J. Saunders Redding lecture, "19th Century Afro-American Literature and Culture," at the University of Iowa, February 25, 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 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. Saunders Reddin...: I was trying to explain yesterday the ambivalence that possessed and still possesses some Black writers in America. And I spoke of the double think and I'd gotten to the point of trying to illustrate this document by citing Sutton Griggs. The author of five novels who vacillated between such subjects as Black revolution in his early work and Black accommodation in his later books. This was, I said, political and psychological posturing and that writing during an era when attacks against Negroes and literature were as overwhelming as those in reality. Saunders Reddin...: Black authors of this period took pen in hand with the intention of writing for the purposes of defense, race glorification, were in an effort to prove that the matter of race had no business in writing by Blacks at all. Disfranchised, powerless, but aroused to fight off stereotypes, these authors often created scarecrows instead of men and women. And when not doing that, they contrived to produce inadvertently, some of the same stereotypes they wished to see destroyed. Saunders Reddin...: 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, but paradoxically enough, even this work was published anonymously. Its author was not revealed as a negro until some 15 years later. Such was the school of fiction that has been called the Negro apologist school. Rarely did the members of this school challenge a white audience, they sought it. Saunders Reddin...: The only one among them who did challenge that audience, W. E. B. Du Bois, coupled his literary expression with political action. His novel, Quest of the Silver Fleece in 1911 attempted to expose cotton culture in the agrarian South as the real base of a racist and exploitative system. Five years earlier, he had organized the Niagara movement, the forerunner of the NACP. And three years prior to that, he had written The Souls of Black Folk. Saunders Reddin...: Du Bois would go on writing and organizing until his death in 1963, but much of his political organizing and literary effort at the turn of the century was done to counter the greatest political apologist of that day, Booker T Washington. The political and artistic boldness that appeared in the work of Black writers of the 20s was more than a coincidence of the jazz age or of the trend then moving from romanticism to realism in literature. The new mood came largely as a result of the changing political base and the growing economic strength of Black Americans. Saunders Reddin...: It was affected by a break with middle class values on the part of some, by changing conditions in the aftermath of world war one, and of the Negroes northward migration before, during and after World War I. It was this period that produced the so-called new Negro writer and with him a new racial attitude, a new literary movement, and a change and political stance, which was most of all characterized by what was called the Harlem School. Whereas the early Negro novelist of the apologist era, era had been accommodating and loyal Americans often to the point of sycophancy, the Harlem School writers of the 20s with few exceptions, were rebels. Saunders Reddin...: Where the apologists had often avoided their heritage and ignored their culture, most of the Harlem School writers searched for their roots and tried to use them. Where previous Negro novels had contained some amount of racial tension, most Harlem School novels reflected the spontaneous, sometimes carefree, often satiric style and mentality of the jazz age. Where the early Negro novelist had stressed white cultural values and integration, most Harlem School experiments emphasized Black cultural nationalism. Some embracing Marcus Garvey's back to Africa movement and where early writers had been apologetically protesting racial indignities, the Harlem school castigated and satirized, white culture and society. Saunders Reddin...: The Harlem Renaissance, however, was not without disagreements among its constituents, nor without some new stereotypes created by them white writers and critics who followed the new fad for things Black. If the eras of slavery and post-reconstruction had brought on the literary stereotype of the happy slave black beast syndrome, the jazz age produced the stereotype of the sexually liberated, carefree, exotic primitive Black man. A quarrel soon arose between certain Black writers and critics as to how best to counter, not only the new stereotype makers, but what path Negro writing should take to promote its best image, that is the Black man's best image. Saunders Reddin...: Whether it should be raucous, hedonistic, kind of plastic, tinged with the folk and directed toward the masses as the Harlem School advocated or gentile, assimilationist and middle class oriented. As some of the more conservative members of the Negro literati insisted upon. All this actually seemed to change the final literary products or their political bent very little. None of the 20s Renaissance writers, whether they were the middle class or rebelling against it, as was most of the Harlem school, actually showed more than a slight glimmer of social consciousness or political awareness of the real problems. Saunders Reddin...: Though there were a few novels on the issue of passing and lynching, which could be called political novels in a sense, and the era could produce such diverse works as the distinctively textured low life novels of Claude McKay, as opposed to the middle class oriented fiction of Jesse faucet and others, there nevertheless appeared no work that actually stressed the everyday struggle resulting from the great migration and urbanization, especially in Harlem. Or the problem of unemployment, crowded tenements, inadequate schools. In short, all the conditions that would one day show up in the depression, which was not far off and later in the Harlem riot and the problems that are still showing up. Saunders Reddin...: Therefore these novels of the Harlem school were essentially apolitical. Unconsciously, but also one feels somewhat deliberately. It remained for the depression to bring to Afro-American literature, a treatment of political and social realities that writers of the 20s had before their eyes, but overlooked. The Renaissance and its mood died with the depression and it was through Richard Wright in the 30s that the plight of the urban Black masses was portrayed in American fiction. But before publication of Wright's Native Son in 1940, Black critic writer, Nick Aaron Ford, summed up the general literary situation by asking in his book, The Contemporary Novel, quote, "Since the Negro novelist has not produced even a first rate novel, is he not justified in laying aside the retentions of pure artistry and boldly taking up the cudgel of propaganda?" End of quote. The 30s produced neither pure artistry nor pure propaganda either. Saunders Reddin...: During this era, Black writers were beneficiaries of a program of national relief through the federal writers project. But some as in the case of many white writers, saw the poet on a plane with the proletariat and believed, as in the words of the poet, [Max Borgenheim] that quote, "No proletarian worker on the face of the earth is more shamefully and deceitfully exploited than is a poet in any capitalist country." End of quotation. For Negro writers, this attitude, together with the issue of race cast and a position of second class citizenship, provided all that was necessary in the political atmosphere of the 30s, for them to find attractions in the communist party. The party supported Negro causes. Saunders Reddin...: In addition to providing a publishing outlet, in particularly, the magazine called New Masses. Though Ralph Ellison for one, has made it know that he never accepted the etiology which the New Masses attempted to impose upon Black writers and that he was studying Dostoevsky and Henry James, and most of the New Masses leaders hated Dostoevsky and found James decadent. Saunders Reddin...: It is just as true, that some Negro authors found the leftist political ideology of the period to their satisfaction. To name only a few, the late Langston Hughes was for a while, president of the communists sponsored League of Struggle for Negro Rights. Richard Wright joined the John Reed Club, began publishing pieces in radical journals, and in one of his earliest essays called Blueprint for Negro Writing urged the Negro writer to adopt Marxism. Though Wright acknowledged that Bigger Thomas, his protagonist in Native Son, was a completely American product. Saunders Reddin...: Bigger's relationship to white communists in the book thoroughly reflects Wright's experience in the communist party, which he rejected after some years. And which rejection he documented in The God that Failed. Paradoxically enough, despite an attraction to communism, the writings of Negro authors during this period revealed something rather consistent. Evidence that rather than rejecting middle class values in America, they resented being excluded from the mainstream that made them possible and that they preferred to be in the main stream than out. Whatever main stream there actually was during the depression. Saunders Reddin...: It was however, from a white author, that what can probably be considered the first and only revolutionary novel of Negro life actually came during the 1930s. The book was Free Born. The year 1932 and the author of the book was Scott Nearing. Nearing's Black hero, Joe, unlike Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas becomes a dedicated revolutionary through his experiences. First as a sharecropper in the South, later as a strike breaker on Chicago's South side. He turns for guidance to the writings of Marx and Lenin and is taught by communists that Blacks must unite with whites for a free world under holy class control. It may say something significant about America that this book found no commercial publisher and Nearing published it himself. While certain novels of the 30s dealt with themes which had little to do with social protest. Novels such as George Wiley Henderson's or Zora Neale Hurston's dealing with ways of loving. Saunders Reddin...: There was the novel which dealt with aspects of the racial ties combined with social protests, such as Arna Bontemps, Black Thunder. A novel based on the actual slave insurrection led by Gabriel Prosser. It is doubtful, for reasons which have been explained here, that this book would have been written or would have found an audience in a political climate unlike that of the 1930s. It found its place in a certain age and a particular political climate in the same way that William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner, found its place recently. Styron however, was not the first to write about Turner. To the accompaniment of [inaudible], about 40 years ago, Black poet critic Sterling Brown wrote his ode to Nat Turner, and it is a commendable product of the creative imagination. Saunders Reddin...: But needless to say, it did not have the impact that Styron's book is getting now. The post world war two generation revealed itself as having something of a mixture of tongues. In the literature of the 40s and 50s, imitators of the naturalism of Richard Wright appeared. And so did novels with anti war theme. Novels that were anti middle class Negro life. And essays that pursued these themes and more. Ralph Ellison, who produced one of these novels and James Baldwin, who produced a score of the essays are important for different reasons. Though neither seems to be the darling of today's militant young Black generation. Ellison is accused of being too detached and too literary, more American than Black and too dedicated to the European literary tradition and not enough to his own heritage. And James Baldwin is no darling of the militants for reasons that Eldridge Cleaver elaborates in Soul on Ice. Saunders Reddin...: Ralph Ellison, has already explained in his book Shadow and Act how he came to write Invisible Man, and I shall not dwell upon it except to say that this particular novel, while not written as a political work as such, represents more than any other single contemporary work by a Negro, all the illusions and disillusionment of our time. Racial, social, moral, political. It is a book which merits all the importance it has been accorded. As for James Baldwin, as I have said on more than one occasion, he is wasting his time as a novelist, which is to say that he is supremely the essayist. And he defines in intellectual terms, what Ellison brings alive in allegory. Baldwin is no novelist to match the likes of Ann Petry, William Demby, Chester Himes, Paule Marshall, John A. Williams, Faith Berry, William Melvin Kelley and Ernest J. Gaines, who are unfortunately too little known. Saunders Reddin...: In discussing Negro writing and the political climate of the past and present, it would be something of a heresy not to acknowledge that as far as Black American writers go, some have had as difficult at time as Black actors and actresses trying to make it on Broadway or in Hollywood. In the world of the theater, there seems to be a rule that there can be only one block star at a time. Something like this was true in the literary world, in the decade under discussion. But now the situation is different. We have a proliferation, a near overkill of Negro, Afro-American, Black, however you want to call it, writers. Some of whom would not have been published even five years ago and many of whom should not be published now. Yet there was a time when Black writers who did warrant reception were refused it. It is no accident that of the less than 100 Negro novelist writing in America over the past 100 years, three fourths have published only one novel. Saunders Reddin...: The difficulties of being published, of securing an audience and the psychological handicaps under which most Negro writers have pursued writing careers, have all contributed to this situation. Touching on this, back during the 30s, Richard Wright in his piece, Blueprint for Negro Writing, noted quote, "White America never offered Negro writers any serious criticism. The mere fact that a Negro could write was astonishing. Nor was there any deep concern on the part of white America with the role Negro writing should play in American culture." End of quotation. Saunders Reddin...: When we reflect upon the circumstances under which writing by Negroes in America began and the conditions under which it has evolved, it is not phenomenal to see happening what is happening today in some of the fiction, drama and poetry by Black writers. A literature that was once defensive is now on the offensive. And needless to say that in the process of change, it has offended some people. But it is no coincidence that much of the present mood throughout the country, and some of the echoes from the Black power movement have been absorbed into recent fiction. Into books, such as John A. Williams', The Man Who Cried I Am, with this issue of Black genocide. Or into the short stories of LeRoi Jones with more than once the theme of death, revolution and living by the gun. Saunders Reddin...: To future generations, these works will all perhaps read more like the literary history of our age than as just works of fiction. And they will be judged as political. Not that that matters, except that they may not endure as works of art. And I cannot fail to say, that is what I fear will happen. And that I somehow see happening to this period what happened to the 20s, that it may be overdone. The victim of overkill, and there will not be so much worth saving as we might wish. Saunders Reddin...: There are those Black critics who believe the freedom of the Black writer in America is inseparable from the freedom of the Black population as a whole. That art must be primarily a weapon until that freedom is fully attained. Art as a weapon, if it is to be effective, however, must be much less weapon than art or it fails. Negro Professor and critic, Alain Locke once said that, "The trouble with most Negro novelists is that they don't know how much art it takes to hold in smooth suspension, the heavy sociology of racial issues and interracial tensions." End of quote. The greatest strength an artists can have is the ability to communicate among men and what he communicates is the truth. Saunders Reddin...: And if turns to weapon then so be it. In honoring Robert Frost at Amherst college in 1963, the late John F. Kennedy had some special words about the nature of art as weapon, as well as about the nature of politics in literature. Since what he said was intended for both Black and white alike, it is not inappropriate to end these remarks with a quotation from that speech. And this is the quotation. Saunders Reddin...: "When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of its limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of experience. When the power corrupts, literature cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths, which must serve as touchstones of our judgment. In a free society, art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the fear of polemics and etiology. It may be different elsewhere, but democratic society in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may." Now, that's the end of that. Are there any questions comments? Before I go on to something else? Speaker 3: You know [inaudible]. Saunders Reddin...: Wait a minute. I'm having difficulty hearing you. [inaudible] take off my glasses. Speaker 3: [inaudible]. Saunders Reddin...: Who, Mark Twain? The Black that Mark Twain mentioned, are they [inaudible]? Speaker 3: [inaudible]. Saunders Reddin...: Nigger Jim in Huckleberry Finn is of course a stereotype. But his significance as a symbolic figure outweighs the fact of his being a stereotype. And as a matter of fact, Twain certainly did not think he was creating a stereotype and certainly he did not use... One thing is for instance, of that novel Huckleberry Finn, as the relation of, a journey through, America by means of the Mississippi river. One also thinks of that novel as the relation of the growing up of a typical white American boy. And one remembers when thinking of that novel in this second way, one remembers that it was Nigger Jim, who brought Huck Finn to maturity. It was Nigger Jim who made Huck Finn realize that things which he had taken for granted were completely wrong. The inferiority of the Black, for one thing, the business, the whole business of slavery about which he changed his mind, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. To the extent that Nigger Jim plays that part in the novel, he is not a stereotype. The characteristics which he exhibits are stereotypical. Does that answer you? He insists upon his humanity. And this is not. Speaker 4: [inaudible]? Saunders Reddin...: [inaudible] Wilson. Speaker 4: [inaudible]? Saunders Reddin...: Would I feel what? Speaker 4: [inaudible]. Saunders Reddin...: Yes, I think I would. Yes, I think I would. Any other questions or comments? I'm sorry I have not been as provocative as I had hoped. Can't get any responses out of people. Speaker 5: [inaudible]? Saunders Reddin...: Apolitical? Speaker 5: [inaudible]. Saunders Reddin...: Yes, but, not a novel. Or maybe it's true. Some Literary historians hold at all. First novels are autobiographical, but his is so particularly autobiographical. Almost to be not a novel. This is his story. In a way in which Richard Wright's Black boy is not his story. I'm not saying that he's not a competent novelist. I'm simply saying that compared to the work in the essay, he's wasting his time as a novelist. Another Country, Giovanni's Room, which has been highly praised. And I know that I stand against probably the majority opinion here. It's a passively good novel. Another Country is a passively good novel. I'm sure that there are people in the audience who don't agree with this at all. That is with this judgment of mine. Alright. Speaker 6: [inaudible]. Saunders Reddin...: Oh, I didn't say that his works would decline. I simply said that, or if I said that, I certainly didn't mean it. It's not- Speaker 6: [inaudible]. Saunders Reddin...: Because the political climate will change. Speaker 6: [inaudible]. Saunders Reddin...: I think that some of his work will endure, but I don't think it will continue to be popular. Just as Richard Wright's early work will endure, but it's no longer popular. Nobody reads Richard Wright now, except under compulsion or to fulfill the requirements of the course or something. So it I'll bet you, they're not three people in here who have read Native Son, except as a course requirement, probably in the last year, two years. I'll bet you, they're not three people in here who have read Native Son period. Speaker 7: [inaudible]. Saunders Reddin...: All good novels hurt. Crime and punishment hurts. Speaker 7: [inaudible]. Saunders Reddin...: No. I see you have no masochistic instincts. But most readers do. Most readers like to be hurt by novels. Most readers like to be hurt by them because hurt is the only thing they can feel. They are insensitive to the subtleties of not, well, most readers are insensitive to the subtleties of emotion. It has to be pain, you see. Or anguish, rather than the sort of tremulous ache that one gets when one reads Doctor Zhivago or Crime and punishment, or some of Ernest Hemingway. Saunders Reddin...: No, I don't think it's because it hurts too much that people haven't read it. I mean, how do they know it hurts if they haven't read it? No, I simply think that the political climate has changed and that though the novel itself will endure as a literary work. It will endure in the same way, let us say, that the works of George Elliot endure. Nobody reads George Elliot anymore, either. Any other questions? All right. This, I think that I'm about to say now, I might've said very beginning. Saunders Reddin...: In a study of, and the evaluation of American Black literature, it is necessary, and I think demonstrably valid to start with three assumptions. One, that Black American literature so-called is American literature in fact. And that it cannot be diverted from the main body of American expressiveness without doing grave harm to native literature as a body of American experience, and as an instrument of historical and social diagnosis. Saunders Reddin...: Two. That literature created by Afro-Americans has but little to do with quote, "pure literature". If there is such a thing. Has little to do with aesthetics, either as philosophy or practice. It appeals as much to the cognitive as to the connotative and effective side of man's being. It is a literature that combines, in uneasy consciousness, the ought and the is. The dream and the reality. The ideal and the real. And three, that there is nevertheless and aesthetic yeast in this literature that makes much of it rise above the content than the emotional level of the mere tractarian. Saunders Reddin...: Though one grants the utmost validity of the first assumption, it should not be thought that there is no distinction between Afro-American writing and white American writing. And although it is only the distinction between root and branch, it can be clarified by designating the intrinsic divisions in Black literature that are not present in the literature produced by white Americans. Other divisions, having other significances are generally applied to the latter and that they are arbitrary divisions rather than intrinsic, can be determined by picking at random any half dozen volumes of American literary history or criticism. Saunders Reddin...: Sometimes such divisions are chronological, 1700 to 1755. Sometimes geographical, the new England poets. Sometimes historical, the literature of the Civil War. Sometimes philosophical and symbolic, the transendentalists. They are a matter of the historians or the critics' convenience. these categories. But there are almost never aesthetic. Imagist, symbolist, metaphysical poets, Pre-Raphaelites, et cetera. They are never given the critical divisions that European literature is generally given. This is the very point that proves it seems to me, that although there is a distinction between writing by African Americans and American literature generally, the distinction does not signify a dichotomy. Much of American literature, like Black literature also appeals to the cognitive. Saunders Reddin...: I have spoken of divisions of this writing in order to forestall confusion, but now I must risk another term. The term is patterns, and I use it to mean things after which something is fashioned or made. The things after which writing by Afro-Americans is made, the things it conforms to, are quite truly the states of the American mind. This truth is of course, a generalization to which each of us can find glaring exceptions. But it is a curious fact that no work by an Afro-American published prior to the 1940s was widely discussed by the general reading public as controversial. That this has been due in part to the general public's ignorance, either willful or imposed, of issues between the races and within the race need not be argued here. Black works, and in general works about Blacks, the conspicuous exceptions being Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Impending Crisis, Native Son, and An American Dilemma either have had, or have failed to have acceptance. Saunders Reddin...: When they have had it, it is because they did no violence to the concurrent and prevailing state of the American mind. When they have not had it, they have failed to have it for the opposite reason. Part of the meaning of this is, that until recently the Black writer in America has been frustrated of participation in the intellectual life. The idea area of America. The Black man's ideas of a creative, aesthetic and abstract kind have never been and are not now either solicited or welcomed by the American intellectual. And seldom has the Black creative writer in America written for a Black audience. He has felt it to be his practical duty and his professional triumph to win the hearing of a white audience. He has tried to win it on its own terms. He has tried to discover that audience's state of mind, what it would and would not take, and his attempt has been to make his work conform to it. Saunders Reddin...: At the other extreme, and certainly presently, he has defied. It in both cases, he has tended to establish a kind of contramythology that, to say the least is hazardous to creative effort. And he has tended to solidify three patterns in Afro-American writing. The folk pattern, the racial pattern and the aesthetic pattern. In the last of which theory consciousness combines with race consciousness do produce quote, "pure literature". In a curious kind of way he has had to do this, or certainly he has done this as an assertion of his triple identity. In the first pattern, he has asserted his identity as a human being. In the second as an American. And in the third as an artist. Saunders Reddin...: These patterns cannot be laid out in neat chronological order. Each has existed with more or less vitality at the same time with the others. Jupiter Hammon, who represented the first was contemporary with Wheatley, who represented the third and Horton, who represented the second came shortly after. Or, to come nearer to the present, Motley, Petry and Yerby lived and worked in the same time with Wright, Baldwin and Brooks on the one hand and Hughes, Henderson and Brown on the other. Indeed the work of a writer like Hughes presents all three patterns, in all the mutable nature of their power and respectability. The works of Wright and Petry present two. Only a handful of Black writers present only one. Saunders Reddin...: Now it seems to me that these considerations pose for the critic, the teacher, the student, the historian of Black writing, problems in American intellectual history and biography. The same sort of problems, except that they may be more pertinent that are posed for the critic, teacher and the historian of American literature. The problems in general American literature have been met by American scholars, such as Brooks, [Geismar], Kazan, Hicks, [Gero] et cetera. And there is no reason why scholars cannot meet them in Afro-American literature. What I have said in the foregoing indicates the way in which I would meet them. First by documenting the validity of the basic assumption. By establishing through critical analysis and historical fact, the existence of the patterns, and finally by aesthetic judgment of the works within the patterns. That's all for today. 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 broadcasting service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the Department of English at 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 25, 1970 from Shambaugh Auditorium and was recorded for future broadcast. This is the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.