J. Saunders Redding lecture, "19th Century Afro-American Literature and Culture," at the University of Iowa, February 23, 1970
Speaker 1: The broadcasting service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the Department of English and Afro-American studies at the University presents a series of lectures by Black Specialist 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. He's being introduced at this time by Professor Robert A. Corrigan.
Robert A. Corri...: [inaudible] lectures, we merely said that we were starting with him. You didn't know much but you had been reading in that anthology and that he was going to give a set of lectures that would introduce us to the study of Afro-American culture and literature. Let me therefore for the rest of the week, turn the platform over to J. Saunders Redding from George Washington University in Washington, DC.
J. Saunders Red...: Thank you. I'm going to begin with an overview of Black writing. And an overview of Black American literature has to consider a definition of the Black or Negro American. And here both Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison can be of help. Referring to several Black writers in his essay, the literature of the Negro in the United States, Wright declared quote, "truly you must now know that the word Negro in America means something not racial or biological but something purely social, something made in the United States." End of quotation.
J. Saunders Red...: And in Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison comments, quote, "it is not skin color which makes a Negro American but cultural heritage as shaped by the American experience, the social and political predicament, a sharing of that concord of sensibilities which the group expresses through historical circumstances and through which it has come to constitute a subdivision of the larger American culture. Being a Negro American has to do with the memory of slavery and the hope for emancipation and the betrayal of allies and the revenge and contempt inflicted by our former masters after the reconstruction and the myths both Northern and Southern which are propagated in justification of that betrayal. It involves to a special aptitude toward the waves of immigrants who have come later and passed a spy." End of quotation.
J. Saunders Red...: A recognition of the Black or Negro American as purely social as a product of a cultural heritage is shaped by the American experience. The social and political predicament is necessary to an understanding of the literature of the Black man in the United States. Just as a Black American is as indeed all Americans are, just as the literature the Black American is as indeed the literature of all Americans are and so understood only in a social historical context. An overview of Black literature therefore cannot slight this context. For instance, only within this context can we find an explanation for the absence of Black American literature of high merit before the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.
J. Saunders Red...: Arriving in America in chains, the Black man was systematically ravaged of his humanity. As early as the 17th century, Black Codes were put into effect to restrict the freedom even of those Blacks who were not enslaved. And the constitution which the founding fathers signed in the 18th century carried three provisions which denied the Black man's humanity. It provided the constitution that is, that the foreign slave trade was to continue for two decades after the signing of the constitution. It stated that fugitive slaves apprehended in free states were to be returned to their masters and in the matters of apportionment and taxation it stated that the Black American was to be counted as three fifths of a man.
J. Saunders Red...: The fact that slavery appeared to be a dying institution in 1887 does not justify the actions of the founding fathers. Moreover, the growth of the textile industry in England and America and the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 revived a dying institution and American slavery not only became profitable, but one of the most profitable institutions in the entire Western world. It was an institution supported by the physical labor of Blacks. And it was supported by their labor almost exclusively until after the turn of the 20th century. This fact considered, it is easy to see why no Black American literature of high merit was produced during the first 250 years of the Black man's history in the United States.
J. Saunders Red...: Set apart by Black Codes, defined as three fifths of a man, forced to work for the profit of others from sunrise to sunset, the black man hardly had time to turn his attention to the conscious production of works of art. Nevertheless, even when the situation of the Black American was at its worst, several Black authors did produce works of literature. The pious poems of the slave poet Jupiter Hammon being published as broadsides in the middle of the 18th century and Wheatley's book, that is Phillis Wheatley book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773.
J. Saunders Red...: In the early 19th century came the work of another slave, George Moses Horton, who wrote love lyrics for the students at Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina and who published two volumes of poetry. And there was James M. Whitfield, one of the first non Black slave poets whose name join... Non slave Black poet, I beg your pardon, whose name joins a number of others in the early and middle 19th century.
J. Saunders Red...: In fiction, we have the works of Frank Webb, of William Wells Brown, of Martin Delaney and of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper as examples of early conscious literary creation by Black Americans. As Sterling Brown points out in Negro Poetry and Drama, the record of conscious literary artists among Negroes thus goes as far back as America's colonial period. Antebellum Negroes both slave and free wanted to be poets, read and studied as widely as circumstances permitted and wrote down their thoughts in the forms approved by the time.
J. Saunders Red...: But we must also see that the work of these early writers is of little literary value. It was for the most part a slavish imitation of accepted models and it failed to honestly reflect the experience of the Black man in America. These early conscious literary artists, they're able to express the feelings, conditions, fears and aspirations. They lacked, that is to say, the stuff of which great literature is made. It was left for another body of Black expression to reflect with honesty the experiences of the majority of Black America. This was a body of folk stuff, work song, ballots, rhymes, tale and above all the Black spiritual. Here we find the humor, pathos, aspiration and tragedy which characterize the early life of the Black man in America.
J. Saunders Red...: The Black man's protest against slavery finds expression in spirituals like, let my people go. His sense of alienation and homelessness finds expression in the haunting chords of "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child". The humor finds expression in anonymous tales like “A laugh that meant freedom and how buck won his freedom." The basic in humanity and industrial capitalist society of an industrial capitalist society finds expression in ballot like John Henry. And the hope for a better life in another world is expressed in innumerable religious songs.
J. Saunders Red...: In Black folk expression therefore, we find a true reflection of the socio-historical conditions that define the early history of the Black American. The forms of expression are original and the content is that of great literature. The two streams of black expression that is conscious literary expression on the one hand and folk expression on the other move along rather separate courses until the last of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. If the 100 or so slave narratives produced by runaway slaves for abolitionist purposes, have some crossover, few do and the two streams remain more or less separate.
J. Saunders Red...: But in the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, the two streams of Black expression draw together. Both Dunbar and Chesnutt wrote around the turn of the century. Both were conscious literary artists who made use of the folk experiences of the Black American. In his best known poems like The Party and An Ante-Bellum Sermon, Dunbar captured both the humor and the pathos of the folk experience and he did so in what was thought to be the Black man's distinctive idiom. Charles Chesnutt made full use of the Black American folk experience in his volume, The Conjure Woman, a volume of short stories which was published in 1899.
J. Saunders Red...: Dunbar who was championed by the greatest then living critic, William Dean Howells, is usually accorded the title of the first Black American poet of distinction and Chesnutt whose short stories enjoyed wide popularity in The Atlantic monthly, is usually considered the first Black American fiction writer of distinction. Both Dunbar and Chesnutt however, were hedged round by difficulty. Both were victims of what I have called, cultural dualism. Both by virtue of race were set apart from the cultural mainstream. Both were torn between writing honestly and not being read or accepted by White audience and writing falsely and being read and accepted.
J. Saunders Red...: Dunbar laments this in his poem, The Poet, he sang of love when life was young and love itself was in his lays. But ah the world it turned to praise a jingle in a broken tongue. The White majority was unwilling to have its stereotype of the Black American as a happy child of nature destroyed by honest and forthright Black writing. Dunbar spoke for Chesnutt too when he wrote, "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"
J. Saunders Red...: By 1906, Dunbar was dead. Charles Chesnutt had become silent and America at large had grown indifferent to Black writing. The socio-historical context explains the plight of Dunbar and Chestnut and the indifference of America to both the Black man and to his literature. The primary factor which helps to explain the reaction to Dunbar and Chesnutt was the growth of Jim Crow codes throughout the nation. In the strange career of Jim Crow, Vann Woodward tells us that Jim Crow legislation proliferated in America toward the end of the century. The Supreme court, the federal government and state and local legislatures were busy piling up prohibitive laws which turned the hostility toward the Black American into open aggression around the turn of the century.
J. Saunders Red...: Added to this growth of Jim Crow legislation were America's imperialistic designs. The so-called tied up empire against the colored peoples of the Pacific and the Caribbean in 1898. The actions in the Pacific and the Caribbean made the myth of the white man's burden and essential element in the American world view. Many scholars, most journalists and practically all politicians had a stake in perpetuating the myth of White supremacy and most became devoted to the stereotypes of the Black American and to dark skin people everywhere. Northern liberal opinion, a restraining factor before and during the civil war had been on the decline since the Hayes Tilden Compromise of 1877 and America's imperialistic avengers caused it to decline even faster.
J. Saunders Red...: In addition, ironically enough, there was the philosophy of the chief spokesman for Black Americans, Booker T. Washington. Washington who had been chosen by Whites as the chief spokesman for Black Americans was one of the most influential men ever to emerge. He helped to reinforce the stereotypes so dear to the Whites. He assured his White patrons and friends that the best thing for Black Americans was hard work and education in the trades and their life of service to the Black community. Integration, Washington assured White America was as much anathema to him and his followers as it was to the country at large. Washington's philosophy was best expressed in one of the classic biographies of American literature from slavery which was published in 1901.
J. Saunders Red...: There was one work, however, published around the turn of the century which stood apart from the work of either Dunbar or Chesnutt or Washington. It appeared in 1903 and it's author was W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk in both content and form belongs to a later period actually but it was by all standards a harbinger of things to come. That America did not respond favorably to Du Bois forthright and scathingly honest work is explained by the same socio-historical factors which determined the fate of Dunbar and Chesnutt. White America was not ready to hear a young militant Black American say that the problem of the 20th century was the problem of the color line nor was America ready to accept Du Bois' scrupulously accurate portrayal of hypocrisy, hostility and brutality of White America toward Black America.
J. Saunders Red...: The Black leadership moreover under the banner of Booker T Washington tried to ignore a young man who thought that Black Americans had as much right in the opera house, as in the factory, and as much right to handle eschalots, as in all. Du Bois work in short fell on closed ears. But Du Bois could have given the answer of the professor who when asked why he was always on the wave of the future responded, because I create the way. Du Bois work, both literary and social created the wave of the future.
J. Saunders Red...: For in the years between 1900 and the early 1920s, we begin to see the decline of those factors which encouraged the fate of Dunbar and Chesnutt. And accompanying this decline, we see a growth in the attitudes which Du Bois projected in, The Souls of Black Folk. These complimentary trends made for a different type of Black literature. Literature of high merit, literature of militancy and race pride. James Weldon Johnson's the autobiography of an ex-colored man which came in 1912 is an example of this literature of Pi merit.
J. Saunders Red...: In this well written and realistic novel, Johnson followed the pick a risk adventures of a young mulatto through turn of the century America and Europe. In his 1917 volume of poetry, Fifty Years, Johnson published a number of examples of militant Black poets and he expressed a strong sense of race pride. The sense of race pride can also be felt in Benjamin Brawley's critical work, The Negro in Literature and Art, which appeared in 1910 and which celebrated the achievements of Black artists in America.
J. Saunders Red...: Du Bois militancy was continued in both literature and social action. For in his 1911 novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, he expose the inequities of the capitalistic system in the Cotton Kingdom and in 99 he was active in the establishment of the NAACP, an organization devoted to the advancement of the colored people of the world. Out of the NAACP came the journal, The Crisis, edited by Du Bois. And In this journal appeared the works of young Black writers of merit, writers filled with racial pride and sharing Du Bois' anti Washingtonian views, the race problem.
J. Saunders Red...: During the years between 1900 and the early 1920s, Carter G. Woodson was also at work engaged in historical studies destined to give the Black American a sense of pride in his history. He founded the association for the study of Negro life and history in 1915 and in the following year he brought out the first issue of the journal of Negro history. In the same years, militant black journalism also gained impetus. These efforts by Black writers, journalists and scholars, of course cannot be divorced from the atmosphere of America as a whole. The educational opportunities for Black Americans were slowly increasing and there was a growing number of college educated Black men moving up into the ranks of what Du Bois called, the talented tenth.
J. Saunders Red...: In addition, the great migration of Black Americans to thriving urban centers put more Black men in contact with American promises and the American dream. Their experiences overseas as soldiers in the American expeditionary force gave them new experiences. Black Americans reached out toward greater social, economic and political opportunity. The migration was accelerated of course by the outbreak of world war one because the war industries demanded workers and Black Americans gladly left the South to fill this demand. The urban Black American, the militant Black American, the race proud Black American, all have their genesis in the years between 1900 and the early 1920s.
J. Saunders Red...: But the best literary manifestations of all these Black American types did not come until the 20s when the ferment of those years culminated in a movement that has been variously called the Harlem Renaissance, the new Negro movement and the awakening of the 1920. The race pride, the interest in the history of the race and the militant opposition to the reality of the racial situation found expression in some of the best works ever produced by Black American writers.
J. Saunders Red...: Where between 1922 and 1929, the year which marked beginning of the great depression, the works of Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke and Langston Hughes went a long way toward destroying the myth of the old Negro and help to put Black American writers on a par with the best of their White contemporary. The themes employed by the writers of the 20s were to a large extent those which had marked the years immediately prior to the Harlem Renaissance. But with this difference, the dialect tradition, the stereotypes, the dawning of masks of any sort was anathema to the writers of the 20s.
J. Saunders Red...: As Alain Locke, one of the most influential figures in the movement stated it quote, "Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on and even the Colonel and George play barnstorm roles from which they escape with relief when the public spotlight is off. The popular melodrama has about played itself out and it is time to scrap the fictions, Garrett the boogies and settle down to a realistic facing of facts." The most obvious facts were that here were Black writers who had mastered their craft and who had something important to say. Claude McKay mastered the sonnet and use the form to say things Blacks had never said before.
J. Saunders Red...: If we must die, let it not be like hogs hunted then penned in an inglorious spot. While around us bark the mad and hungry dogs, making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die so that our precious blood may not be shed in vain. Then even the monsters we defy shall be constrained to honor us though dead. O kinsmen, we must meet the common foe, though far outnumbered let us show us brave and for their thousand blows deal one death blow. What though before us lies the open grave, like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack pressed to the wall dying, but fighting back. There is no need to point out the craftsmanship, the sure sense of rhyme and the lyrical intensity of this poem. McKay's entire cannon sparkle with equally impressive works.
J. Saunders Red...: Two other poets of note who emerge from the Harlem Renaissance were Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. Cullen worked for the most part in romantic verse forms, somewhat overwrought by their sweetness in poetic diction. But in more than one instance, he managed to express with poignancy and or with humor, what it meant to be a Black American. There is one short poem of his entitled, To a White Lady I Know, which reads. "She even thinks that up in heaven her class lies late and snores while poor black cherubs rise at seven to do celestial chores."
J. Saunders Red...: There is also the poem called, Incident. Once riding in old Baltimore heart filled, head filled with glee. I saw Baltimorean keep looking straight at me. Now I was eight and very small and he was no whit bigger and so I smiled, but he poked out his tongue and called me Nigger. I saw the whole of Baltimore from May until December. Of all the things that happened there, that's all that I remember.
J. Saunders Red...: The same that has been said if the poetry of Countee Cullen might be said of Langston Hughes'. I've known rivers, I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramid above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans and I've seen it's muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers, ancient dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
J. Saunders Red...: The pride in the history of the race is unmistakable here. Unlike Cullen, Hughes chose to work in the idiom of the Black American generally. And in a number of his poems, we find the rhythms and that special knowledge which characterizes Black American folk expression. The cannon of Hughes work is so extensive and his range is so great that it would be impossible to do him justice in such a brief overview.
J. Saunders Red...: In addition to poetry, Hughes made notable contributions to the field of drama and both his novel, Not Without Laughter and his collection of short story, The Ways of White Folks, show a good deal of talent in prose. Hughes foremost or at least his most widely known prose works, however, are the simple stories which deal with the experiences and viewpoints of the urban Black American. Hughes treatment of the urban Black American in both poetry and prose is but one manifestation of the concern for low life city characters, which Edward Margolies sees as one of the most salient elements in the Harlem Renaissance.
J. Saunders Red...: Claude McKay's novel, Home to Harlem, is a typical product of this concern for the lower strata of the city. And Rudolph Fisher's short stories, which appeared in The Atlantic monthly during the 20s, touch on the same concern for the lower echelon of Black American urban life.
J. Saunders Red...: One of the foremost literary products of the Harlem Renaissance, however, did not take Black American urban life as its theme. Instead it explored the Black man's experience in the rural South. In Cane, which was published in 1923, a collection of fiction, poetry and drama, Jean Toomer plumed the hidden depths of the Black American experience and produced a Southern psychological realism that has been matched only in the best works of William Faulkner.
J. Saunders Red...: Fern, one of the best short stories in Toomer's volume illustrates his brilliant use of symbolism. The sensual tempting heroine of the story is much more than an indolent Southern woman. She encompasses indeed, she symbolizes the life of that great Georgia Pike by which she sits staring at the world with haunted eye. The temptations and promises presented by Fern's body are symbolic of the temptations and promises held out by the road of light, the Georgia Pike, which stretches before the rural Black American. And the frustration experienced by men in their affairs with Fern is symbolic of the frustrations met along the life journey.
J. Saunders Red...: Men are willing to give their all, but the result is simply frustration, haunting memory, hysteria. Toomer's unique handling of symbolic details can be seen in several other stories in Cane, notably in Becky and Avey. The author however does not confine himself to prose, Song of the Son, is fairly representative of his poetry, of its moods and its themes.
J. Saunders Red...: Pour O poor that partying soul in song. O pour it in the sawdust glow of night into the velvet pine smoke air tonight and let the valley carry it along and let the valley carry it along. O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree so scant the grass, so profligate of pines, now just before an epoch's sun declines, thy son in time I have returned to thee. Thy son I have in time returned to thee. In time for though the sun is setting on a song lit race of slaves it has not set. Though late O soil, it is not too late yet to catch by plaintive soul leaving soon gone, leaving to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone. O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums, squeezed and bursting in the pine wood air passing before they stripped the old tree bare, one plum was saved for me. One seed becomes an everlasting song, a singing tree, caroling softly souls of slavery. What they were and what they are to me, caroling softly souls of slavery.
J. Saunders Red...: The craftsmanship of Jean Toomer in fiction was matched by the technical virtuosity of another Black writer of the Harlem Renaissance. A writer in fact who emerged as the chief critic of the movement. Alain Locke's book, The New Negro, contains several statements of the idea of the Harlem Renaissance and these statements are charged with careful social and the static analysis. Locke was virtually the father of the new Negro literary movement and he stated the attitude of the majority of Black Americans in 1925 when he said, quote, "By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem, we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation. Until recently lacking self understanding, we have been almost as much of a problem to ourselves as we still are to others. But the decade that found us with the problem has left us with only a task. The multitude perhaps feels as yet only a strange relief and the new vague urge but the thinking few know that in the reaction, the vital inner grip of prejudice has been broken" end the quotation.
J. Saunders Red...: This statement offers an example of Locke's analysis, his lucid prose. Then the same essay he touches on all of the most salient characteristics of the Harlem Renaissance. He speaks for example, of the new sense of an African past which found its outlet in literature as well as in the Garvey movement in the 20s. And he sees the problems of the urban Black American as the most pressing problems of the future.
J. Saunders Red...: The last two characteristics of the Renaissance, a concern with the African past and the concern with the urban Black American are two of the factors which connect the Harlem Renaissance in a very real sense with the more recent Renaissance of Black writers in the 50s and 60s. The outpouring, the bursting forth of a new Black American spirit, the flowering of literary genius that was the Harlem Renaissance was destined to be short lived.
J. Saunders Red...: When the stock market crashed in 1929, the White patrons who had supported Black writers, the fun lovers who had come to Harlem in search of that bizarre world portrayed by Carl Van Vechten in Nigger Heaven, the restless escapist of the jazz age who had sought some excitement through association with the Black American and the Black American himself, writer or non-rider alike, all turned from art and the high life of the 20s to grapple with the basic problem of the depression years. The problem of survival.
J. Saunders Red...: The output however of Black literature was not halted by the depression. And in some ways it may have been aided by the great social crisis. A statement by [inaudible] helps to explain this. He wrote, well, the depression had sent the Harlem writers scurry, but I think if more than compensated for this damage by the opportunities it provided for the next wave of literary expression by Negros, many old and defeated writers like the poet Fenton Johnson wandered into writers project of the WPA. But the project also drew the likes of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Frank Yerbe, Roi Ottley, Willard Motley and several others and began to create an environment in which the Negro writer could at last stretch himself at full length. End of quotation.
J. Saunders Red...: To a large extent, the experimentation begun by Black authors in the 20s, continued into the next decade and the audience for literature about Black Americans increased considerably in the 30s. This was partly the result of the work of quite writers like Carl Van Vechten, DuBose Heyward, Eugene O'Neill, Paul Green and Sherwood Anderson who dealt with the Black American experience in something other than the stereotype manner and who portrayed the Black man not as a stock character but as a real human being. Given the increased audience and the aid of the writer's project of the WPA, an author like Arna Bontemps could begin a long and full career during the 30s and Richard Wright could begin his work as one of America's most distinguished authors.
J. Saunders Red...: In addition, the 30s saw the publication of Sterling Brown's volume of verse called, Southern Road, and the appearance of his invaluable critical work, The Negro in American fiction. It is the three years immediately following the publication of Brown's critical work, however, which mark the high point in Black American writing.
J. Saunders Red...: For in 1938, Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children was published. And for perhaps the first time in 15 years the condition of the Black American, the violence, the oppression and the attendant warping of the spirit were portrayed in engrossing fiction. In the five short stories of this volume, Wright showed a mastery of style and a grammatic sense far superior to that of most of his Black contemporaries and predecessors and on a par with that of his most talented White contemporaries.
J. Saunders Red...: The violence, the terrible effects of prejudice are perhaps nowhere more skillfully set forth than in the first story of the volume called, Big Boy Leaves Home. In this story, it is not simply the violence of the White man which militates against the Black man, there is a sense of cosmic violence seen in coiling snake, enraged roosters, snarling dog, threatening storms. In the last story of the volume, Bright and Morning Star, Wright portrays the same sense of violence while at the same time he captures the sense of hope, which many Black Americans felt as a result of the work of the communist party in the 1920s and 30s.
J. Saunders Red...: Two years after the publication of Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son appeared and Richard Wright's reputation was firmly established thereby. Here in one of the best novels produced in the last 50 years, Wright mercilessly set forth a portrait of one of America's most native son, Bigger Thomas. Bigger Thomas is a figure both pulsatingly human and at the same instant bigger than the individual case. His plight brought on by prejudice and societal attitudes is universal in scope and Wright's handling of dialogue, mood and description ensured the appeal of his first novel. The protest in the novel was not a new element in American literature, but the unflinching realism, the technical mastery and the magnificent dramatic sense mark Native Son as perhaps the highest point of Black literary expression the novel, the black novel, had to achieve before the 1950.
J. Saunders Red...: Moreover, Wright's handling of the communist ideology in the novel constitutes a fine expression of what communism and the rise of a new proletariat meant to the Black American of the 1930s. Wright's reputation was further enhanced by the 1945 publication of Black Boy. In this fictional autobiography, Wright scrupulously, skillfully analyzes the American racial dilemma through the lens of self experience. And the significance of Wright's achievement was recognized by no less an artist than Ralph Ellison who recorded his reaction to the book in a piece called Richard Wright's Blues. Ellison stated that Wright's book captured the essentials of the Black man's experience in America and he felt that it did so in a blues form. A form that is which constituted quote, "an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically," end of quote.
J. Saunders Red...: Despite his domination of the 40s, however, Wright was not the only Black author of merit to come out of that decade. In poetry, we have the works of Owen Dobson, of Robert Hayden, of Melvin Tolson and Gwendolyn Brooks. And in fiction, we have the efforts of James Baldwin, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison. Most of these writers were products of the postwar years and their writing is marked by certain characteristics which Richard Wright pointed out in his essay, the literature of the Negro in the United States. Wright stated that the works of the postwar writers were characterized by quote, "a sharp loss of lyricism, a drastic reduction of the racial content, a rise in preoccupation with urban themes and subject matter both in the novel and the poem." End of quote.
J. Saunders Red...: Lyricism in the high flown style of poetic diction and sweetness is largely absent from the verse of Dobson, Hayden and Brooks. The new poets tended to work more in other terms, stressing the concreteness of detail and using a sparseness of language. In regards to Wright's point about a drastic reduction of the racial content, we can only say that racial content as it has existed before Wright and in the work of Wright may have been reduced, but racial content of another sort was present to replace it.
J. Saunders Red...: In the early stories of Ellison and Petry, racial content still carries all before it. But there is a broader scope involved in these stories. The black characters have become more complex than those portrayed in the work of say Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher. The concerns of the characters portrayed by Ellison, Himes and Petry are those of a complex industrial American society in total and the same might be said of the characters encountered in the early work of James Baldwin and I think at this point I should stop. The hours is up.
Speaker 1: That was Saunders Redding, professor of American Civilization at George Washington University with today's lecture. This series of programs is presented by the broadcasting 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 1:30 PM, February 23rd, 1970 from Shambaugh Auditorium and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.
Speaker 4: Was presented by the broadcasting 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 courses. Today's presentation originated as a live broadcast at 1:30 PM, February 23rd, 1970 from Shambaugh Auditorium and was recorded for future broadcast. This is the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.