to a broader and more sophisticated audience. And this broader and more sophisticated audience is distinctly biracial. It is even multi-racial. J. Saunders Red...: One consequence of this is the Americanization of the black race. The movement of blacks into the American mainstream has encouraged black writers to deal with their experiences that go beyond race, per se. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man published in 1952 is an example. Invisible Man is a work of fiction, which captures the whole of the American experience. The protagonist is not simply a black man, but a complex American, searching for the reality of self, seeking to find and to know himself. Ellison's protagonist is perhaps the best example of the multi-faceted complex Americanized black character, which resulted in part from the socio-historical factors that we've touched on above. The acclaim which Invisible Man has received, offers more than ample evidence of the broader and more sophisticated audience available to the black writer. J. Saunders Red...: Other work so the '50s by black writers show something of the same diversity and complexity that we find in Ellison's novel. James Baldwin's, Go Tell it on the Mountain, also published in 1952, is far more than the chronicle of the experiences of a single black boy in a Harlem environment. The novel is a story of universal appeal. It speaks eloquently of the terrors and hopes of youth as a whole. While at the same time, it portrays the very special terror of being young and black in America. J. Saunders Red...: John Oliver Killens' work, Youngblood, which was published in 1954, captures some of this same hope and terror. And is another example of that Americanization and diversification that movement into the mainstream, which characterized black American literature during a great part of the 1950s. This movement into the mainstream, however, was not destined to continue throughout the '60s. For the socio-historical factors conditioning, the experiences of the black American, took a turn for the worse in the early years of this decade. The more forcefully voiced demands of black Americans were met in the early '60s, by violence on one hand, and indifference and apathy on the other. And the American mass media projected this violence, this indifference and apathy. Events and the literature reflecting them, had taken them that turn which Richard Wright prophesied in the essay quoted earlier. J. Saunders Red...: For after speaking of the broadening of black expression, which characterize the late '40s and early '50s, Wright, says, "If the expression of the American Negro should take a sharp turn towards strictly racial themes, then you will know by that token that we are suffering our old and ancient agonies at the hands of our white American neighbors." A sharp turn towards strictly racial themes is surely one of the most salient characteristics of black literature from Baldwin's, Another Country, in 1963, to the most recent work of LeRoi Jones. J. Saunders Red...: Once again, in black American literature, we witness a surge of militancy, of race pride and pride in the history of the race, like that which characterize the Harlem Renaissance of the '20s. Things African have gained a new respect among black Americans due to the emergence in the '50s and the '60s, of a host of independent African states, and due to the growing disaffection of black Americans with All Things American. The new sense of pride has been reflected in modes of speech, dress, and action. And the sense of pride in the history of the race has found expression in the demand for books, courses, and programs that deal justly with the history of the black American. J. Saunders Red...: There is an essential difference, however, between the literary philosophies of the early Harlem Renaissance and those currently in Vogue. The writers of the '20s as Alain Locke pointed out, were interested in shedding their chrysalis is in order to move into the mainstream of American life. Today's writers, however, are engaged in an attempt to construct a chrysalis of their blackness, a distinctive covering, which will set them apart. LeRoi Jones, one of the more talented black writers of the '60s, has expressed this anti mainstream position in his essays, poems and dramas. An increasing number of young and talented black authors seem to be following Jones's lead. J. Saunders Red...: The prevalent attitude in black American in the black American literature of this particular historical moment, seems to be that expressed by Julian Mayfield's notable essay. An increasing number of black writers seem to feel that to move into the mainstream, is to move into oblivion. The works LeRoi Jones, are the best known examples of this cultural and aesthetic revolution. Jones's poems dislocate, they force language into new meanings. And his dramas, notably Dutchman and The Slave require a comprehension far exceeding the ordinary. It is with these remarks on Jones, that this overview of black American literature comes to an end, despite the fact that Jones's work does not quite bring us to the threshold of this day in the history of black American writing. J. Saunders Red...: Now, I should like to pause and ask if there any questions or comments. I hope that I have said something to provoke some kind of response. Yes. Audience: [inaudible]. J. Saunders Red...: It means both. Audience: [inaudible]. J. Saunders Red...: Oh Lord. Julian Mayfield's position is bad. The so called cultural mainstream in America is polluted, that one finds evidences of this in the books, for instance, put out by the Grove Press in certain magazines such as the Evergreen review, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and move into this mainstream into a polluted mainstream. This particular kind of pollution would force black writers to deal with matters that anybody can deal with, that writers of whom you have never heard, but once whom you will never hear again can deal with. And that because they will not, the black writers will not find this their particular bag and will deal with it in much the same way as those who are already in the mainstream are dealing with it, their works will be lost, as well as polluted. It will become just more, shall I say pornography, though pornography is a pretty broad term, or just more sensationalism of one sort or another. J. Saunders Red...: Well, this is certainly what's happening to a writer like Chester Himes with ... Well, through a writer like Chester high. Does that answer? Audience: [inaudible]. J. Saunders Red...: Yes. Audience: [inaudible] J. Saunders Red...: Is smoking permitted in here? I don't think so. [crosstalk]. Audience: Go ahead. We won't tell. J. Saunders Red...: Thank you. All right. Will you repeat the question for the benefit of the ... And then I'll repeat it. Audience: [inaudible] J. Saunders Red...: The statement was, which ended with a question was that when we were talking about the writers of the Renaissance, we said that their ethnocentrism moved them toward the mainstream or into the mainstream. The ethnocentrism of present day writers moves them away from the mainstream. Will I explain this? Is that right? Is that a fair statement? Your question? Audience: Yeah. J. Saunders Red...: The writers of the Harlem Renaissance period were trying above all to prove that black Americans were human beings. They were trying to prove that except for the experiences they lived through, or ... Yes, except for the experiences they lived through. They were conditioned, as it were, by the forces, the pressures, the cultural totems that conditioned all Americans. To the extent that they were trying to prove this, they were moving toward the mainstream. J. Saunders Red...: Presently, much black writing is away from the mainstream, the ethnocentrism is there. But what so many present day black writers are trying to prove is that they are after all different. But they're not saying really though this is what it amounts to, that there is a genetic constant. They're not saying this explicitly. They're saying it implicitly, and I think they're wrong, that there's a genetic constant. But that makes blacks different from white. And that this difference is a good difference and it should be explicated. It is this that of course, leads to that aspect of the movement that is separatist. J. Saunders Red...: Trying to see that this position objectively, I have decided that it is much the wrong position. It reminds me too much of narcissism which postulated. The genetic constant that made the Germans different than superior to all other peoples. I do not ... Well listen, this is about your judgment. Maybe I shouldn't ... It's a value judgment, but believe me, it's not exhortation. I do not believe that a concept of black superiority is any more commendable than a concept of white superiority. J. Saunders Red...: Does that answer you? Yes. Audience: [inaudible] J. Saunders Red...: They are. This is what they claim. But of course, here again ... Well not here again. But in this regard, one has to remember that all of the work of LeRoi Jones for instance, is published by white publishers, his plays have been presented in theaters where black people seldom go even to see LeRoi Jones' plays. Though Jones says this, and other black writers say it too, "One has to take the statement with a grain of salt." J. Saunders Red...: Wow. Does that ... Any other questions, comments? All right. Audience: [inaudible]. J. Saunders Red...: Oh, you. Audience: You spoke breifly about the black man, you never mention the black woman [crosstalk]. That there isn't a lack of, like there is in the [inaudible] black female writers. And- J. Saunders Red...: That there is a lack- Audience: No. J. Saunders Red...: Oh, no. Oh, no there isn't. And then ever has been really. I mean from almost the earliest days ... Well, yes from the earliest days. For instance, the first black to publish a book of poetry was a woman, her name was Phyllis Wheatley. Then there was Francis Ellen Watkins Harper of a little later period, and then Pauline Hopkins, a later still period. During the Renaissance, there was Jessie Fauset Nella Larsen and a host of others who's names are not as important as there's, Georgia Douglas Johnson. The widow of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar Nelson. A slew of them. Including one of the finest poets, Black or White in the United States. Today she's still living, she's in her 90s, named Anne Spencer. J. Saunders Red...: Presently, oh, good heavens. There to reel off a few names, there is Sonia Sanchez. There's Faith Berry. There is Gwendolyn Brooks, who won Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950. There's Ann Petry. Just a host of them. J. Saunders Red...: But when I spoke with a black man of course in general terms, I was including the black woman too. Audience: [inaudible]. J. Saunders Red...: There's a? Audience: [inaudible]. J. Saunders Red...: Well, no please. I want to understand you and I hope I can make myself clear to you. So say it please. Audience: Well, the male tended to dominate [inaudible]. I think that's true. True for the black women who have [inaudible]. J. Saunders Red...: Yes. Yes, this is generally true, there's still that inequality of the sexes, if you will, which incidentally the black panthers are trying to break down. In their organization there is a prohibition against the inequality of the sexes. They haven't dressed their women yet or their women have not dressed in the leather jackets and the black leather jackets and the black berets. But they do everything else that the black panthers do. J. Saunders Red...: But I suppose considering the awards that that black women writers have won, one can say that overall, they are more talented than the men. Audience: [inaudible]. J. Saunders Red...: Well, no, yes. I mentioned Ann Petry. I mentioned Gwendolyn Brooks. But after all, this was a general overview. Are you fussing with me because I have not given equality to women? I deny this really. I have. Yes. Audience: In regards to- In terms of the works that you discussed in 1960s, you mentioned that the American mass media rejected a lot of the violence [inaudible]. Would you say that the mass media had a detrimental affect on the [inaudible]. J. Saunders Red...: Oh gosh. This will have to be a value judgment rather than a historical one. Oh gosh, I don't know. I'd have to go back and have a look really at the particulars. Certainly the there was that section of the press, the radio and television. Those sections of the press, the radio and television, that reflected the violence with considerable sympathy and understanding. These sections I refer to were by enlarge the national press, the national television, the national radio. J. Saunders Red...: Well for instance, when they killed, when they bombed the church in Birmingham in 1964 and killed those four little girls, the local papers not only played this down, but suggested that that whites had not done it at all, that Negros had done it. One cannot of course credit this because if Negros had done it, they would have found them. The fact that they did not find them indicates at least to blacks, I said this is a valued judgment, to me as a black, that whites did it and I knew whites did it. And this has been true all along, the Montgomery Papers during the height of Martin Luther King's activities, just play this up as sinful and pervertive. As communist, this is their favorite phrase. J. Saunders Red...: Yes, I should say that ... And you see... Particularly in the south people are much more influenced by what they read, what they see, what they hear locally than they are by what they see here, nationally. A good many people in the south believe that there has been a conspiracy and as a matter of fact, the great spokesman, the present day spokesman for the south, says he believes this too, that there has been a great conspiracy on the part of the so called liberal media to play up the fall to the south, and that the liberal media should not be believed that Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite and Ralph McGill, when he was living and various of the columnist. Should not be believed that they always slant things, that they do not tell the truth about the south and that things are much, much, much better in the south and these people would have you believe. J. Saunders Red...: The people in the south, a great many of the people in the south who really believe this. But hopefully, very few people outside the south believe it. I don't know whether that's responsive to your question or not. I hope it is. J. Saunders Red...: Yes. I'm sorry. I'm forgetting to repeat the questions, but I hope my answers imply what the questions were. Audience: In your description of the developments, this particular kind of art form, you very briefly mentioned whether or not there might be a parallel development in some other art form, for example music or [inaudible]. J. Saunders Red...: Well, you certainly have it in the drama. I've heard it argued by blacks that in music they can tell if a particular piece was composed by a black, or if they listen to a record, a recording without knowing who the singer is or anything. I've heard the black say that they can tell whether or not the singer is black. I've heard some white people say the same thing. I don't believe either. As a matter of fact, Tom Jones could have fooled me the first time I heard him. Matty Waters could have fooled me the first time I heard him. J. Saunders Red...: Well now, during the Renaissance, the black writers particularly were being tremendously influenced by all the experimentation that was going on among literary artists. They were influenced by, say Carl Sandburg. They were certainly influenced by Sherwood Anderson. They were certainly influenced later by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, et cetera, et cetera. Now they say they are not. But this is hard to believe too, when one considers how much LeRoi Jones, for instance, depends upon those reference in Western culture. He titles a book for instance, The System of Dante's Hell. He titles a play Dutchman, and uses of course the old Western myth as the symbolic base for this play. J. Saunders Red...: One has to take, as I think I said with a grain of salt, the claim by the present day black writer is creating a new black aesthetic. He not, in my opinion, even creating a new black rhetoric. I had occasion to point out to say today that back in the '20s when Rudolf Fisher published his first novel, he found it necessary to append to that novel a glossary of black terms. If one looks at that glossary, one sees that many of those terms which he needed, he felt to define for what was largely a white audience. The very same terms that are being used today and they no longer need definition. J. Saunders Red...: So I'm not even sure that there is a black rhetoric. I think that there is a ghetto rhetoric. I certainly think that there are thieves jargons all over the place. If you have had the experience or incidence of going into a neighborhood bar in a large metropolitan area, and I mean a neighborhood bar. A bar which is patronized by and large, by the same people from the same neighborhood, it is interesting to discover that though they are using the very words you use, you find it very difficult to understand what they mean when they say these words, because there is a there is a class or a neighborhood or a ghetto rhetoric? Eventually if it's forceful enough, of course it moves into the mainstream of American rhetoric. Well, it does. J. Saunders Red...: Any other comments or questions? J. Saunders Red...: The topic of my lecture today is Negro Writing and the Political Climate. And this is at least next to the last time that I shall impose an absolutely formal lecture upon. This next to the last time, it may not be quite the last time. J. Saunders Red...: Before I begin with what I have chosen to call Negro Writing and the Political Climate. I suppose I should point out that though the term Negro has come under assault these days as an ankle term designation, I do not apologize for using it interchangeably with black and Afro American, which currently seem more acceptable. Personally, I have no preference. I still agree with what the revered scholar and writer, W.E.B Du Bois, wrote way back in the 1920s. He was then editor of The Crisis magazine, and the high school sophomore wrote asking him why The Crisis use the word Negro in its pages rather than Afro American or just colored American. J. Saunders Red...: Du Bois replied, and this is a quote, "My dear Roland, your real concern does not lie with names and Appalachians. It is not a matter of changing them, losing them or forgetting them. Your real concern lies in two directions. First, to let the world know what there is fun and genuine about the Negro race. And second, to see that there is nothing about that race which deserves contempt, your contempt my contempt or the contempt to the wide, wide world. Get this then Roland and get it straight, a Negro by any other name would be just as black and just as white, just as ashamed of themselves and just ashamed by others. It is not the name, it's the doing that counts. Come on, kid. Let's go do that thing." That was written back in the 1920s by a man I've had occasion to mention two or three times J. Saunders Red...: But even while I cite this, I am aware that a certain usage seems to fit the new militancy of most of the young black writers today and that LeRoi Jones, Eldridge Cleaver and others, stress not only Afro and black, but redefine Negro in derogatory terms and distinguish between, indeed contrast Negro with black. J. Saunders Red...: Since I may put my foot in my mouth by attempting to make clear the contrast they draw, I shall leave the differences or the contrast to those who have drawn and go on with the topic, trying to show how black literature has often mirrored its times and why and how. That's what we seem to be witnessing now. J. Saunders Red...: Now is in the past, writing by black Americans, reflects much of what we happen to be living through. A nation's literature, as the 19th century theologian and poet William Ellery Channing once remarked about American letters, is the expression of a nation's mind in writing. If this is true of most nations and most literature, it is especially true of that body of work that has come to be known in American letters as Negro literature. Since forever this particular literature has produced, reveals in its own way the history and the psychology of a black man in America in a manner, and even in terms that so called standard American history books and American literary critics have not done, and have not been really in a position to do. J. Saunders Red...: Back in 1892, for instance, a white critic whose name I will mention, though it is not one that has survived in the annals of American literary criticism by any means. [J.K. Weatherill], wrote in a piece called the Negro as Producer of Literature, that Negro authors should avoid trying to explain themselves, since they could tell nothing at all about themselves that hadn't already been told in the writings of white men. J. Saunders Red...: Professor Weatherill, was of course wrong. But his opinion and the attitude he expressed was and has been since the counterproductive impetus for nearly all that has been done by black writers. Because black people have always had to contend with Weatherill point of view. Negro writing has always had "political" overtone. Using the term broadly of course, to mean in the sense of ideological commitment, the felt obligation to defend, the compulsion to overcome stereotypes, and the concern to make known the special plight of an oppressed people. J. Saunders Red...: Black writing has usually reflected ideas and attitudes current among blacks at the time and did attempted not only to influence, but to mold public opinion. Indeed, the earliest slave narratives can only be described as political. Likewise, the first pamphlets written by three Negros in the early 19th century, were not aesthetic and literary exercises. They were polemical tracks. J. Saunders Red...: The titles of two of the most representative speak for authors who might well be called America's first black militant writers, though they did not have the public exposure. But today is granted for instance, to a writer like Eldridge Cleaver. The first of these pamphlets appeared in 1827. It was written by Robert Alexander Young and was entitled, "The Ethiopian Manifesto Issued in Defense of the Black Man's Rights." Its argument was that black people had been wrongfully excluded from the final draft of the Declaration of Independence, where it speaks of the natural and an amiable rights of man. J. Saunders Red...: The second, somewhat more revolutionary, was written by David Walker, who entitled his track, Walkers Appeal in Four Articles, together with a preamble to the colored citizens of the world, but in particular, and very expressly to those of the United States of America. Walker urged his fellow blacks to rise up against their white oppressors, "Do not trifle." Walker said, "For they will not trifle with you, kill or be killed." This kind of writing, which of course is political, was not confined to non-fiction. The first American Negro novel, Clotel, Or the President's Daughter, written in 1853, in England, by a fugitive slave named William Wells Brown. Expose the evils of slavery and by inference exhorted slaves to rebel, even while the novel sought to arouse the sympathy of whites on behalf of blacks. J. Saunders Red...: Similar fictional works, referred to as abolitionist literature followed and had the same slant. Prior to the 1800s, the south, that is the white south, had produced only a handful of writers. And these like Edgar Allan Poe, who came a little later, wrote of the mysterious and the mystical, the long ago and the far away. J. Saunders Red...: But from the 1820s and continuing through the Civil War, in the face of increasing opposition to slavery and the southern way of life, Southern literature became defensive. And one of the principal bulwarks of this defense was a protium, but always derogatory image of the Negro that generated the stereotypes with which every reader of Southern literature, whether a fiction or presumed fact is familiar. The happy slave, but childlike and primitive nigger, Uncle Remus, the tragic Mulatto, the Negro as beast. And the stereotypes were counterproductive in black writing, versus the black protest novels, imaginative works which had been stigmatized as mere propaganda. But were they? The answer is a conditional negative. J. Saunders Red...: The works of black protest novelist in the period between the 1850s and the 1900s, rather than mere propaganda can be characterized as the art of the double think. The meaning of this is best explained as that psychological posturing that dictates that a writer must write one way while feeling another. It was this for instance, that force the writer and poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, to create a white protagonist for his autobiographical novel, The Uncalled, and a four novels to write only one in which the main characters were black. And for him to make use in his poetry as well as his fiction, of a folk dialect, the purpose of which was to amuse at the expense of portraying the harsh realities of the post Reconstruction Era. J. Saunders Red...: It was this double think, that led another writer, namely Charles Chesnutt, who has been referred to as the first genuine Negro novelist, to pose as a white author many years before some of his most honest work was published. Likewise, it was such similar confusion, because Sutton Griggs, the author of five novels, to vacillate between such subjects as black revolution in his early works, and black accommodation in his later books. This was political and psychological posturing. J. Saunders Red...: Writing during an era when attacks against Negros and literature were as overwhelming as those in reality. Black authors took pen in hand with the intention of writing for the purposes of defense, race glorification, or in an effort to prove that the matter of race had no business in literature by Negros at all. Disfranchised, powerless, but arouse to fight off stereotypes, these authors often created scarecrows, instead of men and women. And when not doing that, they can try to produce inadvertently some of the same stereotypes they really wished to see destroy. J. Saunders Red...: Until the appearance of James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, in 1912, no character of full dimensions really emerged from Negro fiction. And paradoxically enough, even this work was published anonymously. It's author not revealed until some 15 years later. J. Saunders Red...: I see again that my time is up. Speaker 1: That was Saunders Redding, professor of American Civilization at George Washington University, with today's lecture. The series of programs is presented by the broadcast service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the department of English and the Afro American Studies Program at the University as material for the course, Afro American Literature. Today's presentation originated as a live broadcast at 1:30pm February 24, 1970, from Shambaugh Auditorium and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.