Some African-American Writers
Past and Present:
Pre and Post Civil War,
Harlem Renaissance,
Civil Rights Movement
and Beyond
Pre-Civil War
The Civil War was also known as “the war
between the states.” This was the war in
which the North or the Union fought
against the South or the Confederacy. One
of the most important issues in this war
was that of slavery. The Northern states
were opposed to slavery and the Southern
states whose economy was dependent
upon agriculture supported it.
Prior to the end of the Civil War, it
was against the law for Blacks in the
South to be educated. Plantation
owners feared that if the slaves were
able to read and write they would be
more likely to organize and rebel.
Acquiring an education as an AfricanAmerican was an extremely risky and
difficult task , yet many people were
willing to go to great lengths in order
to gain knowledge. As a result, we
have had strong and brilliant AfricanAmerican writers since some of the
earliest days of our nation’s
existence.
Phyllis Wheatley, 1753-1784
Phyllis Wheatley
was born in Africa in
what is now the
country of Senegal.
When she was only
seven years old, she
was kidnapped and
transported to
North America
where she was sold
into slavery.
Sadly, she died at age 31 after the
birth of her last child, who also died
shortly after his mother passed away.
She was purchased by the
Wheatley family of Boston*
who taught her to read and
write. Very early on, they
noticed her great intelligence
and gift for writing poetry. Her
first poem was published
when she was only twelve
years old, and she later
became the first AfricanAmerican and only the second
American female writer of any
race to have her poems
published in a book.
*Prior to the year 1800, slavery was legal in both
the North and South.
Frederick Douglas, circa 1818- 1895
Frederick Douglas was born into
slavery in the state of Maryland
sometime around the year 1818.
(The exact year and date of his
birth is unknown.) At a young
age, he was sent to live in the
plantation house, most likely
because one of the men there
was his father. After the death of
his mother when he was around
ten years old, he was sent to live
with another family.
The wife in this
household taught
him the alphabet,
despite the laws
forbidding the
education of
slaves. From there
he learned to read
and write with the
help of other
children and
neighbors.
He would grow up to become
one of the greatest intellectuals
of his time, although almost
entirely self-educated. He
advised presidents and often
spoke before audiences of
thousands on a wide variety of
topics. His writings usually
focused on human rights and
moral issues, including
women’s rights, the abolition of
slavery and other types of civil
injustice.
Booker T. Washington, 1856-1915
Another remarkable AfricanAmerican writer who was born
into slavery, yet rose to
become one of the most
influential men of his time
period was Booker T.
Washington. Washington was
nine years old when given his
freedom at the end of the Civil
War.
As a young man,
Washington taught
himself to read and
write. He passionately
believed in the
importance of education
and founded Tuskegee
Institute, which would
eventually become
Tuskegee University, in a
single small building in
Tuskegee, Alabama.
He wrote 14 books in his lifetime, including his
autobiography Up from Slavery, which is still widely read
today. He was also the first African-American invited to
dine at the White House as a guest of a president and the
first one to appear on a postage stamp.
Post Civil War to the
Harlem Renaissance
After the Civil War, even though slavery
had ended, things were still very difficult
for African-Americans. There were
virtually no laws in place to protect them
from the discrimination and hatred that
many individuals still had towards blacks
and other minorities. It was extremely
difficult for African-Americans to find
decent jobs, and they often were forced
to take positions far beneath their
education level and ability.
In addition, the practice of segregation, or
the separation of people by race, was
common in many areas, especially in the
South. And while the law said that
segregation was acceptable as long as
conditions were “separate but equal,” the
reality was that conditions for Blacks were
almost always far worse than those for
Whites.
In the early part of the
twentieth century many
African-Americans moved
from the rural South to big
cities in the industrial North in
search of jobs and in hopes of
being treated more fairly. This
became known as the “Great
Migration,” and it resulted in
the coming together of
African-Americans in places
such as Harlem, New York;
Detroit, Michigan;
and Chicago, Illinois.
This, in turn, led to a tremendous
flowering of culture and the arts
within the African-American
community, especially in and
around the area of Harlem, New
York. This period would later
become known as the
Harlem Renaissance.
In addition to contributions
to the visual and performing
arts (drawing, painting,
sculpture, and drama) and
music (jazz, the blues,
boogie-woogie and
ragtime), African-Americans
also made significant
additions to and innovations
in literature during the
1920’s and 1930’s.
Some of the talented writers from
this time period include Langston
Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee
Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard
Wright, Jessie Fauset, Claude
McKay, Jean Toomer, Arna
Bontemps, Nella Larsen, James
Weldon Johnson, and Wallace
Thurman.
W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868-1963
W. E. B. Du Bois was the first African
–American to earn a doctorate from
Harvard University. He was one of
the founders of the NAACP
(National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People). A
prolific author, he wrote on such
diverse topics as sociology, race,
equality, politics and history. He
published three autobiographies
and edited The Crisis, the NAACP’s
monthly magazine.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton,
Ohio, in 1872. His parents had been born into
slavery in Kentucky. His father escaped slavery and
later fought in the Civil War, while his mother was
emancipated (or freed) at the end of the war. He
wrote his first poem when he was only six years old,
and gave his first recital when he was nine.
Dunbar was the only Black
student at his high school, yet he still
managed to be elected class president,
editor of the school newspaper and
president of the school literary society,
as well as class poet. Dunbar
attended school with and was lifelong
friends with Orville and Wilbur Wright,
the famous inventers of the airplane.
Though he wanted to be a lawyer, he was unable to attend
college due to racial discrimination and family financial
circumstances. He eventually took a job as an elevator
operator, which, at least, gave him the opportunity to write
in his free time. It is said that he distributed and sometimes
sold copies of his poetry to people who rode the elevator.
Dunbar is recognized for both his
poems that are written in standard
English and his poems written in Black
dialect, though he came to prefer the
ones written in “proper English” because
he felt that some Whites used the ones
written in dialect to reinforce their own
negative stereotypes of Blacks.
Dunbar also wrote short stories, novels,
and even dramas. He is often credited
with being the first African-American
poet to gain national and even
international popularity and acclaim.
Sadly, his life was cut short at the age of
33 when he died of tuberculosis. Even
today he is recognized as one of the
greatest American poets of all time.
We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our
eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
-Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872–1906
Zora Neale Hurston, 1891-1960
Zora Neale Hurston was one of eight children born
to a carpenter/preacher father and a school
teacher mother. The family moved to Eatonville,
Florida, an all Black town, when Zora was three.
She would spend the rest of her youth in this town
which she loved and considered her only true
“home.” A graduate of Howard University and
Columbia University, she studied anthropology
and ethnography, and she traveled extensively
throughout the South as well as the Caribbean
Islands where she studied each culture and
interviewed the elders. As a result she was
uniquely and very highly qualified for her career in
preserving black folk history and folklore;
however, after a brief period of popularity, she fell
into obscurity.
At the time that she was writing,
African-Americans were struggling
to get past stereotypes and
negative depictions of blacks in
films and the media. Many AfricanAmericans felt the need to distance
themselves from her stories of rural
blacks which contained authentic
dialect and traditional beliefs. They
felt that her stories fed into some
of these negative stereotypes.
After she was wrongfully accused of molesting a ten year old boy (she later
was able to prove that she wasn’t even in the country at the time the
incident occurred), she began to fall into a deep decline. While it is almost
entirely thanks to her work that we have accurate and authentic historical
records of rural black life in early America, near the end of her lifetime she
was living in poverty and working as a household servant. She was
ultimately forced to live in a county welfare home where she suffered a
massive stroke which led to her death in 1960.
Richard Wright, 1908 - 1960
Another extremely important writer of
the Harlem Renaissance was Richard
Wright. Wright was born in Mississippi
and, after his mother became seriously
ill, he was raised primarily by his aunt
and grandmother. The two women were
deeply religious and tried to impose
their beliefs on the young boy, who
resisted their efforts.
Wright excelled in school becoming
valedictorian of his primarily white
elementary school, but he was never
able to complete his education because
he was forced to work to help support
his family.
As a young man Wright looked to
the socialist movement as a
possible means of achieving racial
and economic equality for blacks,
but he later became disillusioned
with the internal politics of the
Communist Party when they, too,
proved discriminatory. He
eventually moved to Paris, France,
where he joined a number of
other African-American
expatriates (or people who live in
a country other than where they
were born). Two of his most
important works were Native Son
and his autobiography, Black Boy.
“The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by
experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for
books, new ways of looking and seeing.”
-Richard Wright
Civil Rights Movement and Beyond
In the early 1950’s several important events
occurred that set the stage for a renewed
struggle to try to gain equal rights under the
law for African-Americans. In 1954, the US
Supreme Court made a ruling saying that
“separate but equal” was inherently unequal.
This ruling outlawed the practice of school
segregation in the South. This angered many
Southern whites and resulted in heightened
violence against African-Americans, including
the murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen year
old boy from Chicago who was visiting
Mississippi and allegedly whistled at a white
woman.
This same year Rosa Parks sparked the
Montgomery Bus Boycott after refusing to
give up her seat to a white passenger.
This in turned resulted in the bombings of
four African-American churches and the
home of Martin Luther King, Jr. By this
time, television had become the primary
means of disseminating information in the
United States. This was important
because, through the news, for the first
time people of other races were able to
see with their own eyes the acts of
violence and hatred that were being
perpetrated against Blacks in the South.
Finally, there was an atmosphere of
support of equal rights for AfricanAmericans from outside the Black
community as well as from within it.
Gwendolyn Brooks, 1917 -2000
Born in Topeka, Kansas, Gwendolyn
Elizabeth Brooks moved to Chicago
with her family as a part of the Great
Migration when she was only six
weeks old. Though her father
worked as a janitor, it had been his
dream to become a doctor. Her
mother was a musician (pianist) and
school teacher. As she grew, both
of her parents supported her love of
reading and writing, and, as a result,
she published her first poem when
she was only thirteen years old.
By the time she was sixteen
years old, she had already had over 75
of her poems appear in a wide variety of
publications. She did not favor any one
type of poem, but instead experimented
with many different styles and forms.
Like many African-American writers of
the time, her subject matter often dealt
with the daily struggles of being black in
a racist society.
Brooks would later become the
first African-American to win the Pulitzer
Prize in Poetry in 1950. She was also
given many, many additional awards
and recognitions. Though primarily a
poet, Brooks also published two
autobiographies and a novel. She died
of cancer at age 83 in December of
2000.
“Books are meat and medicine
and flame and flight and flower,
steel, stitch, and cloud and clout,
and drumbeats on the air.”
Gwendolyn Brooks
Alex Haley, 1921-1992
Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, NY, in 1921. As a young man, at
the urging of his father who felt he needed discipline, he
joined the military where he served for twenty years in the
Coast Guard. While serving in the Pacific during WWII, he
began writing as a means of alleviating boredom. It is said
that other sailors would often pay him to write love letters to
their girls back home. After the war, the Coast Guard allowed
him to transfer to the field of journalism.
In 1965 his first book was published when he
collaborated with Malcolm X on The Autobiography
of Malcolm X. He later published his most famous
work Roots: The Saga of an American Family which
documented seven generations of his family
history and was based on over ten years of
research across several continents. He won a
Pulitzer Prize for this book in 1977, the same year
that it was made into an ABC television mini-series
which broke the previously held record for most
viewed program of all time.
Maya Angelou, 1928 –May 28, 2014
Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on
April 4, 1928. Born Marguerite Johnson, her
brother Bailey who was only a year older quickly
nicknamed her “Maya,” his way of trying to say
“my sister.” When Maya and Bailey were ages
three and four, respectively, their parents
divorced. Their father put them on a train and
sent them to Arkansas to live with his mother.
Four years later he returned and took them away
from their grandmother to return them to their
mother’s care. That same year Maya was
molested by her mother’s boyfriend, a Mr.
Freeman. She told her brother Bailey what had
happened, and he in turn told other family
members. The man was arrested and put on trial.
He was found guilty of the crime, but only served
a single day in prison for his crime.
Four days later, he was found dead,
most likely murdered by the little girl’s
uncles. In her child’s mind, Maya felt
that she was the one responsible for
his death because she had “told.” As
a result, she spent almost five years
of her life mute, fearing that her
“voice” would kill someone else.
During this time period she developed
her extraordinary memory, her great
powers of observation, and a
tremendous love of reading and
writing. As an young adult, she
studied dance and became a singer,
dancer, and actress for a time. She
later moved to New York to focus on
her writing career.
In her lifetime, she had personal
friendships with Malcolm X, Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin,
Nelson Mandela, Desmund Tutu, and
Oprah Winfrey, to name just a few of
her noteworthy connections. She was
asked to perform her poetry at
President Clinton’s inauguration, and
she has received the Pulitzer Prize, the
National Medal of the Arts, three
Grammies, a Tony Award,
the Lincoln Medal, and the
Presidential Medal of Freedom,
as well as over 30 honorary
degrees from universities
across the nation.
Toni Morrison
February 18, 1931 - Present
Born in 1931 in Lorrain, Ohio,
Toni Morrison was originally
named Chloe Ardelia Wofford
by her parents. She was raised
with her three siblings in a
middle class family where
storytelling was an important
part of her daily life.
Her father, George Wofford,
was a welder by profession, but
during most of the time that she
was growing up, he held multiple
jobs to support his family. Her
mother, Ramah Wofford, worked
cleaning houses. Her parents
instilled a love of music, reading,
and folk tales in their daughter.
An excellent overall student,
Toni Morrison graduated high
school with honors in 1949. She
then went on to attend Howard
University.
After graduating from college,
she went on to complete her
master’s degree at Cornell.
She then became a professor
of English at various
institutions of higher learning,
including her alma mater
Howard University, where she
met her husband, Howard
Morrison. They had two sons
together, but later divorced.
She published her first
novel, The Bluest Eye, in
1970, followed shortly
thereafter by several others,
all of which received positive
reviews.
The book Beloved, considered by
many to be her greatest work, was
published in 1987. The following year it
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Ten years later it would be made in a
movie by Oprah Winfrey.
In 1993 she became the first
African-American woman to be awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature for her
contributions to the field.
In 1999 she began working with
her son Slade, an artist, to create
children’s books. His death in December of
2010 was, understandably, devastating to
her.
Now in her 80’s Toni Morrison
continues to write in a wide variety of
genres. One of her most recent works was
a drama performed in London in 2012. It
was inspired in part by William
Shakespeare’s play Othello.
Alice Walker, 1944 - Present
Alice Walker was born in Eatonville, Georgia, on
February 9, 1944. She was the youngest of
eight children. Her father was a sharecropper
and her mother worked as a maid. A firm
believer in the power of education, her mother
enrolled her in first grade when she was only
four years old. At the age of eight, her brother
shot her in the right eye with a BB gun, which
resulted in her becoming blind in that eye.
After scar tissue formed over the injury, she
became extremely self-conscious and shy. She
turned to reading and writing for comfort and
companionship. Later on the scar tissue was
removed, and she not only became
valedictorian of her class, but was also voted
most popular and queen.
She credits her childhood “tragedy” with
showing her how to really and truly see
people and relationships in a deeper,
more meaningful way. In 1961 she
entered Spelman College on a full
academic scholarship. There she became
interested in the Civil Rights Movement.
In 1967 she married fellow political
activist, Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a
lawyer and Jewish Civil Rights leader.
Their marriage faced tremendous
pressure since they were the first legally
married interracial couple in Mississippi,
and they divorced in 1976. Walker’s most
famous work, The Color Purple, won the
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and The National
Book Award for Fiction in 1983.
Some African-American Authors of
Books for Children and Teens
Christopher Paul Curtis, Sharon Draper, Eloise Greenfield, Nikki
Grimes, Virginia Hamilton, Angela Johnson, Julius Lester, Patricia
McKissack, Walter Dean Myers, Kadir Nelson, Andrea Davis
Pinkney, Brian Pinkney, Mildred D. Taylor,
Rita Williams-Garcia