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A Xerox Education Company HORD, Helen McConnell, 1917- THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BLACK LITERATURE IN THE LANGUAGE ARTS PROGRAM OF A PREDOMINANTLY BLACK JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1972 Education, general

I University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan

0 1972 HELEN McCONNELL HORD

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BLACK LITERATURE IN THE LANGUAGE ARTS PROGRAM OF A PREDOMINANTLY BLACK JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Helen McConnell Hord, A.B., M.Ed.

*******

The Ohio State University 1972

Approved by

Adviser, Department of Humanities Education PLEASE NOTE:

Some pages may have

indistinct print.

Filmed as received.

University Microfilms, A Xerox Education Company ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I express heartfelt gratitude to the many people who helped me throughout my d o c to ra l stu d y . I e sp e c ia lly thank th e members of my reading committee: Dr. Donald Bateman, my adviser; Dr. Paul Klohr, and Dr.John Ohliger. I am extremely grateful to the ninth grade teachers and students at Franklin Junior High School, Columbus, Ohio. Without their cooperation and participation, the fourth chapter of this project could not have been possible. To my sister, Katherine, I extend my thanks for her encour- agment throughout the writing of the dissertation. To my husband, John, I am extremely grateful for the tolerance and support which helped to make the "task" possible. To Professor Darnell Williams, who worked untiringly to di­ rect my studies in the area of Black Literature and dedicated his time and energy to serve as an unofficial member of my reading committee, I dedicate this work. VITA

July 31, 1917 ...... Born, Greenup, Kentucky 1939...... A.B., Kentucky State College Frankfort, Kentucky 1944-45 ...... Teacher, Franklin Public Schools, Franklin, Kentucky 1945-56 ...... Teacher, Grayson Public Schools, Grayson, Kentucky 1956-61 ...... Teacher, Franklin Junior High School, Columbus, Ohio 1961-62 ...... M. Ed., The Ohio S ta te U niver­ sity, Columbus, Ohio 1962-69 ...... Teacher, Franklin Jr. High School, Columbus, Ohio 1969-72 ...... Assistant Principal, Franklin Jr. High School, Columbus, Ohio

AWARDS 1961...... Outstanding Teacher Award at Franklin Jr. High School 1963...... Valley Forge Classroom Teacher Medal

1969...... George Washington Medal from Valley Forge for Franklin Jr. High School Outstanding Jr. High School Teacher of th e Year by Columbus Ja y c e e s.

i i i 1970 ...... R ecipient of a $500 gran t fo r the improvement of education The Ohio State University Medallion for studies in the field of Education 1972 ...... Outstanding Service to Franklin Junior High School

FIELD OF STUDY MAJOR FIELD: Humanities Education Studies in English Education. . Professor Donald R. Bateman Directed Studies in Black L ite r a tu r e ...... Professor Darnell Williams Studies in Curriculum and Foundations ...... Professors Paul Klohr, Kenneth Arisman Everett Kircher A. Donald Bourgeois TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... i i VITA...... i i i Chapter I. Introduction ...... 1 Purpose of This Study ...... 6

Summary...... 7 II. Review of the Literature ...... 8 L ite ra ry Works by M inority W riters...... 8 Works by Mainstream A uthors...... 84 The R elatio n sh ip between th e Black Dialect and Learning to Read ...... 87 Summary...... 90 III. Language Arts Instructional Units ...... 91 Interdisciplinary Approach: Afro-American . . . 93 Literary Approach: Major Black American Authors and Their Best Known Works ...... 105 Cultural Approach: Creating Black Awareness through the Poetry of the B lues ...... 142 Summary...... 151

IV. Summary and Conclusions...... 152

Methods ...... 153 F in d in g s ...... 154 Limitations ...... 155 Recommendations ...... 156 Page

APPENDIX A...... 159 B...... 160 C...... 161 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 152 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

During no other time in the history of education in this country has the demand for relevancy been so great. Students are demanding that concepts and skills being taught are relevant to their individual needs; that these concepts and skills relate directly to their cultural and social existence; and, that teachers and administrators become more sensitive to their lin­ guistic and cultural differences. If one, however, relied solely upon the mass media (news­ papers, magazines, radio, television, etc.) he would be of the opinion that only college and university students are demanding that their education be geared toward a better understanding of human and individual existence. Contrary to the picture created by mass media, all levels of students are disgruntled with the present trends in education. This dissatisfaction is particular­ ly evident at Franklin Junior High School where I am the Assist­ ant Principal. At Franklin, the language arts program is the area of the total school program which comes under constant at­ tack. The basic complaint by the student is that the books that are assigned for reading do not include any works by Black writ­

ers .

1 2

This writer believes that if the language arts programs in predominantly Black junior high schools restructured their cur­ ricula to include those literary works by black Americans, the students would achieve at a higher level of competency in both reading and writing skills. Now, let us hypothesize that by some magic we have staffed at least the language arts classes of our predominantly black school with trained and reasonably competent teachers who are determined to raise the sights and the achievement levels of their black pupils. What are some of the obstacles they must surmount? Typically, first of all, fewer than ten percent of the students will be reading at or above grade level; most of the rest will be reading from two to four years below. Recent studies con­ ducted in predominantly black schools show clearly that the gap between the median for these pupils and the national median grows wider with each year of schooling. The textbooks available for teaching reading for literary study w ill be taken from a Board of Education’s approved list. For the lower grades there will be the usual reading texts that are found in classrooms the coun­ try over—readers generously illustrated with well-fed, pink cheeked, honey-haired boys and girls playing against backdrops of white picket fences. In these books the strangely pale child­ ren in their strange, white world talk about the strange activ­ ities of their Anglo-Saxon fathers and mothers in a strange, childish dialect that one might even hesitate to describe as Scarsdalian. Advancing through the grades, there will be other 3 books with s till other foreign dialects—the London and Midland dialects, perhaps, of a Great Expectations. With these materi­ als the upper ten percent will progress, but never to the same degree as the upper ten percent of readers in non-ghetto schools. As we have already noted, the great majority will fall further and further below the achievement levels of their counterparts in the schools outside of the ghetto. Yet, reading, we are as­ sured by almost every reputable authority, must be the main focus of language arts programs, if we ever hope to raise the general educational level of inner-city children (meaning black students).

But reading, we are also told, leans inescapably upon the skills of speaking and listening. Can a child—a nonmotivated slum child—learn to read a dialect (standard English) that he seldom hears used and does not use himself? And if it is not a dialect that spells survival at home or in the streets, what motivation is there for him to learn at all? The perceptive teacher very quickly discovers that his problem is more complex than his course in reading methods made it appear. He discovers, for one thing, that he and his students do not speak the same language and, furthermore, that they see very little reason for adopting his. Their families, their peers, after all, speak theirs, not his. When the teacher attacks the problem of the pupils* spoken English, which dialect is he to offer for a model? Shall he be­ gin, for instance, with the seemingly missing ,,g,r or "ing"? (He himself was educated at Ohio State University or Columbia Univer­ 4 sity, yet in his unguarded speech, commonly says "wataya doin;n). Or should he concentrate upon the qualities of vowels? Will insistence upon ’’sir" for "suh" or "sah" increase the vocational competence of students to whom most vocations, in spite of all the laws, will still be closed? Will it contribute'-to their achievement as readers? Or will it possibly add to the number of classroom clams—the students who not only do not speak vol­ untarily or when spoken to, but who do not speak at all? All of these questions can be answered quite sincerely. If the teacher does not understand the language or culture of the child, and makes no attempt to use those linguistic and cultural patterns native to the child, then he is helping in crippling the child's intellectual growth. Because educators do not know the disadvantaged black sub-culture, and they do not know the cognitive devel- ' opment of disadvantaged black children, the present types of compensatory education programs are conducted contrary to the needs of black children. (Johnson, 1967 TESOL Convention, Chicago). Although not much material has been published treating the use of black literature as a tool to improve the level of reading and writing skills among black students, an extensive amount of scholarship has been published treating the significance of the black dialect in the learning process of black youth. William Labov, formerly of Columbia University, has done some very im­ portant research in the logic and structure of non-standard vari­ eties of American English ("Logic of Nonstandard English," 1969). Joan and Stephen Baratz came out with a series of readers (Teaching Negro Children to Read, 1969). These readers are writ­ 5 ten in the Black dialect and center around experiences peculiar to the Black community. It is interesting that none of these studies treat the use of Black Literature in the teaching of reading and writing skills to Black Youth. It is essential that language arts teachers understand that a student, in the course of his education, acquires more than skill and knowledge. The student, especially a Black student, finds and continues to modify his image of himself, and he shapes his attitudes towards others. However, since the school does not exert the influence necessary, it is essential that the materials used in the classroom foster in the student not only a self-image deeply rooted in a sense of personal dignity, but also the devel­ opment of attitude grounded in respect for and understanding of the diversity of American society. I propose that Black Literature will serve to foster these images not provided by school programs themselves. According to the publication of the National Council of the Teachers of English, Task Force on Racism and Bias in the Teach­ ing of English. "Black Americans must be represented in basic texts in a fashion which represents their dignity as human beings and mirrors their contributions to American culture, history, and letters."1 This means that hostile or sentimental depictions of Blacks must be balanced with amicable and realistic ones in

1The Mississippi English Newsletter. Vol. II, No. 4 (Miss­ issippi State Department of Education: Jackson, Miss., 1971, 10. 6

an effort to present a balanced and non-prejudicial picture. To do less is to imply that Blacks are less capable, less worthy, less significant than white Americans; the imbalance in our edu­ cational experience will continue.

Purpose of This Study

Mari Evans, a young Black writer and critic, stated: The Black experiences (cultural patterns, customs, language patterns) are formed at a very early age. Since children acquire these patterns from their par­ ents and members of th e i r communities, e th n ic a lly based cultural and linguistic patterns are naturally being formed from those sounds and sights around them. Literature,then, since it evolves out of the experi­ ences of a people, should serve to teach them about their experiences. (Black World. June, 1970).

Agreeing with Miss Evans, the purpose of this project then is to show that Black literature is very significant in language arts programs of predominantly Black junior high schools; that instructional units prepared from Black literature foster a sense of racial pride and self-esteem in the students as well as a higher level of reading competency; and, that instructional units centered around Black culture will motivate the students to par­ ticipate more freely in class discussions, increase their inter­ est in the subject material and develop their oral language com­ petency . 7

Summary

Chapter I presented the general background of the problem and the need for research, the purpose of this study and the projected outcome of the research. Chapter II will present the review of related literature and literary works by Black authors and c r i t i c s . CHAPTER I I

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

This literature review begins with works by minority cul­ tu re members w ritte n p rim arily fo r m ainstream re a d e rs . The works focus on minority and mainstream culture members interacting in a mainstream culture setting. The second part of the review per­ ta in s to works by mainstream c u ltu re members focused on p re se n t­ ing some s p e c ific fe a tu re s of th e m inority c u ltu re . Studies and assumptions concerning the relationship between cultural patterns, the oral language and learning to read are reviewed in the final section of this literature review.

L ite ra ry Works by M inority W riters

Black on White by David Littlejohn is a very useful resource book for teachers of language arts in a predominantly black ju­

nior high school. Littlejohn's critical survey provides the teachers with a guidebook of Afro-American literature. It is ideal for white teachers who know very little of the black expe­ rience in America. It deals with the entire concept of a white reader approaching black literature for the first time, including his possible reasoning for attempting such an undertaking to be­

gin with, his reactions to what he will read, why he will react as he does, and his method of dealing with the effects of the material he has read. 9

The book proceeds chronologically from the earliest black writings to the present, divided into general eras before the coming of Wright and Native Son, then divided according to the type of writers from Wright to the present. The first era treats the "Dark Ages" of the black experiences, appropriately named for it covers the entire period of writing from the fledgling begin­ nings of the ante-bellum verse to the time of the Harlem Renais­ sance . The second era treats only the Harlem Renaissance writers. The Harlem Renaissance Period was important as a progressive movement, both real and symbolic in the culture of the Black American. From this point on, the book treats the major writers: Baldwin, Wright, Ellison, as well as such contemporary writers as Jones, Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks and Ossie Davis. Racial pride is a central theme in Lorraine Hansberry*s To Be Youncr. Gifted and Black. Written about her life, the play presents the black experience in every aspect—slavery, freedom, oppression, myths, and the struggle of black people today to gain their freedom and dignity. Her choice of language is very repre­ sentative of the language style of Black Americans. Each word is carefully placed, and each one hits like the crack of a whip. An example of this unique language usage is shown in her descrip­ tion of a race riot at Chicago’s Englewood High. She tells how g h etto blacks came to help th e wealthy b la c k s . Then had come the veterans—volunteers from Wendell Phillips High School and DuSable, car­ loads of them, waving baseball bats and shout- 10

ing slogans of the charge: WE BETTER GO ’CAUSE THEM LITTLE CHICKEN-SHIT NIGGERS OUT THERE AIN’T ABOUT TO FIGHT! And so they had come, pouring out of the bowels of the ghetto, the children of the unqualified oppressed: the black working class in their costumes of pegged pants and conked heads and tight shirts and almost knee- length sweaters and worst of a ll—COLORED anklets held up by rubber bands. Her selection of words is excellent for helping teachers and students to understand the significance of black language and cultural patterns in selected reading materials. "Unqualified o ppressed," fo r example, would not mean h a lf as much i f th e au­ thor had not supplemented it with the descriptive ending "COLORED anklets." So much of the black experience is there: the description is symbolic of how Blacks have been trained to be white, conditioned to think white. Robert Nemiroff states in the introduction of the play, "It is not surprising that as early as 1961, at the height of health and success, she had already taken the measure of the en­ emy that was waiting for her." She didn’t pick up her racial pride all in one place, it was a total experience. This fact is significant for young blacks who might have already become dis­ illusioned with life. Miss Hansberry used one line from each act of the play as a title for the act, and in each one of the titles, tells how she became a bit more aware of the black experience. She compared the Blacks with the Irish, saying she loved O’Casey because

...he never fools you about the Irish, you see. . . The Irish drunkard, the Irish braggart, the Irish liar. . .and the genuine heroism which must natu- 11

rally emerge when you tell the truth about people. . When you believe people so completely--because everybody has their drunkards and their braggarts and their cowards, you know—then you also believe in t h e i r moments of h ero ic a s s e rtio n : You d o n 't doubt them.

One of her contemporaries, Sonia Sanchez, echoed Lorraine Hansberry’s feelings during a lecture in Darnell Williams' Black Literature class, Winter Quarter at The Ohio State University: \ Hansberry said, sometimes in this country maybe just walking down a Southside street. . .or maybe in a f la s h tu rn in g th e page of one of th o se picture books from the South you will see it— Beauty. . .stark and full. . .No part of something this—but rather, Africa, simply Africa. These thighs and arms and flying winged cheekbones, these hollowed eyes—without negation or apology. .

Sanchez said come walk with me in the North Carolina slave quar­ ters . In there "you will hear the cries of your ancestors.

Down the streets of Harlem, you hear their cries." The article "Light on 'Invisible Man'" by Ralph Ellison is in essence a discussion of Ellison's ideas on writing and how he came to the conclusions he did. In the first part of the article Ellison explains what he dislikes about twentieth century writers. He brings in some of the characteristics of humanity he has dis­ covered from his experiences that he feels should be a part of his writing. He then goes on to explain why he likes the writ-

^Oliver, Clinton F. and Sills, Stephanie Contemporary Black Drama. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971. 12 ing of the nineteenth century because of its outlook on life. Then he explains how he modeled his writing after it. In the first section he explains how because of his experi­ ence as a black man, a member of a minority group, he couldn't be restricted to the forms of novels which he was first impressed by. On one hand he could not put the diversity of American life into the Jamesian novel. Nor could he fit the experiences he knew into a novel dedicated to violence, social cynicism, and understatement. Because as he put it, "Understatement depends, a f te r a l l , upon commonly held assum ptions and my m inority s ta tu s rendered all such assumptions questionable." What he seems to be saying is that the ideas which he has witnessed and experie- enced cannot be made to fit into already existing forms and pat­ terns . Therefore he must develop a style of his own to let ev­ eryone share his experience. The next p a rt he devotes to th e problem he saw w ith th e la n ­ guage. He recognized that his language was an "alive language." He saw three hundred years of living in America, along with a mixture of folk, biblical, scientific, and political language all combined to form a language of versatility. On one hand it can be recognized as slang, the next instance academic; then loaded with imagery, then the next instance just communication. This combination of good and bad points made it-an alive language that he believed could express more than seemed to be expressed in the writing he had studied. This writing was bogged down by "restricting its language to the rhythms of everyday speech." So here he was saying that in order to relay his experiences he 13

was going to have to use the language he knew, because it was a more descriptive language. He next questions the rigid reality of the works he studied. His experiences, as a black man, (with life in general) have been so fulfilling that he does not believe it possible to fit these into the rigid concepts of reality already set up. His American experience as a man just "two generations away from slavery to the world of advanced scholarship, art, and science" has been too exciting, full of violence, and promises to fit into a rigid con­ cept of reality in the already partially defeated form of a novel. Because of this feeling he had about the twentieth century novels, he turned to the nineteenth century. This was the period of classical novelists. He felt that something vital had gone out of American prose after Mark Twain. It is in this section that you can see Ellison search to bring out the qualities of humanity. He liked the writers of this period because they showed a greater responsibility toward the condition of democracy; they realized that there was s till much about the country and its peo­ ple that was unknown, yet the country had hopes of further great­ ness . These ideas he may have liked because he could apply them to the black race. He saw Black people as mysterious people be­ cause l i t t l e was known of t h e i r h is to r y . In th e l a s t p a rt of th is section you can see his interest in humanity. He points out how he liked the authors of this period because they showed the con­ flicts of the heart when the principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights clash with the human attributes of greed, fear, 14 hate, and love. Showing the human struggle between good and bad to present the universality of humanity seemed to be a major part of Ellison's writing. He next explained that the writers of the nineteenth centu­ ry were able to look life straight in the eye and write the facts down. They looked at the Negro race as low man on the to­ tem pole. These authors used the Negro race as a gauge to see how the human condition stood. Ellison felt that because of these authors presenting the racial situation realistically, Ne­ groes would not be disillusioned. Once you know where you stand, you can then decide where to go from there. In conclusion Ellison strove for a novel combining all he felt was included in life. He wanted to use his language with its vividness; he wanted a prose flexible in manner; he hoped to show human f r a te r n ity and in d iv id u a lity ; he wanted to show th e in ­ equalities of our society; and, he wanted to get away from the narrow naturalism of the twentieth century. To do all this he wanted to leave out the scientific facts and use fiction to show the universality of the human condition. Hugh M. Gloster in Necrro Voices in American Fiction starts with a description of the black man's plight just following the Civil War, explaining how all forms of power and coercion, such as the courts and other power structures, were used to keep the black man enslaved despite his "legal" freedom. He explains the inability of abolitionistic literature to become popularized due to the romantic plantation literature of the time. Novels such 15 as Red Rock (1898) lauds the blue-blood Southerner for courage in the face of adversity while berating Negro politicians and Northern missionaries. The mulatto was treated with sympathy for the most part in early literature because his white blood made him better than the Negro and more pitiable.

Next Gloster concerns himself with Negro fiction up to World War I. While he considered such authors as J. McHenry Jones and Mrs. Harper as untalented narrators, he saw Charles W. Chesnutt as a gifted novelist and one of the significant writers of Negro American fiction. Chesnutt deftly used the folk tale to expose the sordid side of the plantation as in ’’The Conjure Woman.” He is also noted as one of the authors who set the stage for the Negrb' Renaissance. In "The Marrow of Tradition" Chesnutt explores the hardships of being a Negro professional in a Southern town. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, catering to readers and publishers, gener­ ally wrote novels ignoring the worst aspects of the Negro past. Later Dunbar wrote on Negro life in the North as well as the South in "The Heart of Happy Hollow." G. Langhorne Pryor and Sutton E. Griggs both wrote strongly on the political organiza­ tion of the blacks. In "The Quest of the Silver Fleece," a deftly handled socio­ logical novel, W. E. B. DuBois looks at the cotton industry. Often w ith much s a ti r e , DuBois looks a t black and w hite p o litic ia n s . In J. W. Johnson’s novel Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man. a straightforward picture of a black man’s experience, is neither glorified nor degraded. Johnson’s novel heralded the beginning of the Negro Renaissance. For the most part, American Negro 16 fiction was extremely race conscious. While a few of the writers avoided the race problem, most authors wrote against the propa­ ganda of Thomas N. Page and Thomas Dixon. The most powerful force in bringing about the cultural eman­ c ip a tio n of th e Negro was World War I . I f th e w hite and black could die equally in war time, then they should be able to live equally in time of peace. Also influential to the Negro awaken­ ing was the Garvey Movement. Although it failed, it expressed a dissatisfaction with the social status of the blacks. New York City was the melting pot for blacks from all over the world and consequently Harlem became the center for black writers of the Renaissance. Jean Toomer's Cane was possibly the first work by a black author to handle sensitive and inflammatory inter-racial issues without losing the artist's viewpoint. While most of the writers of the Renaissance did not write propagandistic works, W. E. B. DuBois' work, Princess, which deals with the international relations of blacks invites blacks to unite in a universal brotherhood. Both Carl van Vechten's Nigger Heaven and Claude McKay's Home to Harlem te ll of black life in Harlem as sordid as it often was. Many critics thought these works exploited the lower aspects of Harlem life to the point where it was over realistic. Countee Cullen and Rudolph Fisher were two writers who wanted to give a more balanced picture of Harlem. In Cullen's One Wav to Heaven and Fisher's The Walls of

Jericho, they tried to show a more stable, moral way of life. 17

During the Renaissance, writers explored many new settings such as Europe and the West Indies, although the rural South and especially, as I have noted above, Harlem, were the favorites. In Not without Laughter, however, Langston Hughes looks at pre­ judice in a small midwestern town. McKay and Walrond wrote of life in their native West Indies.

As might be expected with the coming of the depression, the Negro suffered most. He was "the last to be hired and the first to be fired." With the depression there was a surgence of left- wing writings. Many wanted more inter-racial action for control of things by the workers. Because of this action, the Negro be­ gan to think more in terms of class rather than race. Many of the prominent black authors such as Ri'chard Wright were very sym­ pathetic towards the left-wing movement. Both Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, possibly the two most important novelists of the decade aligned themselves with the proletarian cause. In Native Son. Wright believes that rather than human deficiency, it is a prejudiced and capitalistic social order that causes the black man’s frustration. During the depression decade there was also a growing in­ terest in the rural South. Zota Neal Hurston adapted folklore to characters in’Monah’s Gourd Vine" which takes place in Alabama and F lo rid a . This book shows (quite well) the flow of Negro Literature. The author explained not only what black writers were writing but the stages of the social conditions that caused them to write 18

The styles and themes used by black writers are shown from an ev­ olutionary viewpoint. Robert H ill's introduction to the collection of essays en­ t i t l e d Anger and Beyond b e g in s:

The American Negro literary tradition is a complex one because it is many things. It is the literature of the Negro community, but also the assertion of a universal humanity. It is an important part of American literature, and it is also implicitly an attack upon the ra­ cist assumptions of American society. Although it has been for the most part a non-ideological literature it has been infused and informed by writers greatly concerned with ideology. It is not with the "most part", but with the writers who "infused and informed," (with Black writers with ideology) that these es­ says are concerned.

The title , Anger and Beyond, by Herbert H ill, is very appro­ priate. Anger, from the first cry against slavery, has been the stable of Black writers. But the new Black writers are going be­ yond anger. They are s till writing about the Black experience, but they are bringing out the elements in the Black experience which apply to all people, regardless of race. As Bone in his article states, "all human suffering is not racial in origin." / The Black writers are universalizing the Black experience. At the same time, they are trying to raise the standard of their art by paying close attention to literary discipline and technique. Negro writers are now moving into new areas of involvement with fundamental social issues that go beyond the race question into an awareness of the tragedy, irony and absurdity of American and twentieth century life. . . For these writers simple protest and anger are not enough and rhetoric will not be useful in 19

masking the inadequacies of literary crafts­ manship .

The twelve articles that comprise this book deal in some form with going beyond anger in black literature. In the first chapter, Saunders Redding says the day is here when Blacks can "create that which rises above race and reaches out to the universal in truth and beauty." Horance R. Cayton tells how Black writers today are opening up new perspectives on our culture so we may question the values held by our society. Le Roi Jones reminds Blacks "where- ever we are, our most important obligation is to tell it all ex­ actly as it is." In his article, "The Writer in Contemporary So- city," Swados feels that, from the equality Blacks are now fight­ ing for, "will come a new kind of literature for a new and better kind of human being." Bone’s essay on Ralph Ellison informs us that, at an early age, Ellison had a deep desire to link the good in the Black community to the rest of the world. Even Tolson’s struggle for synchronization of sight, sound, and sense tells us of the Black w riters’ concern for discipline and technique. And in the closing essay, Wright’s aligning himself with the critics of the dominate class of society, and making them hear him out def­ initely goes beyond anger.

The one major idea I learned, besides the new Black w riter's going beyond simple anger, is that it is impossible to separate

3Herbert Hill, "Introduction," Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writers in the United States; XXI. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966. 20

Black literature from the Black experience. The unique experience of the Blacks in America is what Black writers write about; this unique experience is continuing today and will always be what Black literature is about. Black literature is black life. The main idea of the article "The Negro Writer and American Literature" by Saunders Redding is that three times within this century writing by American Negroes "has been done nearly to death," yet today it is in an excellent state of health because the Ameri­ can Negroes now can "create that which rises above race and reaches out to the universal in truth and beauty." Redding starts with a discussion of the assumption that there is a distinction between writings by American Negroes and writings by other Americans. He concludes that it is only the distinction between trunk and branch. "The writings of Negroes are fed by the same cultural soil as writings by white Americans." Next comes a discussion of the three times in this century that writings by Negroes "has been done nearly to death;" once by indifference, once by opposition, and once by the enthusiasm of misguided friends. The first time was when Dunbar and his peers first wrote in pure English—this contradicted the white's stereo­ type of Negroes, and the whites grew indifferent. This indiffer­ ence crystallized into opposition in the first decade of this cen- tury. It was opposition to the Negro’s ambitions; it was opposi­ tion to the Negro writer who was honest and sincere. If Blacks wanted an audience, they had to work within the stereotype.

Apostary, abandoning of what one believes in, seemed to some Negro 21 writers the only way of escaping complete frustration. Soon Crisis appeared, which served as an organ of expression for those tired of the tradition and apostary. The third near-death occurred in the early '30's, when white Americans "fastened upon the bizarre, the exotic, and the stavistic elements of the Negro Awakening, turning them into a commercialized fad." Soon Negroes were not permitted into the best known "Negro" night clubs. The stuff in which Negro writers were working passed into the less sincere hands of white writers, and Negro writers themselves, from a high pitch of creation, fell relatively silent. Redding hails Richard Wright as a new kind of writer in the ranks of Negro writers. He neither wrote exclusively for Blacks, nor for whites. Instead he dealt with certain modern experiences which went beyond racial and national lines of demarcation. Arna Bontemps uses Jean Toomer as re p re s e n ta tiv e of th e Harlem writers of the twenties, using his fall into obscurity to show a plight common to Negro w riters.

In many ways Toomer's novel Cane, published in 1932, announced the Harlem Renaissance. It was called "a bright morning star of the new day of the race in literature." Among the few raving about the book,: was practically the whole generation of young Negro writ­ ers then just beginning to appear, and their reaction to Toomer*s Cane marked an awakening that soon thereafter began to be called a Negro Renaissance. Subsequent writing by Negroes in the United States, as well as in the West Indies and Africa, has continued to reflect its moods and methods. 22

S everal y ears l a t e r Toomer faded com pletely in to w hite obscu­ rity leaving behind a literary mystery—why did he fade? Despite the richness of his thought, his gift of expression, he ceased to be a writer and turned his back on greatness. His choice reflects ’’the human sacrifice in the field of the arts exacted by the racial myth on which writing in this country is based.’’4 He is represent­ ative of the Black writer who emerged since him. What ordinarily happened to the average Black writer of Toomer’s time was: After he had been published he realized he must not write narrowly about Negroes but broadly about people. Soon he wrote a novel not intended to depict Negro life. It did not sell. What annoys some readers of fiction it seems is not so much that characters in a book are Negro or white or both as the at­ titude of the writer toward these characters. Rejection of tradi­ tional status, as Black novelists tended to do, alienates these re a d e rs . The elusiveness of Jean Toomer in the face of the complexi­ ties of fiction readers can well stand for the elusiveness of Negro w rite rs from Charles W. Chesnutt to Frank Yerby. "What Toomer was trying to indicate to us by the course he took still intrigues, but I suspect he realizes by now that there is no further need to

signify. The secrets are out. As the song says, ’There is no h id in g place down h e re . ’”5

4Hill, Herbert , Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the . United States. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966.

5Ib id .. p. 37. 23

Cayton begins by telling us that we are all prisoners of our culture and, more than anyone else, it is the artist who opens up new perspectives on our culture, so that we may question the val­ ues held by society. "We must understand the influence of various ideological forces as they have touched the perspectives and in­ sights of Negro writers if we are to understand the prophets and poets of the New Negro in contemporary society."8 Next he relates how the American Negro lacks identity. Iden­ tity is a coherent sense of self; it depends upon the awareness that one's endeavors and one's life make sense, that they are meaningful in the context in which life is lived. The loss of iden­ tity ultimately leads the individual to a state of alienation both from himself and from society at large. He becomes preoccupied with the searching of self. "American Negro subculture is purely a product of the Negro's experience in America; it is the American culture refracted through the prism of three hundred years of subordination."^ Blacks were judged by white standards. From the point of appearance alone, the Negro was not in step with the established and accepted norms. The result was shame; the result of a vague overall rejection. "The Negro has been hurt; he knows it. He wants to strike back, but he must not—there is evidence everywhere that to do so would lead to his own destruction."8 Cayton calls this the fear-hate-

6I b id ., p . 37. ^Ibid., p. 40.

8Ibid.. p. 43. 24 fear syndrome. ,rOur failure to achieve a mature culture in which Negroes and whites alike can accomplish some aspect of personality integration has within it the seeds of political fascism.This is what the contemporary New Negro writer is trying to say today. When LeRoi Jones went to Howard University, he was shocked into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be, how he could be lead into self-destruction, and how he would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great sickness. Thus, society forced upon the Blacks, especially the Black writer, the sense of philistinism.

The Negro writer is in a peculiar position because if he is honest, most of what he has seen and experienced in America will not flatter it. T,I write now full of trepidation, because I know the death that society intends for me. I see Jimmy Baldwin al­ most unable to write about himself anymore. I've seen DuBois die on another continent. Chester Himes driven away, Ellison silenced and fid g e tin g away in some c o lle g e . I th in k I alm ost f e e l th e same forces massing against me, almost before I ’ve begun, but let them understand that this is a fight without quarter and I ’m very fast."'*'9

In order for the Black writer to survive, he’s got to break with the urge to get in the mainstream. He can survive only by refusing to become a white man. Now it has become possible for Black writers to come from any place, but write about specific ex­ periences .

9I b id ., p. 46.

10I b id .. p. 53. 25

"The writers in the ghetto will write about ghetto life and the Negroes who find themselves outside of the ghetto life will go where art is and try to do it that way. Whatever the expres­ sion and the experiences available, wherever we are, our most im­ portant obligation is to tell it all exactly as it is."11 There is a two-fold change going on; society is changing its view of the writer and the writer is changing his view of society. Society's view has been changed by higher education. The rising educational level among the American people brings in its wake a rising respect for the products of the mind. The novels of the 60's tended to be a delayed reaction to the stupidities and horrors of World War II, as well as the idiocies of th e post-w ar e ra . Swados b eliev es th is theme is o u t-dated be­ cause the basic truth of our times is that it is a time of change unparalleled in history. "In this time of explosive change, rev­ olution after revolution is sweeping the world; technological, social, and racial."12 A continuous revolution of the oppressed and degraded is severing every continent without exception. Be­ cause they have suffered more, a disproportionate number of the new voices now just beginning to make themselves heard come from the minorities. "It is already apparent that we are going to wit­ ness a s u b s ta n tia l movement of new Negroes, lib e ra te d from ig n o r­ ance, self-underestimation, and self-deprecation, into the fields

of poetry, drama, and fiction."1-^

11Ibid., p. 61.

12Ibid.. p. 68.

13Ibid.. p. 71. 26

"In the years immediately ahead, American Literature will be the product of men, often driven by anger at the fate of their brothers, by guilt that in the solitude of the study they do not always share that fate."I4 There is the new source of inspiration, not just for Negro writers but for all writers. And "for the next writers in a multi­ racial society freed from the wasteful necessity of deciding what it means to be white, to be black, to be whatever, or of strug­ gling for things which will then be taken for granted, there will be, as a product of this racial revolution, a whole world of stories, legends, and myths, replete with heroes, heroines, and great deeds equal to those of any people in the dark, bloody and glorious history of mankind. From the memory of what is being struggled for now will come a new kind of literature for a new and b e tte r kind of human bein g .

The article, "The Other Side of the Blues," by Nat Hentoff, taken in its entirety, was somewhat confusing. The author did not seem to have the general theme, but several themes instead. He did bring up several interesting ideas, however. Hentoff starts off stating how little whites know about the American negro experience. He discusses the various ideas of how different the Black's experience has been from the white’s in America, especially Ralph Ellison’s "diversity within unity."

14Ibid .. p. 72.

-'--’Ibid., p. 75. 27

There are markedly positive elements in the Negro American styles. The diversity, subtlety, and complexities of the styles have to be underlined. He goes on to underline them. He goes into the Black’s music—"it is not musicological analyses which are basically needed. . .but rather a rediscovery of the values and counter-values of those Negroes who did much more than just endure."

He later quotes Ellison: "What is needed in our country is not an exchange of pathologies, but a change of the basis of the society. This is a job which both Negroes and whites must do to­ g eth er ."

Hentoff ends by asking what w ill happen when blacks are given full participation in American life. In the process of becoming a m ulti-racial structure, will the Blacks be given the opportunity to say what is important in their own culture that must be pre­ served in the multi-racial society... "But we s till need to know more about the essence of those Negro-American non-conforming styles, and we need to know more about the wrap in which that non-conformity can help to reshape majority American culture;" or "If it can. If anything can.."-*-^

Ellison was raised on a tradition of aggression and love for freedom. In his writing Ellison returns again and again to the tangled themes of the relationship of Negro folk culture to Ameri­ can culture as a whole, and the responsibility of the Negro artist

16Ibid., p. 84. 28 to his ethnic group. Bone divides the sources for Ellison's imagination into four parts. Music, Literature, Politics, and Culture.17

Music.—Ellison finds in jazz and blues a code of conduct and a ceremonial frame for his art. According to Ellison, "true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group." This is a working model for the Negro writer. As an artist with a special function to perform within the Negro group, the writer must be careful to preserve his individuality; he must learn to operate within and against the groups, allowing neither claim to cancel out the other. The blues are a preventative medicine of spiritual ulcers. "It is not a question of laughing away one’s troubles in any su­ perficial sense, but a gazing steadily at the pain while perceiv­ ing its comic aspect." Ellison regards this tragicomedy sensibil­ ity as the most precious feature of his Negro heritage. From it stems his intensity and the complex interplay of tragic and comic elements which is the distinguishing mark of his faction.

Literature.—Ellison revived the picaresque novel in which the hero transcends all established norms of conduct and violates all ideas of social hierarchy; this reflects the belated access of the Blacks to the basic conditions of bourgeois existence. "The

17Robert Bone, "Ralph Ellison and the. Uses of Imagination," Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writes in the United States, ed. Herbert Hill, p. 86. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966. 29 bursting forth of Negro personality from the fixed boundaries of Southern life is Ellison's essential theme.” Man is the creator of his own reality. If a culture shapes the author, the converse is equally true. The turn towards subjec­ tivity, transcendism, and determinism, insistence on an existential freedom are crucial to Ellison’s conception of the artist. It finds concrete expression in his work through the devices of mask­ in g and naming. 1 Masking came about when Blacks learned to camouflage, to dis­ semble, to retreat behind a protective mask. Ellison’s use of understatement, irony, double entendre, and calculated ambiguity are examples of literary masking. There is something deliberately elusive in his style, something secret and taunting, some instinc­ tive avoidance of explicit statement which is close in spirit to th e b lu e s . Naming re fe rs to th e American names given to sla v e s, in other words, false names. ”Our names, being the gift of others, must be made our own.” He regards the novel as ”an act of ritual naming, the novelist as a moralist who names the central moral issues of h is tim e .” Politics.—It is predictable enough given the rising tempo of the civil rights struggle, that Ellison should be under pressure from the political activists. Ellison's initial point is that "not all human suffering is racial in origin." Being apart from the Movement, Ellison must concern himself with the strategies and techniques of personal survival. It is, precisely with the neces- 30 sity of Negro life that Ellison's art is engaged. Bone sees no need for literature and art to be at odds. C u ltu re .—Negro C ulture is an in d e s tru c tib le monument to th e national past. Bone sees this as a major obstacle to integration.

Especially to the middle class Black who is caught up in his dual identity. Ellison insists upon the relevance of folk experience to the conditions of modern urban life and "most important still, to the conditions of being man." "I was taken very early with a passion to link together all I loved within the Negro community and all those things I felt in the world which lay beyond." This passion is the driving force of his career.

This essay deals with the works of three major Black writers: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, and it centers on the protest novel. Baldwin took Wright’s Native Son to task for for oversimplification. He stated: "The failure of the protest novel lies in the rejection of life and the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread power in its insistence that it is his cate­ gorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended." Murray states about Baldwin: "The very characteristics of protest fiction which he once deplored in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Richard Wright now seem to be his stock in trade." Murray goes on to say that a serious novelist should support worthy political causes, but he should not let that distort his work. He implies Baldwin’s militant stand has distorted his work to where he is guilty of what he criticized Wright’s work for. 31

The topic then switches to why American Blacks have had no great literary masterpieces. He puts the blame on white well- wishers. "They (white well-wishers) encourage inferior standards and values by accepting or pretending to accept shoddy and imma­ ture workmanship. The sanction inadequate education by going along with what they know is intellectual rubbish and aesthetic nonsense, if they know any." Then he tells the Blacks not to believe that first-rate novels will come only after oppression is lifted, be­ cause writers have always thrived on oppression, poverty, alien­ ation and the like.

"A writer who is oriented toward good books will at least try to write good books. But the sad fact is that there is little to show that very many United States Negro writers have ever actually tried to write major novels." The focus then shifts back to Baldwin and Wright with Ellison (being the hero) doing correct what the others did wrong. Invisi­ ble Man "had new dimensions of rhetorical resonance. It employed a startlingly effective fusion of narrating realism and surrealism and it achieved a unique but compelling combination of the natural­ istic, the ridiculous, and the downright hallucinatory.

"The Afternoon of a Young Poet" by C arl Holman is an auto b io ­ graphical article covering an important afternoon during Holman’s senior year in high school. He had entered a poetry contest spon-

^A lbert Murray. "Something Different, Something More" in Anger and Beyond: The Necrro Writers in the United States, ed.Herbert Hill, p. 138. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. 32 sored by the Arts Club of St. Louis. Unexpectingly he was selected as one of the top five poets and was invited to a tea. The story tells of the afternoon of the tea. After finally finding the club, he was met at the door by a woman who thought he was a servant of the Mr. Holman who entered the contest. It never entered into her brain that the poet might be Black. After joining the other winners, all white, Holman felt completely out of place. They talked freely of authors he had only vaguely heard of. Then the five winners recited their winning poems. What followed after Holman’s recital brings to mind Albert Murray’s white well-wishers. Holman says, ’’the applause and praise that followed when I finished, if anything, exceeded that given the others, a situation which, even then, aroused the fleeting suspicion that the dancing bear was being given higher marks than a man might get for the same performance." Before leaving they all agreed to meet regularly and keep in touch with each other. Needless to say, Holman never heard from th e club again. In this informal, non-preaching method of story-telling, Holman brings across the odds a Black author faces living in a white world. He ends his article: "I would try once again to find my way to the Arts Club. I never have and it is probably just as well. It may be that I got as much as could reasonably be expected on that first visit,- In essence this article is about Davis’ play Purlie Victori­ ous . But in the article he also explains his ideas of Black writ­ ing. "I say that we can protest about an unfair situation on an in­ 33 tellectual level by saying that in addition to being unjust, the situation is also ridiculous, and that we can show that it is ri­ diculous and perhaps laughable, and therefore not worthy of the behavior of educated, culturally advanced human beings, such as must be the kind of people, both white and black, who inhabit Amer­ ica at this late date.”

This is the premise for his play. Each character is a stereo­ type. The old Confederate Captain, the white liberal, the Black mammy, the Uncle Tom. He traces these stereotypes to their sour­ ces. "I have tried to restore the protest content of the Negro’s humor." "My intent was to have a handbook of consolation, informa­ tion and struggle, which my people and their friends could use to understand, explain, the situation in which they found themselves and point the way towards a possible solution." The Old Captain believed that anyone who attempted to change the world of law and order, this ordained relationship between the two groups, was threatening the very foundations of civilization. But in actuality, justice is the essence of civilization, and "when law and order is imposed upon a basically unjust situation, there is bound to be a clash between law and order and those whose cry and need for justice makes them unable to maintain a real re­ spect for law and order." Today Blacks have been called upon by some of their leaders to refrain from demonstrations and protests because they might be thought of as an attack on law and order. The leaders also ask

Blacks to be patient and Davis hopes they will "meet us with a real 34 concrete program of action, with real remedies, so we w ill have something to be patient about." My deepest thanks go to M. W. King, the interviewer, and in my case, the interpreter of this article. Tolson made little if any sense to me. Everything I got from reading this article was from Mr. King. Tolson seemed wrapped up in egotism and intellec- tualism and was unable to relate to me; the interviewer seemed to have both feet on the ground. Tolson talks about his early life, how he wanted often to be a painter but his mother wouldn’t allow him to go to Paris with a stranger he met on a train. He turned to poetry instead. His ideas and images come out of the lives he lived. "I like to go about places, hobnob with people, gather rich epithets and pro­ verbs in churches and taverns, in cotton fields and dance halls, in streets and toilets." Tolson also takes his characters from life, but they are never fully rounded until they are fictionalized. "Only in art can one know a character in the round." The inter­ view er says as a r e s u lt o f to d ay ’s Black w rite rs , "More and more African modes of creative expression are receiving attention as we seek to understand the thinking of Africans." Talking about the need for artists today Tolson says, "The personalities in the United Nations Assembly need a galaxy of novelists, poets and dramatists to help the diplomats interpret the motivations and actions of all the alien characters."19

19Melvin B. Tolson. "A Poet’s Odyssey: An Interview in Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, ed. Herbert Hill, p. 190. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966. Praising his own work, Tolson says he likes ’’the synchroniza­ tion of sight, sound, and sense.” When asked by the interviewer to pick out the character of his own making that he liked the best, he said it was like asking a mother "to name her favorite child, after she has suffered the doubts and fears of bringing her prog­ eny into the world."20

"In Reflections on Richard Wright, ’’ the moderator was the editor of this book, Herbert Hill. The participants were Horance Cayton, flrna Bontemps and Saunders Redding, not only authors whose works I previously read in this book, but also men who knew Wright personally and had seen him in Paris. The a r t i c l e to ld of h is involvem ent in th e Communist P arty and how he broke away from it when Native Son was published because the novel did not follow the orthodox Marxist line on the Negro q u estio n . Wright was a novelist powerful enough to break out of the nar­ row compartment previously occupied by Black w riters. He was aware of his prison and realized the novel as he knew it was a projection of the value system of the dominate class in the society. He "al­ lied himself with the critics of the basic assumptions of that so­ ciety and demanded that it hear him out." Wright moved to Paris following an incident in which his white wife rented an apartment. When they both turned up together, the landlord refused them the apartment. He had had an invitation from 36

Paris and he accepted. For a few years his writing fell under the influence of the French existentialists (ex. The Outsider). ’’His abandonment of America did things to him, weakened him emotionally— he no longer had anything to write about.” He went to Africa in search of a cause, but failed to find one. He wrote best when he was angry, but he was no longer angry. Wright himself asked why Joyce, Fitzgerald, and the others went to Paris, studied, and their work improved, while he was the opposite. The panel agreed Wright was very thoroughly American, a product of the South. Joyce and the others were true cosmopoli­ tan, and Wright never was. He was a small town boy all his life. ”His deepest roots were in the folk culture of the bottom South. The lore of that milieu was such an intimate part of his background he sometimes treated it as if it had all originated in his own family.” Benjamin Brawley’s book, The Negro Genius. is a storehouse of information about the achievements of black people beginning with the first written evidence of black thought or black crea­ tiveness in 1760 up to the time at which the book was written, 1937. Mr. Brawley had stated that the black people had been most w ell known in th e f ie ld of a r ts and a e s th e tic s . He w rote in h is introduction, ’’The temperament of the American Negro is primarily lyrical, imaginative, subjective; and his genius has most frequent­ ly sought expression in some one of the arts.” He selectively chose the ones that he could conceive of making the most contribu­ 37 tion to our culture and that of the country. There were probably numerous more black people that did numerous work in these and other fields, but he chose what he calls "the negro genius" to put in p r i n t . Because Mr. Brawley felt that the black people did better in arts and aesthetics, he has essentially included in his work liter­ ature, drama, art, mostly music and poetry. Keeping in mind that the book was written in the mid 1930’s, it seems to have been written in the vein of protest. In one part; of the introduction Mr. Brawley says, "....w e emphasize no connec­ tion between primitive African art and that of the Negro in Ameri­ ca today. An individual sculptor may indeed receive some sugges­ tion or inspiration from a piece of African carving, but that would not say that his own culture was basically African." It seems as if the author is trying to tell white America and the black people that we have just as much culture or brains or whatever that the white society possesses. If anything, our culture is definitely basically African if not outrightly. There is also, of course, more emphasis today on our African heritage than there has ever been, and a movement towards more of the African customs. Benjamin Brawley’s style of writing is very simple. I would imagine that in 1937 not even half as many black people read books as they do today. He obviously meant it to be read by black and white alike because of its easy flowing style. He formed the book step by step, chapter by chapter, year by year, and so on chrono­ logically. Brawley first states the overall tone of all the artists 38 then he gives a synopsis of their life and works.

In the introduction, Mr. Brawley explained a little about the nature of black folks and the nature of their works. He wrote how the Negro spirituals were the inspiration in some way for practi­ cally all of our art forms. He then brings in the different atti­ tudes towards the black art forms, for example, "jazz is not a form of music. . . The jazz treatment, in brief, is a distortion of the conventional, a revolt against tradition, a deliberate twisting of established formulas." Mr. Brawley also wrote about the atti­ tudes towards Negro life and Negro themes. "The Pioneers," which is the title of the first chapter, told basically about three black writers around the era of 1760. The writers were Jupiter Hammon, Phyllis Wheatley, and Gustavus Vassa. Jupiter Hammon was a slave without formal education, but he wrote poetry. He was most concerned with salvation from the Lord and freedom. The account of Phyllis Wheatley was largely about how she was educated even though s till a slave, and about some of her works. She was regarded as "a prodigy." Gustavus Vassa wrote an autobiography telling how when he was a child in Benin, he was kid­ napped and taken away by a man and a woman. These three writers were pushed in the back of the pages of white history, but never­ theless, they are important in establishing our history. The next chapter, "The Era of Effort for Freedom," includes five writers. The inspiration for these writers came from the de­ sire to be freed and from the church. The most important writer of that era that was mentioned was Frederick Douglass. Brawley 39 gives an account of his life from a young slave to his death. He mentioned many of his works and the significance of them. Mr. Brawley wrote, "Frederick Douglass, the foremost man of the period, is s till regarded by many as the greatest of American Negroes." Others included in this chapter are David Walker, James McCune Smith, Henry Highland Garnet, and William Wells Brown.

In his first chapter on poetry and art entitled, "Early Poetry and Art," Brawley brings in poets, dramatists, and musicians. Three of the poets that he wrote about were Daniel A. Payne, James M. Whitfield, and James M. Bell. The only dramatist mentioned in this era (1830-1865) was Ira B. Aldridge. One of the musicians was Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield. During the period of these early black artists, there was a tendency towards a "means of escape." Therefore, the emphasis on protest since Frederick Douglass was basically not seen in these works. The next chapter, "Literature (1865-1890)" includes four main writers which are Alexander Crummel, George W. Williams, Albery A. Whitman, and Francis E. W. Harpre. The theme that was prominent in this time right after the Civil War was political. One of the men was an essayist, Alexander Crummel, and the rest were poets expres­ sing their view of life. "Music and Art, 1865-1895" was an extremely interesting chap­ ter. Brawley included Fisk Jubilee Singers, "Blind Tom," The Hyers

Sisters, Marie Sebka, Flora Batson Bergen, and Sissieretta Jones. The two that really stood out, however, were the Fisk Jubilee Sing­ ers and "Blind Tom." It was interesting the way the sisters got 40 their start to help pay for the school and in the process became rather famous. Thomas G. Bethune, "Blind Tom," was born blind. He was considered a prodigy because later in his life anyone could play a piece on the piano once that he had not heard before and he could produce it afterwards verbatim. "The Maturing of Negro Literature" included Chesnutt, Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, and Archibald Grimke. As Mr. Brawley says in his book, there was a "tendency towards healthy controversy" in these w riters' works. He mentions all of the authors’ most impor­ tant works, and feels that Paul L. Dunbar was the one that was most iri/luencing in his work. The "Music and Art of 1895-1920" included the account of a painter, Henry 0. Tanner, and a sculptor, Meta Warrick Fuller, which I feel is very interesting. There cannot be found many black painters, especially sculptors and a woman at that. Others men­ tioned in the chapter were Will Marion Cook, J. Rosamond Johnson, Harry T. Burliegh, and William E. Scott. "Protest and Vindication" was truly seen in writers such as E. W. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, and Alaine

Locke in this chapter. Mr. Brawley begins by telling how and why the Niagara Convention was formed and who helped organize i t . He then goes into separate accounts of the aforementioned men and their works. The central theme or thought of the "New Realists" was that of complete freedom in every way possible. During this era of writers, Harlem started to become the big attraction especially 41

suggesting in terms of primitiveness. This brought out a lot of works on the Negro life by white writers who saw an opportunity to write on sordid and unpleasant themes as they perceived them to be. The black writer, however, attempted to show the true Harlem in his works. The writers who were included in this chapter are Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Eric Walrond, Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, and Arna Bontemps. In "Drama and Stage 1916-1936." Brawley showed how there was a great interest in the portrayal of Negro life in drama. He wrote, "Within a decade and a half more was accomplished than in all the years preceding." The black artists in the drama that Brawley men­

tioned were Willis Richardson, Randolph Edmonds, Charles Gilpin, Richard Harrison, Rose McClendon, and Paul Robeson.

The "Music in Recent Years" stated the achievements and life of prominent black composers, singers, pianists, organists, and violinists. Some of the people mentioned were H. Lawrence Freeman, Clarence C. White, Nathaniel Dett, William Grant S till, William L. Dawson, Julius Bledsoe, and Marian Anderson, considered one of the "outstanding singers of the world." The final chapter deals with "The New Temper in Painting and Sculpture0" A source of inspiration for more black artists was more black art exhibitions and competitive contests. Brawley men­ tions basically three divisions of art that more blacks are parti­ cipating in which are painting, sculpting, and architecture. The black artists that were mentioned were Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Aaron Douglas, and Richmon Barthe. 42

Mr. Brawley’s book is a very informative piece. He covers the primary black leaders in the field of arts and aesthetics which, at that time and now, is basic information and history that everyone should be given an opportunity to read. Benjamin Brawley’s The Negro in Literature and Art is a brief collection of the numerous outstanding works of art by Black people. The book deals with the people, a short background on each of them, and, in many cases, it shows the situations and handicaps under which their talents had to develop. First, five writers who have been most constantly guided by standards of literacy excellence will be discussed. The next step will include those whose literary work has been noteworthy. Follow­ ing that, those who have risen above the crowd in oratory, painting, sculpture, and music will be considered. These are only a few who have longed and striven for artistic excellence. Many have reached their ultimate goal and fulfilled their ambitions, but there are countless numbers who have yearned

and died in silence.

The Negro Genius

The Negco’s instinct for beauty has found such outlets as pic­ tures, posters, or advertisements pasted on the walls, a flower on the windowsill, or a bush in the garden. Red is his favorite color because it is the most pronounced.

Some Negroes have a tendency to get "happy" in church. In order for their souls to be lifted in such a manner, the minister

must be able to express himself in a way that will relate to these 43 people. It is not necessarily the well-educated minister who can reach his congregation through his sermon. He has not taken into account the basic psychology of his audience. In order to have an effect on the audience, the educated minister must add imagination and rhetorical expression to his scholarship and culture. The min­ i s t e r must make th e re lig io n come a liv e and make i t appealing to th e p eo p le’s n atu re . ”No race can rise to the greatest heights of art until it has yearned and suffered.” The Negro's background of tragedy has marked their literature and art with an unmistakable note of power. The arts will be the field in which the Negro will reach his greatest heights. This is not saying that the Negro will not rate highly in areas other than the arts, because he has already made noteworthy accomplishments in scholarship and invention. Although the Negro has great gifts of ear, voice, and soul, his talents have not soared above the stage of vaudeville due mainly to economic instability. The Negro’s music is recognized as the most distinc­ tive the United States has produced. The Black race has unlimited possibilities in literature, oratory, sculpture, and painting.

Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley was about eight years old when she was carried aboard a slave ship from Senegal to Boston. Mrs. Susannah Wheatley wished to possess the girl as a special servant for her declining y e a rs . Phillis thus showed signs of her talents at an early age. She would express herself by drawing figures on the house walls. Be- 44 cause of her ability to grasp knowledge so easily, Mrs. Wheatley and her daughter began to teach her. Besides becoming proficient in grammar, Phillis learned reading, astronomy, geography, history, the Bible, and the Latin classics. If it had not been for the dis­ advantages under which women labored, Phillis Wheatley would have been distinguished as one of the most highly educated young women in Boston. Phillis was about fourteen when she first began to develop her poetic talent, unfortunately using Alexander Pope as a guide and falling into his pitfalls. Her diction is distinctly pseudo-classic. One of her earliest and most interesting works is "On Being Brought from Africa to America."

No hard labor was required of Phillis. She was more^cf a daughter and companion than a slave. She was regarded as "a kind of poet-laureate in the domestic circles of Boston because whenever there was an unusual event, she would write lines on the same." The earliest publication of one of her poems was in 1770. On August 18, 1771, Phillis became a communicant of the Old South Meeting House in Boston. This was an exception to the rule because slaves were not baptized into the church. Phillis's health began to fail her so she accompanied Nathaniel

Wheatley (the son) to England. This visit was the highest point in her career. She became the pet of the society people of England be­ cause of her strange history, the influence of kind friends, abil­ ity to write verses, and brilliant conversation.

Mrs. Wheatley became ill, and Phillis immediately left for home. 45

Before she returned to Boston, arrangements were made for the pub­ lication of "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," which is the only collection ever brought together by Phillis Wheatley. In 1778 she became the wife of John Peters, who sported a cane, wore a wig, and felt himself superior to labor, but yet who could not make a living. He was only a source of embarrassment for Phillis. Mrs. Peters and the two children accompanied Mr. Peters to Wilmington, Delaware after Boston fell into the hands of the British.

After John Peters* ja il term he worked as a journeyman, baker, and a phony physician. Phillis labored in a cheap lodging-house. Her disease worsened, she died December 5, 1784, and was buried along with her third child. The exact site of the grave is not known. Phillis Wheatley was regarded as a prodigy, appearing at a time when the achievement of the American Negro in literature and art was still negligible. Her verses of the last century, even though peo­ ple discounted her poetry by stating that it was beneath the dignity of c ritic is m (Thomas J e ffe rs o n ). I n te r e s t in her work was revived (if it had at all declined) at the time when anything indicating unusual capacity on the part of the Negro was received with eager­ ness. Interest in her work has greatly increased within the last decade mainly due to an increasing race-consciousness on the part

of the Negro.

Phillis Wheatley was an intelligent woman with a great ambition,

and she triumphed over the most adverse circumstances. 46

Paul Lawrence Dunbar

Paul Lawrence Dunbar is credited with being the foremost expo­ nent in verse of the life and character of the Negro people. He brings out the moodiness, abandon, love of song, and irony in his w orks. Dunbar was born to uneducated but earnest, hard-working parents in Dayton, Ohio. His mother was a dominant factor in the poet’s life. He was the only Black in his class at Steele High School. He was president of the literary society and editor of the school’s monthly publication The High School Times. He composed the class song in 1891. After struggling for a while to sell some of his publications and at times being greatly discouraged, with the help of friends, the young poet came into notice and was on his way up. His best known p u b lic a tio n is ’’L yrics of Lowly L if e .” In 1898 Dunbar moved back to Dayton, his health still failing. He died February 9, 1906. Although he was only thirty-three, he ’’had existed millions of years.”

Dunbar’s works f a l l in to th re e d iv isio n s : th e poems in c la s s ic English, those in dialect, and the stories in prose. His distinct contribution to American literature was his work in the Negro dia­ lect. His poetic masterpiece is "When Malindy Sings," which was in­ spired by the singing of his mother. Dunbar’s reputation could have stood on his short stories alone without his even writing the poems. One of the best is "Jimsella."

Dunbar's weak areas of writing are found in his novels and articles.

He did his best job with lyrical poetry. 47

Charles W. Chesnutt

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, 1858, Charles Chesnutt was consider­ ed th e b e st known n o v e list and sh o rt sto ry w rite r of th e ra c e . He taught in the North Carolina public schools at age sixteen, and he was a principal in Fayetteville at age twenty-three. Chesnutt left the South, worked for a newspaper in New York, and then worked as a stenographer in Cleveland.

Mr. Chesnutt studied the dialect, natural manners, and super­ stitions of the Negro people while he was in North Carolina. From these studies he wrote "The Conjure Woman." From his best works it is evident that Chesnutt is fully the master of the short story as a literary form. One of the best is "The Bouquet." His stories set forth a certain problem and worked it out to its logical conclusion. This reflected great credit up­ on the literary skill of the writer. "The House Behind the Cedars" is his best novel. Young writers who wish to disguise in fiction the searching questions that one meets in the life of the South might study Mr. Chesnutt*s style.

W. E. Burahardt DuBois

W. E. B. DuBois was born in 1868, at Great Barrington, Massachu­ setts, received Bachelor of Arts degree at Fisk University and at Harvard, Master of Arts and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy also at Harvard. He taught at Wilberforce University and at the Univer­ sity of Philadelphia. Mr. DuBois was a professor at Atlanta Univer­ sity, and later left to become Director of Publicity and Research 48 for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He started the publication of the Crisis. DuBois has been noted as one of the great sociologists of the day, and as the man who has given the most scientific accuracy to studies relating to the Negro. The remarkable style of "The Souls of Black Folk," a combi­ nation of fourteen essays, has made it the most important work in classic English ever written by a Negro. The combination of high scholarship and the peculiarly romantic temperament of the Negro race is best seen in W. E. B. DuBois. He has a strong love for his people, and for two decades he has remained an outstanding interpreter of the spiritual life of his people. To­ day he is the foremost leader of the American Black race.

William Stanley Braithwaite

William Braithwaite of Boston is the foremost poet of the race. He took time and pains to master the fundamentals of his talent and turned them into great literary works. Lately he has become dis­ tinguished as a critic in the special service field of American po­ etry. He has contributed valuable critical essays to a number of publications. "The Poetic Year" is the sturdiest achievement of Braithwaite in the field in which he has recently become most dis­ tinguished, illustrating his graceful, suggestive prose. Recently a note of mysticism has crept into Braithwaite’s verse. He is the foremost man of the race in pure literature. He also has credit for being the chief sponsor for current American poetry. A comment from th e T ra n s c rip t. November 30, 1915, puts i t very w ell:

"He has helped poetry to readers as well as to poets. One is guilty 49 of no extravagance in also saying that the poets we have—and they may take their place with their peers in any country—and the gath­ ering deference we pay them, are created largely out of the stubborn, self-effacing enthusiasm of this one man. In a sense their distinc­ tion is his own. In a sense he has himself written their poetry. Very much by his to il they may write and be read. Not one of them will ever write a finer poem than Braithwaite himself has lived al­ ready . ,T

Other Writers

There is a small need to mention briefly the fields of religion, of sociology and of politics. Booker T. Washington has produced periodical sociological stud­ ies dealt with the place of the Negro in American life. David Walker wrote "Appeal," a protest against slavery that awakened South­ ern legislatures to action. Before the Civil War, Henry Highland Garnet wrote sermons and addresses on the status of the race in Amer­ ica. Within recent years the progress and achievements of the race have been published in a great many works. Very few of these books are scholarly. However, there are three collaborations which are of decided value: "The Negro Problem," "From Servitude to Service," and "The Negro in the South."

There are also publications dealing with biography and autobi­ ography. Most of these were based upon the experiences of fugitive s la v e s . The field of history must also be considered. Church history came first. The great storehouse for students of Negro history is 50

George W. Williams’ two volume ’’History of the Negro Race in Ameri­ c a ."

The young writers are beginning to cultivate the short story. Excellent work has been done by a few of them who are connected with syndicates of great newspapers. The composing of novels has also been tried many times, but a sense of literary form has often been lacking. The literary essay has suffered from the general pressure of the Problem. Few accomplishments have been made in sustained poetic flight. However, many booklets of shorter lyric verse have appeared. There have been imitators of P. L. Dunbar and some were better than fair; but this was a passing phenomenon. Present-day writers almost invariably ’eschew' dialect and insist upon classic forms and m easures.

O rators—Doucrlas and Washington

The Negro has a peculiar gift of oration. One who excels in this field must add fervor of sentiment and an appreciation of the possibilities of a great occasion to the magnificent gift of voice. The romantic quality is found in imagery and a power of expression. Great efforts, sometimes realized even by untutored members of the race, have been accounted for by this innate gift of rhetorical expression. It has limitless possibilities under the influences of culture and education. Many men have joined the advantages of culture to this love for figurative expression; and a biblical phrase is a common charac­ teristic thoroughly typical of the romantic quality. 51

When dealing with oratory, one must constantly remember the importance of the spoken word and the personal equation. Many of the most worthy addresses made by Negroes have not been preserved in accessible form. J. C. Price was one of the most effective ora­ tors the Negro race ever had, and many of those who heard him will insist that he was foremost. Despite his eloquence, his reputation will fall because his speeches are not generally accessible. Reverdy C. Ransom of th e A. M. E. Church has given th e im pres­ sion of the terse true orator. He is stately and dignified, has little humor, but is bitter in satire and invective. His speaking reminds one of Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington have earned an undisputed place among American orators. Frederick Douglass (1817) lived as a slave for ten years on a Maryland plantation after which he was bought by a Baltimore ship­ builder. He learned to read and went to New Bedford, Massachusetts and adopted the name Douglass. A famous abolitionist named Garrison assisted him with his education. Douglass was made the agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and gave many lectures in England and the United States. English friends raised L150 to en­ able him to purchase his freedom. Before the Civil War he lived in Rochester, New York, where he published The North Star (and where there is now a public monument for him). Later he was Recorder of Deeds in the D istrict of Columbia and then Minister to Haiti. Douglass had won for himself a place of unique distinction by the tim e of h is d eath . Every forward movement of h is people was h is greatest interest, but he embraced all men and all races in his 52 charity. He had an international reputation, and today many of his speeches can be found in the standard works on oratory. Mr. Chesnutt summed up all of Douglass?s personal characteris­ tics and among them were a magnificent figure, and a strong, rich and melodious voice. Douglass was dignified, majestic, and elo­ quent . He could not be funny or witty. He was not always on the popular side nor was he exactly logical. But he was the outstand­ ing figure of the race in the United States for half a century. Douglass's greatest speech was "American Slavery" made at Rochester July 5, 1852. Booker T. Washington was born in Franklin County, Virginia,1850. His family moved to Malden, West Virginia after the Civil War. He worked in the salt furnaces and coal mines when he became old enough. The name Washington was an adopted, spur-of-the-m om ent surname. Washington graduated from Hampton University and taught school at Malden for three years. Later he was appointed an instructor at Hampton. Tuskegee, Alabama was in need of someone to organize and become the principal of a normal school. Washington was recom­ mended, and he opened the school on July 4 in an old church and a little shanty with only thirty students. He wrote several books and during his later years only about one or two other men in America could rival his power to attract and hold great audiences. He received the degree of Master of Arts from Harvard University and the Doctor of Laws from Dartmouth. He died in 1915. Washington was always in demand to give p u b lic sp eeches. His Atlanta speech is famous for the so-called compromise with the 53 white South. Douglass and Washington differed. One was subjective; the other was objective. Douglass always swayed his audience and him­ self by his passion and rhetoric; Washington studied every detail and weighed every word, always keeping in mind the final impression to be made. Douglass was an idealist; Washington was an opportun­ ist. One voiced the sorrows of the Old Testament; the other longed for the blessings of the New Testament. Both loved their people, and each worked as best he could.

The Stage

Classic drama has been the hardest field for the Negro. Only within the last two years has this distinct racial element begun to receive serious attention. The Negro was not wanted on the legitimate stage, but Ira Aldridge did show that the Negro could succeed. Aldridge was uni­ v e rs a lly ranked as a g re a t tra g e d ia n . Numerous honors have been bestowed upon him. All association of.the Negro with the classic drama was erased from the public mind when the new blackface minstrelsy that became so popular showed up after the Civil War. Some outlet was found in light musical comedy near the turn of the century. Bert Williams is said to be one of the two or three foremost comedians on the American stage. The competition of vaudeville and moving pictures has caused m usical comedy to become le s s prom inent. Any p resen t

representation of the Negro on the stage is likely to be either a burlesque or a deliberate and malicious libel on the race. 54

There are dreams of a Negro drama; one that deals with honest­ ly presenting Negro characters face to face with all the problems that test the race in the crucible of American civilization. This field is comparatively new, but it is one that is pecul­ iarly adapted to the ability of the Negro race; and at least enough has been done so far to show that both Negro effort in the classic drama and the serious portrayal of Negro life on the stage are worthy of respectful consideration.

Henry 0. Tanner

The artistic spirit of the Negro race has wanted to express i t s e l f through p a in tin g fo r q u ite some tim e. Henry 0. Tanner was born in 1859' in Pittsburgh, the son of a minister. The early years of his life were torn with struggle and sacrifice and a battle against uncertain health. He obtained his early schooling in Philadelphia. When Tanner was about thirteen, he saw an artist at work, decided he also would become a painter, and later became a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The paintings he sent to New York publishers were nearly all turned down and sent back. Then he turned to photography in Atlanta but was unsuccessful; he taught drawing at Clark University in Atlanta for two years. Encouraged by Bishop and Mrs. Hartzell, Tanner gave an exhibition in Cincinnati, but it, too, was a failure. Financially aided by the Hartzells, young Tanner went to Paris. But he ran into money problems and went back to Philadelphia.

Tanner was more drawn towards religious subjects, and "Daniel in the Lions’ Den" brought his first official recognition. Mr. Tanner 55 had finally become a recognized artist after twenty years of heart­ breaking effort. He won countless prizes for his work during the later years of his career. He spent those later years with a col­ ony of artists at Trepied, where he built a home and studio. Moon­ light scenes appealed to him most, and he usually only painted biblical subjects; but once in a while he w ill paint •■an idealized landscape. He has a thoroughly romantic tone and spirit. "The Annunciation" is noted for its effects of light and shade and ranks high among the painter's works. Aspiring painters should find Tanner's career an inspiration and a ch allen g e. His work is a monument of stro n g endeavor and ex­ alted achievement.

Sculptors—Meta Warrick Fuller

There has been a big beginning of highly artistic achievement in s c u lp tu re . Edmonia Lewis was th e f i r s t Black person to come in to prominence in this field. Most of her work is in Europe. Mrs. May Howard Jackson is a more recent addition to this sculpturing group. Meta Vaux Warrick was born in Philadelphia, 1877. She won a four-year scholarship to Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art.

Upon completing her schooling and taking a few prizes along with her, Meta went to Paris and worked and studied for three years. She went back to America and resumed her studies. In 1909 Miss Warrick became the wife of Dr. Solomon G. Fuller. In 1910, some of her most valuable pieces were destroyed by fire. Her works that require special consideration will always be tragic or serious in tone.

Mrs. Fuller's work falls into two divisions, the romantic and 56 the social. Her early work is gruesome and terrible but also in­ tense and vital, and the very tragedy of the Negro race speaks di­ rectly from i t .

Music

Samuel Colridge-Taylor, born in London (1857), found the in­ spiration of his best work in African themes. He had training on both the violin and the piano. In 1890 he enrolled as a student of the violin at the Royal College of Music. He won a scholarship in Stanford's composition department and was graduated with honor in 1894. "In Thee, 0 Lord" was his earliest publication. He gave fre­ quent performances of chamber music, and had one of his symphonies produced. The first part of his "Hiawatha" trilogy, "Hiawatha’s

Wedding Feast," made Coleridge-Taylor world famous. He became one of the foremost living English composers. The composer’s most dis­ tinctive work is that reflecting his interest in the Negro folk­ song, "African Suite." The history of conscious musical effort by the Negro goes back before the Civil War. During slavery days there sprang up among free Negroes a number of musicians and artists who removed them­ selves to foreign countries because of the prejudice which existed against colored people. Harry T. Burleigh, the foremost composer of the race today has won a place among the most prominent song-writers of the world. His work displayed great technical excellence. Although Will Marion Cook has devoted most of his time to the composition of popular music, he has produced numerous songs that 57 bear the stamp of genius. His works not only exhibit unusual melody but also excellent technique. J. Rosemond Johnson had been the director of the New York Music Settlement, the first in the country for the general cultivation and popularization of Negro music. He had an unusual knowledge of in­ strumentation . Raymond Augustus Lawson was an outstanding pianist. He had a highly developed technique, and his style caused him to be a favor­ ite concert pianist. He conducted one of the leading studios in New England; Hartford. Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, a soprano, had a voice range of more than three octaves, which naturally attracted attention in both England and America. She was frequently compared to Jenny Lind. After her stage success, Miss Greenfield became a music teach­ e r. The Negro's theme has suffered the most from the coarseness of the mob-spirit in literature. The Negro in his problems and striv­ ings offers American writers the greatest opportunity that could possibly be given to them today. Instead of having a variety of works, we have consistently had political tracts, traditional tales, and lurid melodramas. "The artist is so bound by circumstances and hemmed in by tradition that he simply has not the courage to launch out into the deep and work out h is human problems fo r h im se lf."

11A Defense of James Baldwin" by Addison Gayle, Jr., is, just as the title implies, a simple justification of the writings of 58

Baldwin. Basically the article, which upholds the literary worth of Baldwin's writings, is a reaction against a certain breed of lit­ erary critics. This specific breed of critics tend to review the personal aspects of the author (in this case Baldwin) instead of re­ viewing the validity of the literary work itself. As can be ex­ pected, this method of inspection is used primarily in the evalua­ tion of the writings of Black authors. Suppose a critic wishes to comment on th e work of a c e r ta in Black l i t e r a r i a n , Mr. X. The c r i t i c w ill industriously proceed to delve into the background of Mr. X, gathering such "significant" data as, he hated his mother, or he was afraid of his father. These relevant findings will then be used by the critic in analyzing the only work of Mr. X. As a matter of fact, the personal aspects of Mr. X's life will probably dominate the critic’s review of the work. As a result, the main point of Mr. X’s argument will be overlooked. Gayle emphasizes the necessity of distinguishing between the author's personality and the worth of the message the author is trying to get across. Why is the theme of Black literature often overlooked? Accord­ ing to Gayle, "Blacks and whites find it uncomfortable to face the argument of Black writers." Instead, they find it safer to cling to illusions rather than face up to reality. But if there is a kind of security in this "hiding game" it is as unreal as the illu­ sions to which so many cling. Despite obvious discrepancies, it is believed by many that "Americans of all national origins, classes, etc.,. . .have something in common: as a set of beliefs, a polit­ ical creed." Supposedly, "this American Creed is the cement in the

diversified structure." Gayle points out that there are many, 59

Blacks and whites, who simply do not want to face up to the fact that the creed has not worked. It will never work. Gayle has renamed Robert Bone’s article on James Baldwin, "A Defense of the American Society.” Gayle points out that he is not at all attempting to degrade Bone’s critique. On the con­ trary, he states that "American Society needs all the defenders it can get.” Bone’s chapter on Baldwin, found in his book, The Negro Novel in America, is a defense of the American Creed. Gayle labels Bone's chapter an "extrinsic" review, since it dis­ cussed the non-essential aspects of Baldwin’s personality in ref­ erence to the novel, Another Country. As a result, Gayle strongly criticizes Bone’s disregard for the actual message in Baldwin's novel. In The Negro Novel in America. Bone la b e ls Baldwin a "mad­ man" before "expelling him from the Literary Republic." According to Bone, "Another Country is not simply a bad novel, but a dead end. It is symptomatic of a severe crisis in Baldwin's life." Gayle attributes Bone's negative attitude toward Another Coun­ try to the novel’s rebellious nature. Bone, as a critic and par­ ticularly an American, cannot tolerate intolerance of the American Creed. Yet, according to Gayle, the theme of protest is common in English literature, "Society makes rebellion in literature manda­ tory." And in a sick and troubled society, rebellion is ’charac­ teristic of health and sanity.'" Robert Bone was concerned with the "Defense of American Society," not the theme of Baldwin’s novel.

In his defense of Baldwin, Gayle considers another critic, Eldridge Cleaver. Unlike Robert Bones, Cleaver "has nothing but 60 contempt for the American Creed." "Notes on a Native Son," was Cleaver's first article on Baldwin. Cleaver stated, "He (Baldwin) placed so much of my own experience, which I thought I had under­ stood, into new perspectives from which I derived new insights." L a te r, under th e in flu e n c e of Chapman, C leaver became " in te n t on defending Negro manhood and avenging Richard Wright." At times like this, Cleaver commented that he "began to feel uncomfortable about something in Baldwin."

According to Gayle, Cleaver’s critique is "both heroic and tragic." The heroic aspect of the critique deals with Cleaver’s need to defend Black manhood. Black manhood, Cleaver felt, was be­ ing challenged in Baldwin’s Another Country. "Another Country is Baldwin’s most definitive statement on homosexuality." And in his contempt for homosexuality, Cleaver continues, "The day is quite distant when Negroes will be found engaging in sit-ins for the right of homosexuals." In conclusion, Cleaver states that "homo­ sexuality is a sickness," and dramatically compares it to baby-rape. The tragedy of Cleaver’s critique also deals with homosexuality. Cleaver demonstrates that Black men must "compensate" for what is considered loss of manhood. As an example, Gayle discusses Black pride in reference to sexual superiority. Symbols of masculinity have long been admired within the Black community. The Black homo­ sexual, in the eyes of Cleaver, challenges this admired Black mas­ culinity. The basic tragedy of Cleaver's criticism of Baldwin, is that Cleaver, like Robert Bone, was unable to separate biography from literature. 61

Gayle, however, acknowledges the necessity for defending Black masculinity. Booker T. Washington’s "Atlanta Exposition Speech," which was considered by many Black intellectuals to be "a mental castration," had quite an impact at the time of its writing and still affects Black thinking today. Since the speech's publica- , tion, Black writers, including DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, and James Baldwin, have attempted to dispel the Washington theory. Contrary to Washington’s theory, which advocated Black passiveness in regard to whites, Frederick Douglass wrote that he himself "loathed them (whites)," and considered them "robbers" of Africa. Gayle also finds it necessary to sympathize with Cleaver’s defense of Richard Wright. Gayle acknowledges Wright's value as a cultural hero. However, he finds flaws in the literary aspects of Wright's novel Native Son. In "Everybody’s Protest Novel," Baldwin writes, "The failure of the protest novel (Native Son) lies in its rejection of life, the human being. . ." Thus Baldwin claims that Wright is categorizing the character, Bigger Thomas. Cleaver, in reference to Native Son, states that "Bigger Thomas, Wright's greatest creation, was a man in violent rebellion against the murderous, totalitarian, white world." Gayle has concluded that Baldwin and Cleaver unknowingly agree in the analysis of

Native Son. According to Gayle, only in a naturalistic novel can "the individual be so categorized that the gigantic overwhelming environmental forces determine his very existence."

After pointing out the discrepancies in the critiques of Bone and Cleaver, Gayle proceeds to criticize the character of Bigger 62

Thomas. "The myth of the American Creed looms large in the eyes of both Wright and Cleaver. For all society has to do to stifle Bigger’s rage is live up to its creed." Gayle, in conclusion, points out that Wright Was finally convinced of this hopelessness himself, and finally, in 1946, went off to Paris, "leaving the rest of us Bigger Thomases to rage on—perhaps till eternity." DuBois believed the race would be saved by the "talented tenth." Cleaver perhaps believes salvation w ill come by way of the Bigger Thomases. However, Baldwin, and perhaps even Addison Gayle himself, conclude that "salvation is impossible. . ." Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment is a thorough and extremely well documented account. Written by Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer, it is quite readable and convincing. As it was published in 1967 , it is relatively u p -to -d a te even now. Although as the title suggests, it is largely a pictorial his­ tory, the text is certainly as valuable as the excellent photographs, drawings, and other reproductions. The text gives the general con­ tinuity to the book and further gives anecdotes, quotations, and a number of specific details that add significantly to the credibil­ ity and vividness of the book. Examples are the anecdote of Bessie Smith’s death outside the doors of a white hospital where she was refused admittance, the numerous quotations supporting the statement that slaves were exploited as entertainers from the time they were taken in Africa (e.g., the logs of the British slave ship Hannibal. in 1664, recorded that the captive Africans linked together on the 63

ship were made to "jump and dance for an hour or two" on every day that the weather allowed them to come out of the hole; a 1788 rec­ ord says "If they (the Africans) go about it (dancing) reluctantly or do not move with agility, they are flogged"; an advertisement by two slave brokers in the Richmond Daily Inquirer on June 27, 1853 offered George Walder "the celebrated musician and fiddler. . . admitted by common consent to be the best leader of a band in all eastern and middle Virginia" for hire "either for the remainder of the year or by the month, week, or job," and the details of how a black man, Sam Lucas, was finally permitted to play the leading role in the play Uncle Tom’s Cabin. However, the various illustrations and other reproductions give the book a completeness otherwise impossible. It is not enough for the authors to quote Walker Kerr's opinion of Lena Horne ("there can't be a handsomer creature on the face of the earth") or The Post's description of her as "probably the most beautiful woman in world, though these are valuable; the reader wants to see her, and the book gives a full-page, close-up portrait of her that is therefore very satisfying. The paintings of Black dancers and mu­ sicians that were painted in the 1700's and the 1800's give a power­ ful support to the statements that black people have been noted, throughout their history in America, for their dancing and musical abilities. There is a reprint of an 1855 playbill advertising per­ formances of Ira Aldridge in The Slave. Othello. Macbeth, and The Padlock that lists some of his honors, e.g., appearance before the imperial family of Austria, the queen of Sweden, the royal family 64 of Prussia and the king and queen of Holland. There are reproduc­ tions of playbills featuring various performances by people (min­ strel shows, slave narratives, plays, musical comedies, concerts, etc.) and reproductions of the covers of sheet music composed by black people. All of these give so many examples to support the statements of the text that the book must be considered an extreme­ ly well-documented book. Basically the organization of the book is chronological, starting with early accounts of the slave trade, and either cover­ ing a variety of forms of entertainment in one chapter or, if the amount of information warrants, giving a chapter to the music of the period, a chapter to the theater. There were no groupings of chapters into sections, for the tone of the book is that of a very well-informed person conversationally presenting the information. Thus, even the chronological order is not rigidly adhered to: a single chapter may cover a trend that began with slaves on planta­ tions and trace it to the 1930Ts or further; the authors appear to present the information in the most logical and spontaneous method of development. This does not make it a bit difficult for the reader who is trying to see the history in a thoroughly chronolog­ ical order, but it would be an advantage to the reader who picks the book up to read only a little at a time. The entertainers covered by Hughes and Meltzer are those in many fields of entertainment: they are performers and creators in music (blues, spirituals, musical comedies, opera, etc.), dance (popular dances of the 1920*s such as the Charleston and "truckin'1, 65

(ballet, minstrel shows, etc.), theatre (tragedy, comedy, the so­ cial society consciousness plays of LeRoi Jones, Broadway produc­ tions, etc.,) vaudeville, circuses, radio, TV, and films. The book deals not only with American entertainers but also with Africans like Miriam Makeba who have performed in America. It also deals with the tremendous obstacles for black people in entertainment in America.

I found the book extremely valuable, in telling (and showing) me a g re a t many th in g s I had known nothing about, and a lso in sug­ gesting how a book of this sort (i.e., intended for pleasure read­ ing and for reference) could be made successful. I did wish that the index (which is otherwise excellent) had italicized the num­ bers of the pages showing photographs which would seem to make the book a more convenient reference. However, it is both an enjoyable and a most informational book. The book Images of the Negro in American Literature, was edited by Seymour L. Gross and John K. Hardy, but Kaiser felt it a neces­ sity to 'set the record straight' in relation to white people at­ tempting to determine, and write about the true image of Black peo­ ple. The most astonishing fact about this article and the book itself is that whites have not yet stopped attempting to judge the writing of Black people.

Establishing this, how can a white man who has never experi­ enced the love, the pain, the fear, the pride, and especially the determination that the people "who are darker than blue" have felt, even attempt to interpret Black writers? (How can I know what hap­ 66 pens or what happiness is, if I ’ve never been sad?) Kaiser tells us that the first mistake that the two editors made (one which most white critics make—ed. note) is ”. .Gross immediately tries to separate the socio-economic from the literary and point up their so-called differences. But he has to admit that the Negro has been depicted in American Literature (creative and critical) not as a human being but mostly as vicious racist stereotypes which tied in with the Negro's socio-economic status throughout American history." Kaiser states further that before one can write a critique he must know, "When was this written?" "What was happening in th e country as a whole?" "What e sp e c ia lly was happening to the Negro at the time?" And to answer these ques­ tions are authors such as: James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Wright, Ellison, and Gwendolyn Brooks, but all of which were excluded from Mr. Gross and Mr. Hardy’s book. K aiser fe e ls th a t Gross, and Hardy a lso , wrote th in g s down in the bibliography without doing the necessary research to prove or disprove their assertions. For example, Gross alludes to the fact that even a Black author has publicly talked about the inferiority of his fellow Black authors. But if Gross had researched, he would have found that Baldwin now defends the Black people today, and is no longer adhering to this pack of white critics. (Gross was re­ ferring to Baldwin's Everybody’s Protest Novel). Blacks—Why Only Protest Writing? Confining the Negro to protest writing is like enforcing segregation of the races. And the Ne­ gro has made us such social change in the last two decades, he continues, that the protest image 67

in Negro writing must be changed to emphasize the conflict and tensions within the Negro group or to tracing the assimilating of the Negro into the white middle class. (White critics seem afraid that social criticism will lead them into dangerous terrain and get them into serious, ideological trouble with the establishment from which all their blessings flow.) But in response to Gross’s feeling on Black protest writing, Jim Williams said, "How can our creative writers ignore the freedom movements and the police, fire hoses, dogs, bombs, jailing, etc., used to oppose them?"

In the qualitative world-wide change repre­ sented by the dissolution of classic colon­ ialism and the concomitant national liberation struggle of our own people, lies the richest of minds awaiting the creative Negro w riters' golden touch. If only our writers will base themselves on the firm foundations being laid down by our people, self-pity and the pathet­ ic tendency to imitate the white middle class intellectuals stark absurdities will vanish like fog in the bright sunlight. . .

We know that there is a lag between the con­ struction of a foundation and the fashioning of the superstructure, but certainly now is the time to close the gap. . .the Negro re­ volt against the continuing restrictive shackles of second class citizenship begs for artistic creation in new images. This book and Kaiser’s opinion simply showed me how incompe­ tent white critics are in their evaluations of Black writers. They will always believe that "Negro writers put too much protest into their work." But, it is this kind of cynical, insensitive, anti-social protest, art-for-art's sake, certainly formalistic criticism that is endemic in a society whose economic system and scale of values have lost all their humanism, and have turned against all the people, both Black and white. 68

nBlack Drama,11 by Loften Mitchell, is a book, a story, a saga. It is historical and futuristic. This book traces the Black man's struggle to be recognized and accepted in the theatre as an actor, playwright, producer, and most of all as a BLACK MAN. Loften places heavy emphasis on the attempts and needs of a black theatre run and supported by blacks. He sees the theatre as something to be accepted by the people, the common man. It must be about him and for him. The story, like most stories, begins at the beginning. The theatre, like all American institutions, made the Black man's debut about as degrading as possible. Blacks were first used as subject m atter in "Padlock," a play w ritte n in 1769 which was a comedy about a West Indian Slave who was profane and of little authenticity.

This first play stereotyped Blacks as clowns, useless, but funny. In 1795-97 "Triumph of Love" and "The Politicians" reaffirmed the black man's role as something to be ridiculed and a creature to be denied human s ta tu s . If I were to remove the words, Drama, Theatre, and Play from this paper and insert freedom, housing, work, and equality, this study would be just as true. One is amazed at the thorough job America;, did (and does) when i t came to keeping th e black man down in all phases of life from the beginning till now. There are so many dates, plays, theatres, theatrical movements, etc., showing the ups and downs of black theatre that to continue along this vein would require re-writing the whole book. 69

Mitchell presented his material in a fair and unbiased manner (a f e a t somehow never achieved by many w hite w r ite rs ). He gave praise where praise was due. He critically assessed the plays lauding their good points, pinpointing their bad ones. He praised and gave credit to the many Negro actors, writers, producers, and just plain folk, who participated in the struggle for recognition of Black Theatre as an honored, respected theatre, just as talented and capable as White Theatre. He also damned the high white society that was trying to damn the black theatre movement. Yet he heaps praise on one Orsen Welles (a white) for his many contributions as a director and man. Mitchell tells of the false image perpetrated by whites about blacks during the Minstrelsy era in the 19th cen­ tury. Minstrelsy consisted of whites with painted faces portraying blacks as lazy, loud-mouthed, flashily dressed, kinky-haired, gin drinking, useless creatures. He points out though that when blacks finally played in M instrelsies, they continued stereotyping them­ selves, thus becoming caricatures of a caricature. Some good things to come out of the era were that blacks had performed and proved that they could. They also fought Minstrelsy and created the American Musical as we know it today. This is just one example of M itchell's treatment of the history of "Black Drama."

Mitchell separates his book into four parts: The Day Before Yesterday, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. At first, I thought that this literary technique was merely a convenient way of presenting the story in its different parts according to the time sequence. But upon closer scrutiny I found this ordering of events also showed 70

striking parallelisms among the four periods. In the first section we see distortion of the black image, the rise and fall of Minstrel­ sy, the rise of the Theatrical Trust Syndicate, and the exiling of blacks from Broadway. Part two features "The Development of Harlem by Negroes," "The First Harlem Theatre Movement (1909-1917)," the "Black Renaissance," "The Return of Blacks to Broadway," "Efforts for • a New Harlem Theatre," and "The Effect of World War II on Black Drama." Part three, "The 1950’s and 60’s" feature the "Millennium and Broadway" reconsidered. And finally part four, "The Future." Take for instance the First part; we see Blacks stereotyped, treated as inhuman and untalented. When they attempted to create their own theatre, (The African Grove Theatre), they were destroyed by white hoodlums and the police. In short, white society could not and would not accept blacks in the theatre because to do that would have opened other doors. Finally when the Negro Musical be­ gan to wane, the white power structure seized the opportunity to banish blacks from Broadway, lest they should create more sensations, and in so doing destroy the carefully plotted course of Whitey to keep Blacky in his place. Going from Part one to Part three, a span of almost two hun­ dred years, we find less stereotyping, but just as much bondage if not more, in the picture. The Government, (the official tool of the oppressors), under the guidance of that now infamous Senator, Joe McCarthy, began to label Negro writers, playwriters, plays, etc., as communistic and un-American. Black artists were harassed, jailed and stifled. McCarthyism, like the Communism scare of the Thirties, 71 sought to put the Black theatre in its place. This last word "place," I have discovered, means "out of existence." And so Black Drama struggles onward, but its lifesaving seed planted during the B Black R enaissance-has begun to mushroom a t l a s t . Black a r t i s t s no longer seek Broadway’s approval for their work. They are now cre­ ating blackness for blacks and to hell with the white Broadway. Each part then is almost a rewrite of any other with the ex­ ception of "Tomorrow," which is now. Each is a story of a people struggling to escape bondage, achieving, making great strides, then SLAP’. They are driven back. The hope for Black Theatre, according to Mr. Mitchell, lies with the youth. "The hope is that youth will te ll the American Oligarchy: No, no, you cannot continue to send me down the road of new discovery through alcohol, drugs, sexual d e v ia tio n , and f r u s t r a t i o n ." "In the last analysis this nation will have to accept their truly rebellious souls, subject not in the sense of doing them any special favors by extending human rights, for these people are not dogs begging to be let in the house. They helped build that house, to preserve it, and to revitalize it. And the best way America is going to realize this is to have it dramatized on our stages, TV screens, and movie screens." This prediction by Mitchell in 1967 has in my opinion remained unfulfilled, but the movement toward fulfillment is on. One can readily see that unless this direction is taken the ensuing frustration shall not split blacks and whites; they can’t get any further apart, technically, but that frustration will result in the destruction of America itself. 72

In Sterling Brown's The Negro Author and His Publisher, he tells us that before Richard Wright's Native Son, no black writer had made a living solely from creative writing. Many black writers had made money on their works through publicity by way of lectures and teaching. Authors such as Phillis Wheatley, who might have made money from their works, were published posthumously. Slave narratives were great sellers, but the authors shared their profits with ghost writers and turned quite a bit of it over to anti­ slavery organizations. Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, who were considered to be the first professional black writers, had to supplement their incomes through lecturing and journalism. Consequently, they could not devote all of their time to writing as they wished. W. E. B. DuBois, who had written a vast number of works, had to depend upon editing magazines, scholarly grants and teaching, in order to make a living. Many writers, such as William S. Braithwaite, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Zora Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Arna Bontemps, and Walter Turpin, relied upon grants, prizes, patronage, and most of all, teaching to support themselves and their families. The early years of the century involved "door to door" selling of books by their authors. These "author agents" took care of sales, distribution, and advertisement. This was a blessing to the authors who were lit­ tle known, but it was not very profitable. Sterling Brown feels that this is not a black experience alone. It has been the experience of all writers. Professional writing is a risky business for all involved. It has always been a problem fo r any new w rite rs . Some w hite w rite rs , such as Hemingway, were 73 popular due to publicity from such things as, ’'Book of the Month" clubs. It was believed that no author can expect to be an indi­ vidual and still be popular with everyone. Romance and intrigue were the big sellers and the publishers sought authors who wrote in th is v ein . For Blacks, the main hardship was racial prejudice. Stories that dealt with life as it was were not the the publishers’ liking. They were desirous of ’’conjure stories" and pictures of pastoral southern plantations. The publishers did not even want to reveal the author’s race unless it was a selling point. When Charles W. Chesnutt wrote his first book, it was not revealed that he was black. Ten years later, when it was popular, it was revealed. Langston Hughes felt that black novels were considered exotic by white publishers. He felt the more truthfully that we wrote, the more limited our works became. Happy ghetto life and picturesque southern scenes were big sellers. For whites, there was at least the possibility of working in fields directly related to writing. No such jobs existed for blacks. Blacks who were writers were not allowed to develop those writing skills that made their works fa­ vorable to white publishers. They were not allowed the exposure that white writers were, but they expected them to have the same skills. Publishers wanted books that they felt would sell. Regard­ less of whether the publisher was liberal or conservative, narrow or tolerant, in the end they were the same, businessmen. Brown felt that many black authors did not submit their works to publish­ ers for fear of their not being published. This attitude was by no means to their benefit. Many publishers did not feel that the 74 reading audience for black authors, mainly black people, was large enough to solicit a demand for black publications. There were many reasons for this. First, there were blacks who couldn’t afford to purchase any books. Many of the blacks who were among the middle class, did not relate to black books about black existence. The disinterest on the part of this segment of black society was an effort to escape the realities of blackness. These people were doing their utmost to withdraw and separate themselves from the problems of th e mass of b la c k s . Brown f e l t th a t some of th is was based upon the ineptitude of immature authors dealing with d iffi­ cult subject matter. This cannot be so if the authors are writing from their own experiences. This immaturity may in fact be a re­ flection on the standards set down by white critics for black au­ thors . They fail to realize that whatever rules and regulations apply to the white writers can never apply to blacks. Brown makes the statement that blacks cannot be regarded in a different light than other American w riters. When blacks speak of their experien­ ces they are no different than the Irish, the Germans, or the Jews. Yet he also asserts the fact that this equality does not necessar­ i ly make them immune to c r itic is m . They s t i l l must be su b jec t to the values and standards of white writing and composition. This in itself appears to be incongruent. How can a writer who wants to write about his experiences as he knows them and as he wants the reader to know them, not apply this same ideology to his writing style? How can he write about ghetto life and also proceed to form a p lo t when he knows th a t th e r e a l p lo t is a g a in st h is very lif e ? 75

This is what black writers are all about. They are not trying to write a good story, they are trying to get other blacks to under­ stand what is going on, and how they must be aware of it every day. But because a writer does not follow a manual, or a set of rules and directions, does this mean that his work is not legiti­ mate? The real legitimacy of an authorfs work lies in his ability to make his readers find his meaning. When a reader can relate to an author’s experiences as his own, then the author has indeed accomplished something. There were also at this time a few black publishing houses underway. Two of th ese were, C arter G. Woodson and th e Negro Pub­ lication Society. Carter G. Woodson probably more than any other single figure, encouraged a Negro audience to buy books by Negroes about Negro life and history. Brown felt that the black authors s till needed to know how to work within the existing publishing framework. They could not exist only in the aura of self-pity. They had to fight and push and force their way into the white lit­ erary world. But the question exists, why should blacks have to subject themselves to white standards; why should they have to prove themselves to anyone? When someone knows his worth, then he need not prove himself to anyone else. Until about 1962, there was very little good material written in depth about the struggles of the southern Negro freedom move­ ment . Mainly all there had been written were articles with no back­ ground basis. Nothing of value had been printed on the Southern

Negro revolt which had gone on since 1958. Although there were 76 many with great ability for writing, there were few materials writ­ ten by the actual participants of the civil rights struggle. Since 1962 there has been an abrupt change in the availability of written material, with quite a few books, articles, and record albums being printed.

"The Negro Revolt” by Louis Lomax which covers the history of the Negro revolt and the present Negro revolt is a good record of Negro oppression, unrest, injustices, and anger. But Lomax also was very wrong in parts of his book. Lomax tried to prove that Negroes are just like whites except for their skin, and by doing that he denied the fact that the Negro had developed a culture, distinctly his own, over the years of slavery. Lomax showed that the Negro historically could be seen helping achieve the American dream, whereas in truth the Negroes opposed the American whites in several instances. In dealing with the Negro's early belief in education, basi­ cally industrial, and in Negro business, Lomax showed that the be­ liefs were mislaid. Industrial education supposedly to advance racial progress was a false belief in that it did not prepare Ne­ groes for the job. The belief in Negro business was false because a small Negro business could not thrive against white monopolies. Lomax has agreed that the Negro people are a group molded to­ gether by a common suffering'and struggle but protested against it being called a cultural group.

Lomax, in dealing with the Negro outside the South, tells of the two main problems since the migration to the large cities. 77

They are housing, which is overcrowded and segregated, and the job discrimination, which has caused improper diets: poor food and a large amount of welfare. On current Negro revolt, Lomax tells of the desegregation in education which was heartbreaking in its slow fulfillm ent. It led the Negro to doubt the fairness of government, to lose trust in it, and to believe that the law could not effect change. Lomax believed that since the Negro has tried Negro business, education, and legalism as weapons against segregation, and since they have failed, that non-violent direct mass action is the weapon. Dr. Martin King was the leader in this new form of Negro revolt. The methods of Negro re v o lt were in s titu te d by SCLC, NMCP, and CORE with sit-in s, and freedom rides. Lomax supported SCLC, SNCC, and CORE because of their direct mass action and therefore disap­ proved of the now NMCP for not having mass action programs and . loss of contact with the Negro people. The Black Muslims seem to have his approval because of their representation of a threat for the future if progress is not made. Lomax saw the main role of the white liberal as using his power and influence on other white people to prepare them for the Negro’s civil rights movement. Lomax understood that very few white people had knowledge of the Negro, with the majority ignorant of the Negro and his history. Kaiser, in one of his few disagreements with Lomax, ridicules Lomax for failing to realize that the image of the Negro given in movies, television, books, magazines, and newspapers causes the whites to assume that the Negro is without a h is to ry . 78

In ,rPain and Progress” Lomax feels that as other minority groups have political power, now Negroes are getting some power, but also losing on the move to integrate because of talent, not race. He feels that the revolt will reach the more established part of the community in the future, for integration will not take place fast. Lomax feels that as integration advances, Negroes will rise as Americans rather than as Negroes. Kaiser feels that Lomax is too hopeful because with the bad American situation now, the. integration problem of Negroes w ill have a hard time being solved especially since Negroes are at the bottom. In the "Urban League" Lomax said that, while Whitney Young, executive secretary of the National Urban League, also says the Negro should be given special fast treatment to enable him to assume full responsibilities in American society, is the Negro ready to assume the responsibilities and privileges he seeks? Kaiser accuses Lomax of harping on Negro crime although Lomax says he understands the reasons for it: poverty, ignorance, and unemployment. Kaiser suggested that Lomax should suggest on work­ ing on changing the conditions and reasons instead of just under­ standing them. Kaiser points out that because of Lomax’s false statement on Negro weaknesses in his book, John Fisher wrote an article, using Lomax’s statements as ammunition in attacking Negroes. T. L. Jones made a speech using Fisher’s articles and stated that to deserve equal opportunity, Negroes have yet to prove that they deserve it. Fisher and Jones assumed that the sole Negro struggle for in­ tegration was at an end, while actually i t ’s only a beginning. 79

Kaiser states that Fisher and Jones put the obligation of improv­ ing the Negro conditions on the Negro rather than on the whites where it belongs since the Negroes are presently unable to improve the conditions. White writers will also use this inability to shame th e Negro. In "American Negro and Government," Lomax talks about 20th century Negro history but gives very few facts. Lomax puts a lot of faith in the Kennedy Administration’s help in the Negro’s reg­ istering to vote while it had to be done sooner or later. At the end, an "International Context for Current Negro Re­ volt" was compiled. Lomax sees the international race war as the main threat, but that a victory for the Negro revolt will help pre­ vent it. Kaiser feels that Lomax, as always, has passed over the political, economical, and social factors of the world today. Ralph Ellison in his article "On Recent Negro Fiction" states th a t: It was typical before the Harlem Renaissance for Black writers to write in a general way. They did not write to a Black audience and were therefore actually unknown to the Black masses. These writers were middle-class Negroes and simply could not relate to the masses of Blacks. They wrote what was acceptable to the white s o c ie ty . Their writings were directed towards that very white society. Since they did not have the same experiences that the Black masses had, it was impossible for them to consider themselves representatives of the Black masses. In 1920 fiction was more representative of the middle-class Negro. There was no reflection of the life styles of the Black masses. But there were two authors who were excep­ 80 tions to this limited style of writing. Langston Hughes and Richard Wright wrote in such a way that all who read their works could eas­ ily grasp the message that they were passing. In Uncle Tom’s Children. Wright uses a southern background to display the social ridicule Blacks encountered there. It must be known that Blacks did indeed try to better their life-styles only to be put "back into their places" with the noose of a rope. Blacks tried to make alliances with whites but these methods were of no good because racism had made a hard imprint into this society. Langston Hughes dealt directly with social protest that all Blacks could identify with Blacks (that is, the working class Blacks.) The works of these two writers was a sort of ice breaking in that Black folklore was beginning to pave the way for much protest writing. Negro folk culture was divided into the imitated culture of the middle-class Negro and that of the Negro in the slums and ghettos. During this period of literature, Langston Hughes’s work greatly flourished. Oppression was a real part of the Black masses everyday life style. Through Hughes,America became aware of the stuggling Black masses. From this awareness sprang many cultural organizations, one being the Federal Arts Project which enhanced Negro cultural activity. At the time of the stock market crash, the Black working class started picket lines. They were well aware of oppression and discrimination. Their actions and voices drowned out the conventional middle-class Negro writer. Black writers began to write to the Black masses. Consciousness of Black folklore was being noticed and organizations for social struggle emerged. 81

During 1939 and 1940 centers for cultural discussions evolved. And as usual Black writers entered these organizations only to be more confused and less vibrant in their works. Writers of this period, Arna Bontemps and Zora Neil Hurston did writings that had slackened in forcefulness. Their previous works were either his­ torical or set in the typical racist situation that many Blacks could identify with. For example, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watch­ ing God, tells of a southern Negro woman’s love life but rarely focuses on the brutalities of the south. And Arna Bontemps' con­ tribution, Black Thunder, was a great contribution to historical fiction but his Drums at Dusk as a historical romance hasn't the high seriousness of Black Thunder. The general effect of the Ne­ groes’ writing during this period was incompleteness. Native Son probably was the best work of Wright which excels all literature of the Harlem Renaissance. It conveys the cruel, brutal force of white society. The protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is a victim of this brutal force. One is able to put himself in Bigger's shoes and feel the ropes from the white side of society and from the Black side. The coming of Native Son fully shows cul­ tural and political segregation. It was a pathway for Negro fiction writers to master the culture and civilization through the tech­ niques and disciplines of his writing ability. The manner in which ethnic pride is manipulated in a class­ room peopled primarily by Black students can spell the difference between the success or failure of a language arts teacher’s goals. To truly understand the friction which can be caused by ethnic pride,

one must investigate its nature and see how it operates in a class­ 82 room situation. To many Black junior high school students, ethnic pride is a yearning for the familiar. It is an attempt to discov­ er what they are all about. Its purpose is to provide a focal point, a center of understanding or reason, from which the Black student can begin to comprehend his peculiar situation in the total American society.

Works by Black writers are extremely important in supplying the teachers and the students ample cultural and linguistic pat­ terns to build upon this ethnic pride. Some autobiographies and biograhies of and about famous American Blacks would serve quite effectively on the junior high school level to develop ethnic pride in the students: Marian Anderson's My Lord. What a Mornincr is the story of a great Black singer's growth in self-understanding and empathy; Roy Campanella's It's Good to Be Alive is an account of Campanella's rise from the sand lot to the Dodger's baseball team and of his struggle to recover from an auto accident; Sammy Davis, Jr.'s Yes. I Can is the story of his struggle, rise and acceptance in the mainstream culture; Althea Gibson's I Always Wanted to Be Somebody is the story of her rise from poverty to the top in tennis and her growth in empathy with minority and mainstream culture mem­ bers; Langston Hughes' The Big Sea is an account of Hughes' love of adventure and of his growth in empathy for ordinary Blacks and whites; Thomas W ill's The Seeking is a Black's Odyssey through prej­ udice to acceptance and friendship for his native Vermont; Arna Bontemps' Famous Negro Athletes presents sketches of Black athletes who have risen in the mainstream culture; Langston Hughes * Famous 83

American Necrroes is th e account of Robinson’s r i s e in b a se b a ll and of his efforts to bring about full acceptance of the Black man into the mainstream society; John Williams’s Sissie is the story of a Black family’s struggle with personality scars caused by childhood poverty toward self-understanding and acceptance; James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain is the story of a Black family’s inter­ nal struggles and its interaction with mainstream society; Langston Hughes' Simple’s Uncle Same is a collection of stories about an average Alabama-born Harlem Black’s interaction with Blacks and whites; James Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie is a play about the tria l of a southern man for the murder of a Black man who, on returning from the north, "insulted” the white southern­ er’s wife; Gwendolyn Brooks' Bronzeville Boys and Girls is a col­ lection of poems about children in Chicago; Rachel Field’s Prayer for a Child is a prayer in verse for the blessing of Black child­ ren everywhere; James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name is a collec­ tion of essays with titles and content reflecting a Black’s search for identity in the mainstream culture. Examples of the titles are: "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American," "Fifth Avenue Uptown," "E ast R iver Downtown," "Nobody Knows My Name"; Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X is the story of his ex­ periences in Black and mainstream culture. He talks about the ex­ periences which led to his being a leader in the Black Muslim Re­ ligion; Lorene Bennet, Jr.'s What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King. J r.. is the story of Dr. King’s growth in un­ derstanding of the dilemma faced by Blacks and whites, as well as 84 his efforts to lead both groups to harmonious living; James Baldwin's Another Country is a portrayal of talented Blacks in search of identity, values, purpose and love against the background of main­ stream culture; Langston Hughes’ Tambourines to Glory is an explo­ ration of religious mores of Blacks in Harlem in interaction with mainstream culture; Mr. Hughes' Simple Speaks His Mind: Laughing to Keep from Crying; Simple Takes a Wife: Simple Stakes a Claim; and The Best of Simple are all about an average Alabama-born Harlem Black man who is usually chatting with a college-educated man about his problems and his views; William M. Kelley's Dancers on the Shore is a collection of stories about a middle-class Black actor's family dealing with the search for identity in the interaction be­ tween lower Black and mainstream cultures. Since the primary concern is the experience background of the Black junior high school students, the above works should serve to open up new channels of understanding for him. The students know poverty and its manifestations—malnutrition, chronic illness, early death, violence, murder, suicide, and drug addiction. Literature chosen to engage these young learners in the learning process must present them a world with which they can identify—one which has familiar entry points.

Works by Mainstream Authors

Another prime concern of the language arts teacher should be the choice of literary experiences designed to initiate a Black

learner in the quest for empathy with mainstream culture persons.

The Black student living in poverty in the midst of the more afflu­ 85 ent mainstream culture, with television commercials in recent years highlighting the material barrenness of his culture, has been con­ ditioned to think of members of the mainstream culture as his na­ tural enemies. Literature chosen to start him on a quest for empathy with members of the mainstream culture must portray minority culture persons as liv e , unstereotyped human beings in te r e s tin g with dig-* nity and respect for their own values among mainstream culture mem­ bers . Some works by white writers have portrayed this image quite w ell. John Griffin's Black Like Me is the author's account of his passing for a Black in the South and shows how it feels to be treated like a Black by whites and Blacks there. Dorothy Sterling's Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman is the biography of a leader in the pre-Civil War underground railroad; Frank Bonham's Durango Street is the story of the involvement of a young Black probationer with gangs and of his struggle toward self-understand­ ing and empathy; Ruth F. Chandler's Ladder to the Sky is an account of a seventh grade Black youth who grows in understanding as he overcomes problems in a white school; Lucy Daniel's Caleb. My Son. a southern Black family is involved in the civil rights struggle to the point that the father kills the son to keep from disgracing the family with a trashy white girl; Nat Hentoffs Jazz Country. sixteen-year-old Tom, finding it hard as a white to make good in jazz where the great artists are Black, gains maturity; Bella Rodman's Lions in the Wav, is the story of the interaction between whites and Blacks in a sourthern Black community in which Blacks try 86 to integrate a white high school; Phillip Durham's and Everett L. Jones"s The Adventures of the Necrro Cowboys is an account of the interaction between Black and white cowboys in the development of the Southwest and West. Sarah P. Boyle’s The Desegregated Heart. a white southern tells about her struggle to overcome ignorance and prejudice among her people as she tried to bring about "deseg­ re g a tio n of th e h e a rt" among them; S h irle y Graham's The Story of Phillis Wheatley: Poetess of the American Revolution, the life of a Black slave girl in colonial Boston who wrote poetry, applauded in New England and England; M. J. Shapiro's The Roy Campanella Story is an account of a Black catcher's struggle to make the major league and then for a role after a paralyzing auto accident; also Shapiro’s The Willie Mays Story which traces May's struggle to the top in baseball and his growth in the mainstream culture; Elizabeth Yate’s Amos Fortune: Free Man is the story of a slave who buys his own and his wife's freedom, becomes an honored citizen in New Hamp­ shire, and does a great deal for his community. In Adele DeLeeuw's The Barred Road, a white 'high school girl practices integration, is ostracized by her friends, goes to work in a Black community center and finally breaks down prejudice in her family and school. Cath­ erine Marshall’s Julie's Heritacre is a story of a talented Black girl who learns how to cope with rejection when she enters a pre­ dominantly white high school. In Hope Newell's A Cap for Mary E llis. the characters Mary and Julie are the first Blacks to be ad­

mitted to a nursing school where they overcome their problems as they grow and bring about growth in empathy. A s equel is Mary E llis, 87

Student Nurse; Dorothy Sterling1s Mary Jane is the story of a Black girl who gradually wins acceptance in integrating a predominantly white school in a southern town. William Faulkner’s ’’That Evening Sun,” and other stories in Collected Stories are concerned with showing interaction between Black servants and the southern white families for which they work; Eugene O’N eill’s fill God’s Chillun Got Wings, in Nine Plays deals with the problems of racial inter­ marriage and their potentially tragic consequences. Eloise Culver’s Great American Negroes in verse contains forty-one poems about Blacks and about whites who have been important in the Black strug­ gle. Hildegarde Swift’s North Star Shining is a verse account of the highlights of the Black man’s accomplishment in the building up of America; Jules Henry’s ’’White People’s Time, Colored People’s Time," in Staten W. Webster, The Disadvantaged Learner, treats the differences between mainstream and minority culture children’s views of time makes the latter less disciplined. Marc Connelly’s The Green Pastures is a dramatization of scenes from the Bible as a Black Sunday School class sees them. Martin Duberman’s In White America is a documentary play showing scenes of interaction between whites and Blacks based on a variety of historical documents.

The Relationship between the Black Dialect and Learning to Read

The phonological features of the Black dialect have been charted by Pederson (1965) in Chicago, by Labov (1966) in New York City, and by Shuy, Wolfram and Riley (1967) in Detroit. Many of the subjects of these studies were of the junior high school age group. In most 88 available studies of Black students’ language performance both Black and white subjects have been included. Often the linguistic analyses have failed to describe the grammatical structures of the Black child’s language; instead the Black child’s language corpus has been compared with the white child's as to production of pre­ scribed standard English grammatical structures. Several perti­ nent studies of this type will be reviewed. Thomas (1962) gathered language samples from Black and white kindergarten children living in socioeconomic areas of Detroit. The language samples were analyzed according to sentence structures used. In addition, a vocabulary list derived from the speech sam­ ples was tabulated and compared with standardized primary grade word lists. Generally it was found that low status children (both Black and white) showed evidence of deficiency in amount, maturity, and quality of oral expression. Thomas also found that twenty to fifty percent of the words used by the subjects tended to differ from primary grade word lists. Black children tended to be some­ what deficient in amount, maturity, and accuracy of oral expres­ sio n when standard English was th e language used. Riling (1965) included 100 black fourth grade students in a replication of Stuckland’s (1962) study of the oral language of children compared with their textbooks. Riling found that: ’’Negro children are more fluent than Caucasian children of their own grade level, but they do not use the variety of language structures that

Caucasian children do.” She neglected to define ’’fluent” and fol­

lowed the quoted statement with: "In oral language they (Black 89 children) enunciate less clearly and have many dialectal peculiari­ ties.” In addition, Riling found that all the fourth grade subjects irrespective of relatively low scores on reading and mental maturity tests or of low socioeconomic status, used all the basic language structures and varied them extensively in their oral language. Houston (1968) conducted a pilot investigation of the language of Black children, median age about eleven, in a rural county in Northern Florida. The investigator found two varieties of Black Dialect in the language samples: educated and uneducated. These two varieties of Black Dialect were further defined by distinguish­ ing features into ’’registers” which the investigator characterized as ’’school" and '’nonschool," each possibly including more than one style. Houston found that the nonschool register of these child­ ren was characterized by long utterances, rapid speech, low pitch, less stress, inventive and playful use of words, and variety of content, as opposed to the school register which displayed a lim­ ited number of the features of the nonschool register. Houston concluded that the Black child’s language was in no way impover­ ished or pidginized. Labov (1969) provided a similar report of the language of the Black pre-adolescent and adolescent males in inner-city New York. In their neighborhood environments, the young males entered into

lively, logically-oriented discourse concerning many topics whereas at school, many of the same young men failed to acquire rudimentary reading skills. 90

Summary

Like all other children, Black children enter school knowing and using the basic phonological and grammatical features of the dialect spoken in their speech communities. The dialect spoken by these children is a variety of Black English which differs in specific and rule-governed ways from standard English, the dialect used primarily in school books and other avenues of communication. Shuy (1970) stated that reading materials written in the Black stu­ dent’s cultural and linguistic patterns could affect their literacy. He postulated that dialectal reading materials (Black Literature written in the Black Dialect) would serve to build self-esteem and motivation into the students. Baratz (1970) unequivocally stated that the Black Dialect was sufficiently divergent from Standard English to cause difficulty for Black Dialect speakers who were attempting to learn to read using Standard English textbooks. Chapter II has presented a review of the literature related to creating a functionable language arts program in a predomi­ nantly Black junior high school, and the relationship between the Black Dialect and learning to read. Chapter III will present teach­ ing units prepared from works by Black authors, as well as from experiences equally unique to the Black Americans. CHAPTER I I I

LANGUAGE ARTS INSTRUCTIONAL UNITS

During the many years that I have taught language arts, I have concluded that many Black children experience great difficulty in learning to read simply because the teaching materials are not de­ signed around the cultural implications of these children. Because of this discrepancy in teaching materials, many of the students achieve little more than a functional level of literacy during their years in junior and secondary school programs. The use of different methods or materials has been advocated with many of the new materi­ als designed for the avowed purpose of teaching the disadvantaged child to read; yet, they have neither mitigated the situation nor erased the marks of reading failure chalked up to the schools. I have found through my years of experience that not only are mate­ rials and methodology involved in this failure, but the entire edu­ cational establishment. The educational establishment, including the schools and universities, needs to take a broader view of the entire process of teaching children to read. The immediate change in the classroom usually comes directly from the teacher, but since she is a product of the university teacher education program and since she works within the administrative structure of the school system, change always cannot be effected without the active involve­ ment of both institutions.

91 92

In the language arts programs of predominantly black schools, teaching the children to read seems often to be the primary objec­ tive. I have come to realize that reading, in and of itself, is a skill, not a discipline, but the skill can be acquired most suc­ cessfully if it is taught within a framework of several disciplines with attention to the contributions of each and their interrela­ tionships . The distinction should be made between multi-disciplinary —many disciplines not necessarily related—and interdisciplinary— between and among d is c ip lin e s . An in te rd is c ip lin a ry approach draws on the interrelated offerings of various disciplines both directly and indirectly. This point will be more clearly shown in the first unit of instruction later on in this Chapter. From the interdisciplinary approach to teaching language arts skills, the learning process is viewed in terms of the total envi­ ronment. One looks not only at what is to be exposed to the learn­ ing situation and who, as a result of the instruction, is expected to learn. The background of the black child in a junior high school language arts class, who has been exposed to the traditional instructional language arts program and who frequently has not ex­ perienced success, is usually different from that of his teacher. In the traditional program the black student seems to have a pre­ disposition for failure. If there are factors in his environment that are contributory to this prediction of failure, then some kind of intervention should occur to counteract possible failure. This, then, has been the primary purpose of this project— to intervene with alternatives to prevent the possibility of failure.

Therefore, I have prepared three units of instruction which are 93 designed to teach language arts skills to the black child all the while developing a keen sense of self-esteem and cultural pride in him. The three units follow three approaches: the interdis­ ciplinary approach, the literary approach and the cultural approach. The first unit to be presented is Afro-America. It is inter­ disciplinary in that it is concerned with geographic locations, the literature as well as the culture of black people in the United S ta te s . Unit 1 Interdisciplinary Approach: Afro-America General Statement The Afro-Americans are an integral part of American life. Even though a minority in numbers, their influence in science, literature, education, and athletics, and especially, in social reforms, is of major importance to their race as well as to all races, that make up the population of the United States and the world. The express purpose of this unit, then, is to present to the students the cultural contributions of the Afro-Americans to the United States and what they are continuing to contribute to nation­ al and world development. The unit was prepared to teach reading skills to black students on the junior high school level. Obi e c tiv e s Concepts: 1. Geography of the United States has influ­ enced how and where the Afro-American has liv e d . 2. Afro-Americans have contributed to the culture of the United States. 3. The struggle of Afro-Americans for free­ dom and dignity in the past has affected the present and will affect the future. 4. When one is able to understand a group such as the Afro-Americans, conflict is lessened and appreciation of them is g re a te r. S k ills 1. To take an active part in group discussions. 2. To improve reading skills. 3. To improve cooperation in group study and in good listening while others are reporting. 4. To stimulate an interest in further reading, take notes, evaluate, and summarize for oral and written reports. 5. To think reflectively on social problems. 6. To be able to evaluate ideas and opinions on controversial problems in a way that will contribute to the general welfare of the black community. A ttitu d es 1. To develop respect and cooperation among individuals and the class as a whole. 2. To develop an understanding of interdepen­ dence among all people of all races in the United States. 3. To develop an awareness of the problems and feelings of others. 4. To develop a respect for contributions made by Afro-Americans in th e h is to ry of the United States. Outline in Brief

I. Geography affects where people live A. Where th e Afro-American has liv ed B. Means of liv in g in early h isto ry of country C. Occupational roles of Afro-Americans

I I . The stru g g le fo r human d ig n ity A. Slavery B. In d iv id u a l stru g g le s C. Group stru g g le s

III. Contributions of American culture A. Afro-American pioneers

B. Contributions in particular fields IV. The Afro-American today A. Where Afro-Americans liv e and work today B. Agencies help Afro-Americans C. Outstanding Afro-Americans

UNIT OUTLINE

Geography of the United Developmental Variants States has influenced how and where th e Afro-American The u s a b ility of an are a has liv e d . is affected by its loca­ tion with respect to the A. Where has th e Afro- e a rth , and to people and American lived? things on earth. 1 . Where did th e f i r s t Africans live? 2 . Where did th e Afro- Americans live after 1800? 96

B. How did people earn a Different occupiers of living in the United the land have applied know­ States in its early ledge, tools, and ways of years? Why? working to the natural habitat. As each group 1. New England colonies? of settlers discovered and appraised th e n a tu ra l 2. Middle colonies? elements, they developed d iff e r e n t ways of liv in g 3. Southern colonies? and working which have changed from time to time C. What occupations did the during the history of the Afro-Americans have in c o u n try . the early history of the United States? 1. The northern part of the country? 2. The southern part of the country? 3. The western part of the country? II. The struggle of the Afro- The r a te of c u ltu r a l change Americans for freedom and v a r ie s . The degree of dignity in the past has af­ social, political, and fe c te d th e p resen t and w ill economic development w ill affect the future. influence the rate of change. A. How did being a slave affect a person's life? 1. What were a d u lts ex­ pected to do? 2. How did children live? B. How have individual per­ Every effort at reform be­ sons in history helped gan as the private opinion to obtain dignity for of an individual. Afro-Americans ? 1. Crispus Attucks? 2. Soj ourner Truth? 3. H a rrie t Tubman? 4. James Forten? 5. Frederick Douglass? 97

6. Abraham Lincoln? 7. Charles Lenox Redmond? 8 . Richard Allen? 9 . Martin Luther King, Jr.? 10. John F. Kennedy? How have groups of persons in history helped to bring dig­ nity to Afro-Americans? 1. Quakers? 2. The Freedmens Bureau? 3. The Abolitionists? 4. The Union so ld ie rs? 5. Labor Unions? III. Afro-Americans have contri­ No..one is born with culture buted to the culture of the but each person acquires United States. the culture of his group as he liv e s and le a rn s A. How can Afro-Americans w ith in i t . be considered pioneers? 1. Navigators and s e ttle r s ? 2. Social reformers? B. What did th e Afro- Americans give to the United States in the fields of science, educa­ tion, and literature, m usic, a r t , and a th le tic s 1. Science? a . Benj amin Bannaker? b. George Washington Carver? c. Dr. Daniel Hale W illiam s? d. G r a itv ille T. Woods? 2. Literature and Education? As people met their basic a. Phillis Wheatley? needs, they had more time b. Booker T. Washington? for self-expression c. W. E. B. DuBois? through the arts such as d. Paul Laurence Dunbar? literature, drama, the e. Paul Vesey? dance, music, painting, f. Langston Hughes? sculpture and architec- g. Arna Bontemps? ture. 3. Music? a. Negro spirituals? b. Individual persons? 1. Marian Anderson? 2. Mahalia Jackson? 3. Nat "King” Cole? 4. Duke E llin g to n ? 4. Art? a. Before the twenti­ eth century? b. Twentieth century a r t is t s ?

5. Sports? a . Boxing? b. Basketball? c. Football? d. Baseball? When one is able to understand a group such as the Afro- Americans conflict is lessened and appreciation of them is g r e a te r . A. Where are th e Afro- Americans living today? B. What agencies are being used to help Afro- Americans share in equal r ig h ts and g ain th e ir human d ig n ity ? 1. NAACP? 2. National Urban League? 3. Congress of Racial E quality? 4. Southern Christian Leadership Confer­ ence? C. Outstanding Afro- Americans today? 1. Congressmen? 2. Ent ert ainers ? 3. Athletes? 4. Civil Rights Workers? A c tiv itie s Introductory Activities 1. Make a map of the United States for a bulletin board entitled Afro-Americans Today. Have the children cut out pictures of Afro-Americans today that they think are important. Put these pictures on the map. 2. Display pictures of Afro-Americans in history. 3. Have a class discussion on Afro-Americans they know of in the news or in history. 4. Sing a Negro spiritual the children know or have heard of b efo re. 5. Discuss what an Afro-American is. 6. Show the motion, picture "Negro Heroes in American History 7. Display the books: Negro Cowboys: Straighthair. Curley Hair: Golden Slippers: The First Book of the Civil War; American Heritage Pictorial Atlas of United States His­ t o r y . Developmental A ctivities Concept 1. Geography of the United States has influenced how and where the Afro-American has lived. 1. Make a salt map of the colonies or of a particular colony 2. Write a story on the ways of life in a certain colony or of th e same area th e s a lt map was made o f. 3. Make a map of where the Afro-Americans came from and where they settled. Trace the course. 4. Have group discussions on occupations Afro-Americans had during the early part of our country’s history. a. Northern part of the country. b. Southern part of the country. c . Western part of the country. 5. Make a study of where Afro-Americans migrated from the years 1800 to 1830 and re p o rt o r a lly . 100

6. Begin to construct a chronological chart of im­ portant happenings in the lives of Afro-Americans, persons, and discoveries. 7. Have children construct a booklet of Negro history that seems important and of interest to them. It could include history, pictures, clippings, poems, o r so n g s. 8. Discuss why African slaves were brought to this c o u n try . Concept 2. Afro-Americans have contributed to the culture of the United States. 1. Read orally descriptions and personal accounts from In Their Own Words. 2. Have children write reports on individual Afro- Americans in history. 3. Play the record ’’Negro People in America.” 4. Have a panel on organizations that have helped Afro- Americans to gain their dignity. a . Quakers b. Freedmens Bureau c. Abolitionists d. Union soldiers e. Labor unions 5. Have children make a model, draw or paint a scene of a southern plantation. 6. After reading materials on slave life have children do role playing of being a slave or the master. 7. Show the film strip "Exploding the Myths of Prejudice." 8. Play the record "Songs of American Negro Slaves."

Concept 3. The struggle of Afro-Americans for freedom and dignity in the past has affected the present and will affect the future.

1. Show the film strip "Minorities have made America great." 2. Play the recording "Story of Jazz for Children." 101

3. Have children bring records of Negro singers they may have at home and have them look up the life of this person or group to give a short oral report.

4. Read orally poetry by Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, or Phillis Wheatley. 5. Have a group discussion on contributions of Afro-Americans in the field of science. a. One group takes the field of medicine. b. One group take inventors. 6. As each specific field of contribution is discussed, have children make a bulletin board corresponding to th a t f ie ld . Have them fin d p ic tu re s or have them draw or paint pictures to describe the things they are discussing. 7. Have written reports on famous sports persons. Encourage the bringing of sports magazines and equipment to show to the class what the person in that sport does. 8. Have children sing Negro folk and spiritual songs. 9. Have a discussion on why so many Afro-Americans are famous stars in the entertainment world. 10. Show the motion picture film "Story of Doctor Carver." 11. Have children read prose or poetry written by Afro- Americans and have them share it with the class orally. 12. Have a panel of Afro-American artists early and late artists. Each person could investigate a different artist or could investigate different types of fine art, painters, sculpturers, or architects.

Concept 4. When one is able to understand a group such as the Afro-Americans conflict is lessened and appreciation of them is greater. 1. Make a map showing where Afro-Americans live today. 2. Have children write short stories of how an Afro- American might live in a large city, a small town, or on a farm. 3. Have all types of group discussions on what agencies are doing to help Afro-Americans gain dignity and their rights. a . NAACP b . CORE c . SCLC d. Congress of Racial Equality Have c h ild re n make a ch art of Afro-Americans they h ear about in the news. Have children act out how it would be to be a famous Afro-American they have studied about in history or of a person in th e news re c e n tly . Have children report on entertainers in the news. If possible, bring books, newspaper clippings, records, and pictures to better illustrate their life and work.

Culminating Activities

Complete the chart of chronology. Have a party serving favorite Negro foods, play music of Afro-Americans, old and pop m usic. Have a larg e d is ­ play of pictures of Afro-Americans and books. Read poetry or a short story written by an Afro-American. Play a Bill Cosby record. Put names of Afro-Americans studied in a box and divide the class into two teams. After pulling a name out the child should te ll something about that person and if correct, that side will get one p o in t. Have c h ild re n make up a s k it of a famous happening in history. The other children should guess what the others are acting out. Have th e c h ild re n w rite a biography of any Afro- American they would like. Give children a written test over material covered. Conduct a discussion on the importance of the unit just studied. Complete booklets started in the beginning of the unit. Make the covers and display them for the whole class. 103

Evaluation

Evaluation should be made in terms of skills, attitudes, and concepts learned. Teachers and pupils should evaluate the results of their work by a criteria set up at the beginning of the unit.

The children should know basic knowledge but also increase in co­ operation with others. This growth should be measured'in as many different ways as possible, written and oral work.

Teacher's Books

American Heritage Pictorial Atlas of U. S. History. New York: American H eritage P ublishing Company, I n c ., 1966. The book gives information about history, geography, agriculture, population, economy, pictures, maps, and graphs, a very thorough job. Although reading materials are difficult for the average student the pictures and maps would be of use. Civil Rights. Facts on File, Inc., 1964. Facts of what happened in recent years. Information is reprinted from News Year and Facts on File and other sources. Davis, John P. The American Negro Reference Book. New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc., 1966. Current information on main aspects of Afro-American life in America contrasting the past and present. Articles written by scholars. Davis, Jr., Sammy. Yes I Can. New York: Farras, Straus, 1965. Autobiography of a Negro making good from a poverty- stricken family. Dumond, Dwight Lowell. Antislaverv. University of Michigan Press, 1961. Slavery and its beginning to the Civil War. Pictures. Pictures should be of interest to students. Katz, William Loren. Eyewitness. New York: Pitman Publishing Corp., 1967. H istory and p ic tu re s of th o se who made h is to ry . From slavery to the present time. 104

. Teachers Guide to American Negro History. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, Inc., 1968. A resource unit in itself. Books related to various topics, films, filmstrips, addresses for additional infor­ mation. A valuable book for all teachers. Kozol, Jonathan. Death at an Early Age. Boston: Houghton Mifflin-- Company, 1968. The story of the destruction of Afro-American children’s minds in Boston Public Schools. Lincoln, C. Eric. The Negro Pilcrrimacre in America. New York: Bantam P ath fin d er e d itio n s , 1967. Lodd, Jr., Everett Carl. Necrro Political Leadership in the South. New York: Cornell University Press, 1966. Meltzer, Milton (editor). In Their Own Words. Volume I. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1964. Telling the story of how they as Afro-Americans felt, thought, and suffered. From actual letters, diaries, and journals. From the years 1619-1865. (editor). In Their Own Words. Volume II, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1965. Actual facts from diaries, journals, and documents. The book covers the years 1865-1916.

(editor). In Their Own Words. Volume III, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968. Stresses achievements and changes. Covers the years 1916 to 1966.

Necrro Handbook. The. Chicago: Johnson P ub lish in g Company, I n c ., 1966. Deals with mainly, Afro-Americans in the last ten to twenty years. Discussions on populations, civil rights, crime, education, economy, religion, sports, entertainers. Book bibliography for further information. P losk, Harry A. and Roscoe C. Brown, J r . , e d ito rs . The Necrro - •- Almanac. New York: Bellehter Publishing Company, Inc., 1967. History, culture, growth, landmarks, from slavery to pres­ ent time. Graphs, charts, pictures, and a book bibliography. Pictures would be of value to children. 105

Rollins, Charlemae H ill. They Showed the Wav. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1964. Forty American Negro leaders throughout the years. In­ ventors, politicians, musicians, and war heroes. Ross, Arthur M. and Herbert Hill, editor. Employment. Race and Poverty. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, Inc., 1967. A critical study of Negro workers from 1865 to 1965. Excellent charts of employment forces, numbers and what occupations are held. Changes through the years. White, Newman I. American Necrro Folk Songs. Pennsylvania: Folklore Associates, Inc., 1965. Negro songs, religious work songs, add specimen of th e se songs. D iscussions of word o rig in s , and when and why the songs were sung.

Books for Junior High School Students

Adoff, Arnold, editor. I Am the Darker Brothers. New York: Macmillan Company, 1968. An anthology of modern poems by Afro-Americans. Bernard, Jacqueline. Journey Toward Freedom. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1967/" The biography of Sojourner Truth, abolitionist, and re­ ligious leader in the nineteenth century. One of the great women Negro leaders. Bontemps, Arno. Golden Slippers. New York: Harper and Row, 1941. Poetry and simple verse of Afro-American w riters. Buckmaster, Henrietta. Flight to Freedom. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968. A book about the underground railroad. Cavanah, Frances. Our Country's Freedom. New York: Rand McNally and Company, 1966. Tells of Americans struggling for freedom from the time of the settlers, Indians, immigrants, world wars, and the Afro-Americans.

* Difficult books. 106

Cuban, Larry. The Necrro in America. Gleview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman, and Company, 1964.* Contains different documents on Negro problems from in­ dividuals, books, and periodicals. It starts from the begin­ ning of slavery to the March on Washington in 1963. Durham, P h ilip and E v erett L° Jo n es. The Negro Cowboys. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1965. Gives a h is to ry of when Afro-Americans came west and how they helped to tame the west. D rish, Carol F. and Edgar A. Toppin. The U nfinished March. Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1967.* A paperback book that gives the history of the Afro- American from reconstruction days to World War I. Goldin, Augusta. Straight Hair. Curly Hair. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1966.+ Goldston, Robert. The Negro Revolution. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968.* Johnston, Johanna. A Special Bravery. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1967. Lenenson, Dorothy. The First Book of the Civil War. New York: Franklin Watts, Inc., 1968. Original Civil War drawings and photographs. Details of what happened, famous persons. Pine, Tillie S. and Joseph Levine. The Africans Knew. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967.+ The A fricans knew how to do th in g s ju s t as we know things today, fire, iron ore, music, agriculture, and clock making. Patrick, John J. The Progress of the Afro-American. Westchester, Illinois: Benefic Press, 1969." Struggle and growth, problems and potential. Differing viewpoints are given. Discussion questions at the end of each chapter. Richardson, Ben. Great American Negroes. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1948. Famous Negroes in the fields of orchestra, classical and popular music, theatre, sports, education, science, politics, and the military.

*D ifficult books . +Easy books. 107

Saunders, Doris E., editor. The Kennedy Years and the Negro. Chicago: Johnson P u b lish in g Company, I n c ., 1964. A photograph record. Schecter, Betty. The Peaceable Revolution. Boston: The Riverside Press, Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1963.* Discussions of Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and the Afro-American. A history of man's longing for justice and the history of non-violence protest. Showers, Paul. Your Skin and Mine. New York; Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1965.+ People’s skin is the same but just a little different. Young, Margaret B. The First Book of American Negroes. New York: Franklin Watts, Inc., 1966. The story of Afro-Americans today in the last ten to twenty years. Some background is given. Films, Filmstrips. and Records. "Exploding the myths of prejudice." Two filmstrips with records and script. Part of a kit put out by Warren Schloet. Gives a basic understanding of prejudices, (color, 55 frv ) "Minorities have made America great." Two film strips with records and script. Four other films in this kit deal with other minority groups. Films deal with contributions made by Afro- Americans . (color, 50 fr.) "Negro Heroes in American History." A motion picture. Sketches of heroes in American history, (color, 11 min.) "Story of Dr. Carver." A motion picture. Story of how a slave boy advanced himself to a renowned scientist, (color, 10 min.) "Negro People in America." A record portraying the lives of people during two centuries from slavery to the present time. (33 rpm.) "Songs of American Negro Slaves." A record giving work songs, s p ir itu a ls , game songs, and songs of hope. Booklet included gives additional background. (33 rpm.) "The Glory of Negro History." A recording narrated by Langston Hughes. The Negro in America from earliest times until the present time. (33 rpm.) "Story of Jazz for Children." A record narrated by Langston Hughes. Traces development of Jazz from African beginnings to the present. (33 rpm .)

*Difficult books + Easy books. 108

Further Information United States Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C. Cata­ logues are available for studying Afro-Americans. U. S. Civil Rights Commission, Washington, D. C. Annual reports given on the different phases of Negro life. The Negro Bibliographic and Research Center, Washington, D. C. Quarterly bibliographic survey of materials on the Negro. Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago. Publishers of ’’Ebony," "Jet," "Tan," and "Negro Digest." Pictures in "Ebony" are ex­ cellent for teachers. The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Washing­ ton, D. C. Provides a catalogue of its books and catalogue of hundreds of inexpensive pictures of Negro leaders past and present. Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, New York. Publishers of booklets and materials on Negroes. They have a film library that provides movies and filmstrips at little or no cost. Catalogues are free on request. "Life." Four part series entitled "The Search for a Black Past." Discussion of the past, growth, and the present. Discussion, documents, and pictures. Valuable for teacher and student. November 22, 29, December 6 and 13 iss u e s , 1968.

U nit I I Literary Approach: Major Black-American Authors and T heir Best Known Works

General Statement This unit will employ works by Black authors to teach language arts skills to Black youths on the junior high school level. As was stated in Chapter II of this project, Black youths need to ex­ perience a sense of pride and dignity during their formative years in school. All of the textbooks used do not include very much at all about the Black man’s contributions to the development of this country. There needs to be created an aura of self-esteem and a sense of empathy in the youth’s life. Literature by Black-American 109 authors is the best vehicle for these purposes.

William F. Marquarat in his article, "Creating Empathy through L ite ra tu re between Members o f th e Mainstream C ulture and Disadvan­ taged Learners of the Minority Cultures" stated:

Black power is helping us to see that giving 'disadvan­ taged ' learners isolated communication skills is not bringing them into growth-interaction with the main­ stream culture of the United States. Teachers of the disadvantaged, after some experimentation with Eng­ lish as a second language technique aimed at giving their disadvan­ taged learners ability to communicate in mainstream English, are again turning to literature to provide the magic without which the disadvantaged seem to have little incentive for learning mainstream communication sk ills. (Florida FL Reporter, Spring/Summer, 1969). The most relevant magic in our day is giving the child a sense of pride by using Black authors in the language arts curriculum as well as creating empathy—the habit of trying in time of conflict to see things the other person’s way. If our schools were commit­ ted to making the quest by teachers as well as students for empathy with persons different from themselves, the primary objective in • every course of activity, violence, racism, and destruction might become negligible occurrences in our lives. Aldous Huxley in his article "Literature and Science” stated: Science is important in human affairs for investi­ gating, ordering and communicating the more public or human experiences, but literature is indispensable be­ cause its main concern is with man’s more private ex­ periences and with the interactions between the private worlds of sentient, self-conscious individuals and the public universes of objective reality, logic, social conventions and the accumulated information currently available. (Harper and Row, 1963). 110

Literature, then, especially those works by Black authors, is the best basis for teaching language arts skills to Black Youths. I have found also that literature is the best way to motivate stu­ dents who have a negative or an indifferent orientation toward learning. Literature can be used to break this orientation and to engage these students in the learning process and keep them learn­ ing once the process has started.

Unit Outline of Major Writers

I . Langston Hughes A. Background 1. His central purpose in writing was to "explain and illuminate" the Negro experience. 2. Born February 1, 1902, his parents were separated and his home life was at times very hectic. 3. Throughout h is early l i f e , Hughes tra v e le d a g reat deal and worked at a variety of jobs. 4. Hughes wrote throughout his life. Unlike many au­ thors of the Harlem Renaissance whose careers ended with it, Hughes continued until his death. 5. Hughes was very concerned w ith th e th e a tre and formed several theater groups. 6. His most famous character is Jesse B. Simple, b e tte r known as j u s t Simple. 7. Hughes was known fo r h is tra n s la tio n s and work in the area of books for children that helped to illuminate the history and the experience of the Negro for them. 8. He also has published collections of works of Negro authors. I l l

B. Poems

1. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." The speaker tells of the rivers that he knows. He knows about the rivers from his African heritage and from his heritage as an American slave. He says that his knowledge has made him deep like the rivers. 2. "Mulatto"—A child of a white man and a black woman petitions his father for acknowledgment and love, but his father, taunting him about his mother's vir­ tue and person, rejects him. 3. "The Negro Mother"—traces the sacrifices and the things that she has had to do for her children from the time that slaves were brought to America until the present time. The poem expresses her love and her hope for her children. 4. "Evenin' Air Blues"—The speaker is out in the air, but air has been all that he has had to eat lately. He was told to come north and seek his fortune but all that he has is air and he is unhappy, so he has the blues. The poem can be used for the basis of an interesting discussion on the language of poetry and what the poet can do with the same word. 5. "Dream Boogie"—A little boy tells his father about the music that he is listening to but his father tells him to take the music away again. The father seems to have his own problems and is not interest­ ed in what his son has to say. Short Stories 1. "On the Road"—The setting for the story is a cold night during the Depression and it is snowing out­ side. A man named Sargeant applies for aid at a parsonage but the minister refuses to open the door to him and tells him to go to the relief mis­ sion down the street. Sargeant decides to enter the church and this seems to begin his fantasy. He dreams that he is able to knock down the church and to rescue Christ from the altar. Christ then accompanies him to a hobo camp but does not spend the night because he has to catch a train to Kansas City. The next morning, Sargeant thinks that the police capture and beat him as he is boarding a train. In reality, he is jailed. He seems to realize for a short while that he is in jail but then at the end, he slips back into fantasy. 112

2. "Dear Dr. Butts"—Simple explains that he saw the picture of Dr.Butts in a white newspaper and the paper said that Dr. Butts was a Negro leader but as far as Simple is concerned, Dr. Butts is not his leader because he does not come to Harlem. His second complaint against Dr. Butts is that his speeches are too full of BUTS. Everything that he says is qualified by a but and Simple thinks that Dr. Butts is not really saying any­ thing to help the Negro but simply to please and not to offend his white audience. Simple says that the Negro has tried to get rid of that word BUT for years and if he is the type of person who the white people have listened to as a Negro leader, it is no wonder, but is still around. 3. "Jazz, Jive and Jam"—Simple explains that Joyce took him to a boring series of lectures on Black history and culture by a lecturer who talked and talked. Simple thinks that they would have been much more successful if they had invited white people and had music, conversation, and food.

II. Richard Wright A. Background 1. Wright came from a very poor family in M ississippi. He lived with?his grandmother and other relatives. 2. The misery of his life and his rebellion against the way that he lived and white society treated him is reflected in all of his works. 3. He experienced g re a t d isillu sio n m e n t when he came to the city and he reflects this in his writing. 4. His first important book was Uncle. Tomt s Children in 1938. He followed this with Native Son in 1940. Both books secured for Wright a prominent place in American literature and made him the lead­ ing Negro author. 5. His autobiography Black Boy in 1945 was also very well received. 6. His work reveals the agonies that he felt as a child and as a young man. 7. Wright left America in 1947 and lived abroad in England and France for the remainder of his life. 113

B. "The Man Who Killed a Shadow"—Saul Saunders was a man who always feared shadows and he particularly feared their closing in on him. To Saul, the shad­ ows usually meant white people. As a child, he never really knew people and he seemed to live in a shadow world. He recalls his past life and his different jobs and how he learned that alcohol made him able to forget the shadows that he was afraid of. But the shadows never really left him so he moved around the country and from job to job. His present job was cleaning in a church, stores and a library but the woman who sat at his desk in the library seemed to always be watching him and he felt that the shadows were closing in again. His boss told him to ignore her because she was crazy but she disturbed him because she seemed to want something. One morning, she tells him to clean under her desk; he says that he has, but she tells him to do it again. When he bends down,he can see her under­ wear because she is deliberately sitting with her legs apart. He tells her that she is making trouble for him. She calls him a name and he slaps her. She screams and will not stop. He becomes very confused and upset and to stop her from screaming, he kills her. The next day the police arrest him and from the conclusion.of the story, the reader can tell that Saul is undergoing a complete mental collapse. C. "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow"—The narrator tells the story of how he learned to live Jim Crow as he was growing up in the South. He relates a series of incidents that point out the cruelty of being Negro in the South. From the time that he was a small boy and his mother beat him and told him how he was lucky that the white boys did not k ill him, through his various jobs, as an optical trainee, where he made the mistake of expecting to be trained, as a messenger when he was stopped for being in a white neighborhood after dark, as a porter where he learns to ignore the management’s beating of people who had not paid their bill, as a hallboy in a hotel where he learns about white attitudes towards sex and Ne­ groes, and as an employee of the same optical com­ pany in Memphis where he le a rn s o fte n to t a lk to white-;men about certain subjects and no others. In all, it is a realistic portrayal of the life of a young man trying to make it in a hostile world. III. Ralph Ellison A. Background. 114

1. Born in Oklahoma, he knew segregation as a child but not the harsh hatred of the deep south. 2. He was interested for the most part in music as a young person and studied to be a composer. 3. He became interested in writing after he got to know Richard Wright and other authors and he be­ gan to publish short pieces. 4. His central theme is racial identify and he makes use of the literary techniques of irony, symbol­ ism, and fantasy. 5. His most famous book is Invisible Man published in 1952.

B. "Flying Home"—The story is set during World War II and it tells what happens when one of the first Negro pilots, Todd, crashes his plane into an Alabama plan­ tation. He is found by an old man named Jefferson who tells him not to worry that he has sent for help. Todd is discussed by the old man's peasant nature and the way that he fusses over the plane. At the same time, he worries about what the crash will mean to his flying career. The reader learns that Todd has always wanted to fly and that to fly would make him acceptable in white society with a white achievement. He does not want to be like the old man. In the course of their conversation, the old man tells him about the time that he was in heaven and learned how to f ly in to Alabama. Todd is not amused by th e old man but in the end of the story, the old man ironi­ cally is the one who saves him from being locked up in an insane asylum by Graves, the white man who is cruel but owns the land where he crashed. Todd learns Ellison's theme that one black man cannot re- j ect another, that they all must be together for su c c e ss. C. "King of the Bingo Game"—A man is playing a bingo game in a movie theatre hoping to win some money to help his wife, Laura, get well. He wins the game and gets a chance to spin the wheel.. As he is hold­ ing on to the wheel, he realizes all that it sym­ bolizes to him. He keeps on holding and knows that he is King of the Bingo Game. He does not want to let go. At the end of the story, he seems to under­ go a mental collapse and he is beaten over the head to be made to give up the wheel. As he is hit, he knows th a t h is luck is running o u t. 115

D. "Hidden and Complex Fate"—Ellison's hidden name is Waldo a f te r th e w rite r Ralph Waldo Emerson. This is the name that his father gave him and he believes that this is part of the reason that he eventually became a writer rather than a composer or a conduc­ tor. He explains about his childhood and how his name plagued him. He eventually shortened it to W. and then it became his hidden name and yet it has always been involved with his decision to become a writer and follow his fate or destiny. The essay includes much information about his life, what he thinks about other American writers and what has been involved in his own creative process of w ritin g . IV. James Baldwin A. Background

1. He was born in Harlem, New York, the son of a minister. 2. His father dominated the whole family. His father died of tuberculosis aggravated by his paranoic be­ lief that everyone was trying to poison him. 3. Baldwin’s most successful book Go Tell It on the Mountain tells the story of a boy like himself who is pressured into religion and rej ects i t . 4. Baldwin has written in a variety of genres and has used as his central idea the necessity of casting aside past superstitions and to seek for love and freedom in .life.

5. Baldwin is a very successful essay writer in addi­ tion to his fiction achievements. B. "Notes of a Native Son"—Baldwin tells about the summer of 1943 in which his father died and his baby sisters was born on th e same day and th e r i o t in Harlem on th e day of his father’s funeral which reminds Baldwin of the Bible’s prophecies for the end of the world and he begins to wonder if it was such a good idea to to­ tally reject religion like he has. During the course of his reflections on the events that took place that summer, Baldwin tells his past family life and how he has never really gotten along with his father. He also explains that what happened during the riot and why it occurred. Central to the essay is his reali­ zation of what his father was trying to protect him and the rest of the family from. This was the preju­ dice and hatred that he discovers when he goes to work 116

in New Jersey and can’t even get served in a restau­ rant. He wishes after his father is gone that they might have been able to talk more. The essay is a good view of father-son conflict and life in Harlem at this time and it is a way to teach how a writer can see what everyone else can, yet the wit of the writer can turn it into literature. C. ’’Sonny’s Blues"—Sonny was a heroin addict. His brother reads about his arrest in the newspaper and remembers about the past and wonders why Sonny has become an addict. He recalls that his mother had told him to watch over and p ro te c t Sonny when he came home from th e army fo r h is father’s funeral but he was more interested in getting married. He remembers that after his mother’s death talking to Sonny and Sonny telling him that he wanted to be a jazz piano player and how he really didn’t understand and that he was more concerned with finding a place for Sonny to live rather than to listen to him. Sonny lived with his wife, Isabel, and her family but ran away and joined the navy after they all had a big argument about his skipping school. The narrator gets in touch with Sonny after his little girl dies from p o lio . The two b ro th e rs make peace and when Sonny is released from the drug hospital, he comes to live with his brother and his wife, Isabel. But his brother feels very ill at ease with him and constantly wonders if Sonny has gone back on drugs. He says that his wife Isabel gets along better and is more natural and relaxed with Sonny than he is . The brothers seem to be on the way to resolving their differences, at the end of the story. Sonny invites his brother to hear him play and t-hey s'e'em to understand one another better as the man listens to Sonny play or at least, it seems that he is more willing to try and understand and listen to his brother. Langston Hughes Skill Building Activities 1. To improve reading skills by oral and written, reading exercises. 2. To take an active part in group discussions. 3. To improve oral language sk ills. 4. To improve cooperation in group study and aural comprehension. 117

5. To instill cultural pride in the students. 6. To stimulate an interest in further reading. 7. To be able to evaluate ideas and opinions on problems that affect the Black community. Developmental Activities 1. Have stu d en ts compare experiences of J e s s ie B. Simple with the experiences of someone they know in their community. 2. Read aloud the poem "The Negro Mother." Explain the significance of cultural heritage as a central theme in the work. 3. Show how the struggle of characters in the works of Hughes are similar to the struggle of today’s Black Americans. 4. Have students write an essay on Langston Hughes. 5. Introduce new vocabulary words which are found in the works of Hughes. 6. Always d isp la y books and p ic tu re s of Blacks in a respon­ sible position in society.

Spelling- and Vocabulary Building-

This activity is designed to build the student’s oral language skills by presenting him with new and expressive vocabulary items. Since the items will be presented in context, the students will not experience great difficulty in comprehending their meaning. In this exercise, the teacher will always present the new vo­ cabulary before the reading exercise is approached. The students will have had ample contact with the words before they see them in the reading selection. It is the goal of the teacher to make these

words a part of each student’s speaking and writing vocabulary. 118

abomination re c o n c ile articulate kindred ethic estrangement cadence sarcasm imbue Euphrates revue Congo neon N ile brigades seep scen ario parsonage diction grunt endeavor ferociously pedagogy d eb ris symbolism convert c a n ta ta e ig h t-b a ll perpetuation lia b le indigenous curtail a u th e n tic broods d id a c tic pursue fu sio n drape d elu sio n fien d etymology A c tiv itie s

1. Present vocabulary words from each reading selection be­ fore the reading selection is assigned to the students. 2. Give comprehensible meanings of each word even before the word is presented within the context of the reading assignment. 3. Use the words in communicative situations of which the students are familiar. 4. Write the words on the chalkboard along with meaningful sentence patterns. 5. Present the words within context. 6. After the reading exercise is completed, a spelling bee will motivate the students to study the words for spelling purposes. 7. Each student will be rewarded for his efforts. There will be no dummy. The purpose of the exercise is to build a sense of achievement and self-esteem into each student. Study Questions

These questions are to be used in the preparation of class discussions by the teacher. Copies may be passed out to the stu­ dents after they have been thoroughly discussed by the teacher in a lecture-discussion format. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." 1. What riv e rs has th e Negro known? 2. Where has he known th e se riv e rs ? 3. What has happened to him as a result of knowing the rivers?

"M ulatto." 1. Who is speaking in the poem? 2. Who is he addressing his speech to? 3. What is the setting of the poem? 4. What does the man taunt him about? 5. What does the man tell the boy that he is? 6. What is th e mood of th e poem?

"The Negro Mother." 1. Who is the mother speaking to? 2. What is she going to tell them about? 3. What examples does she give to support her arguments? 4. What does she want for her children? 5. What does she want them to remember? 6. How long does she say that she will be with them? 120

’’Evenin’ Air Blues" 1. Where is th e speaker from? 2. Where was he told to go to seek his fortune? 3. How long has he been in the north? 4. Why is he disturbed with the north? 5. What does he decide to do to drive away th e blues? 6. What would you see if you were to look at him?

"Dream Boogie" 1. Who is speaking as the poem begins? 2. Who is th e speaker d ire c tin g h is comments to? 3. What does the speaker want the other person to listen to? 4. What is the speaker told to do? 5. Has he ever been told to do this before? 6. How is the speaker acting at the end of the poem? "On the Road" 1. What is the weather like as the story begins? 2. Does the main character notice the weather? 3. Why doesn’t* he notice the weather? 4. What is the main character's name? 5. What happened when Sargeant knocked on Mr. D o rset's door? 6. What did Sargeant know about th e r e l i e f shelter that Mr. Dorset did not know? 7. When d id Sargeant f i r s t n o tic e th e snow? 8. What did Sargeant see as he walked away from the parsonage? 121

9. What did he decide to do? 10. What had he decided to do in the church?

11. At what point in the story does Sargeant’s fantasy begin? 12. What does he do when the policemen start to grab at him? 13. What does the crowd of onlookers have to say? IS. What does he think that he has done? 15. What does he think happens to the parsonage? 16. Who does he see as he walks away from the church? 17. What does Christ say to him about being off the cross? 18. Where do th e two men walk to? 19. What does Christ tell Sargeant he is going to do? 20. Where is he going? 21. What happened when Sargeant got on the train the following morning? 22. Where is he re a lly ? 23. Why does he think that he is jailed? 24. What does Sargeant say that he is going to do? 25. What has happened to his mind at the end of the story? Is he in touch with reality?

’’Dear Dr. Butts ”

1. What is the style of the Simple story? 2. What has happened to Simple? 3. How has this interfered with his private life? 4. What is disturbing Simple?

5. Who is Dr. Butts? 6. How does Simple find out about him? 7. What does Simple decide to do about Dr. Butts? 8. What is the first thing that Simple criticizes about Dr. Butts* speech? 9. Where does he wish that he could find out about Dr. Butts? . 10. Why.doesn’t Simple think that Dr. Butts is a race leader? 11. What word does Simple think that Dr. Butts uses to o often? 12. What does he say that Dr. Butts does with this word? 13. In his conclusion, what does Simple say that the Negro has been looking for? 14. Why w ill he not take "no*' for an answer any longer

, Jive and Jam” 1. What began the problem for Simple? 2. What word does Simple mispronounce? 3. What did the lecturer that Simple heard criticize? 4. What did Joyce think of the lecturer? 5. How does Simple console himself after hearing the lecture? 6. What is Simple's real name? 7. What happened at the race relations seminar that Joyce had taken him to last month? 8. What did Simple object to about the meetings? 9. What did he suggest doing instead? 10. Why does he think that his way would achieve integration more rapidly. 11. What did his wife think about his suggestions? 123

Culminating Activity

This exercise is designed to give the student an opportunity to use the knowledge he has gained from the reading selections and activities. Quiz--Written or Oral. 1. When and where was Langston Hughes born? 2. What early family difficulties did he have? 3. What is the main reason that Hughes says that he w rites? 4. What different types of things has he written? 5. What are two of the rivers that the Speaker has seen in ’’The Negro Speaks of Rivers”? 6. Why is the mulatto angry? 7. What does the Negro mother hope for her children in "The Negro Mother"? 8. How is Sargeant described to the church? 9. What does he think happens to the church? 10. Who does he talk to as he is leaving the church? 11. What happens when he gets on th e t r a in on th e following morning? 12. What has happened to his mind? 13. What is Simple’s greatest complaint about Dr. B utts? 14. What is Simple’s real name? 15. What is h is w ife ’s name? 16. Where did Simple fin d out about Dr. B utts?

17. What does Simple say was wrong about the race relations seminar that his wife took him to? 18. What does Simple say is the way to bring about integration in "Jazz, Jive and Jam"? 124 Richard Wricrht Skill Building Activities 1. To improve reading skills by oral and written exercises. 2. To take an active part in group discussions. 3. To improve oral language skills. 4. To improve cooperation in group study and oral comprehension. 5. To instill cultural pride in the students. 6. To stimulate an interest in further reading. 7. To be able to evaluate ideas and opinions on problems that affect the Black community. Developmental Activities

1. Have student compare experiences Saul Sanders had with the experiences of someone they know in their community. 2. Read aloud the essay "The Man Who Killed a Shadow." Explain the significance of the symbolic shadow as a central theme in the work. 3. Show how the struggle of characters in the works of Wright are similar to the struggle of todayTs Black American. 4. Have students write an essay on Richard Wright. 5. Introduce new vocabulary words which are found in the works of Wright. 6. Always display books and pictures of Blacks in a respon­ sible position in society. Spelling and Vocabulary Building This activity is designed to build the student's oral language skills by presenting him with new and expressive vocabulary items. 125

Since the items will be presented in context, the students will not experience great difficulty in comprehending their meaning. In this exercise, the teacher will always present the new vocabulary before the reading exercise is approached. The stu­ dents will have had ample contact with the words before they see them m the reading selection. It is the goal of the teacher to make these words a part of each student's speaking and writing vocabulary.

subjugation s t i f l e a lie n a tio n exterminator frustration f r a n tic ev o lu tio n benign b arren felo n io u s tenacious premeditate Seven-Day Adventist m alice renounce ab rasio n dissem ble cin d er d isc o n te n t g r itty in trig u e fortification p a ro c h ia l profuse candor dem oralize corroborate stav e bequeath Jim Crow em asculate d e lirio u s consolation le e r s ty le e x p a tria te s tru c tu re remote naturalistic vague estrangement in s is te n t id ealism instinctive cynicism p o rte r s ilh o u e tte precept tim id b asta rd depravation c a s tr a te tra n s ito ry s u b tle endure ing en u ity A c tiv itie s 1. Present vocabulary won from each reading selection be- fore the reading selection is a; igned to the students. 126

2. Give comprehensible meanings of each word even before the word is presented within the context of the reading assignment. 3. Use the words in communicative situations of which the students are familiar. 4. Write the words on the chalkboard along with meaningful sentence patterns. 5. Present the words within context. 6. After the reading exercise is completed, a spelling bee will motivate the students to study the words for spelling pur­ poses . 7. Each student will be rewarded for his efforts. There will be no dummy. The purpose of the exercise is to build a sense of achievement and self-esteem into each student.

Study Questions These questions are to be used in the preparation of class discussions by the teacher. Copies may be passed out to the stu­ dents after they have been thoroughly discussed by the teacher in a lecture-discussion format.

"The Man Who Killed a Shadow0" 1. How long had Saul been afraid of shadows? 2. Where was he born? 3. What were people like to Saul? 4. Who did Saul live with as a child? 5. How far did he go in school? 6. Why did he only go this far? 127

7. What color seems to dominate in his shadow world? 8. What did Saul discover that helped him to forget the shadows? 9. What was he told would happen to a Negro if a w hite woman screamed when he was around? 10. What northern city did he move to? 11. What different types of work did Saul do? 12. What caused Saul to lose his jobs with the colonel and the exterminator? 13. Where did he get h is next j ob? 14. What did he have to do in this job? 15. Who interferes with his way of doing the job? 16. What does his boss te ll him about the lady? 17. What was unusual about her asking him to clean under her desk? 18. Why does he slap her? 19. What does she do? 20. What does he become a fra id of? 21. What does he do to stop her screaming? 22. What does he do after he leaves the library? 23. What does he do when she won*t stop? 24. What does he tr y to do when th e p o lic e catch him? 25. What does he discover most ironically at his t r i a l ? 26. What is his mental condition at the trial? 27. What have the shadows finally done to him? 128

’’The E thic of L iving Jim Crow” 1. Where did he liv e when he f i r s t learned about Jim Crow? 2. What happened when he got into a fight with white boys? 3. How did his mother treat him? 4. How had he expected her to treat him? 5. When did he first go to work?

6. What was his first job? 7. Who did he work with? 8. How did he lose the job? 9. What did he learn when he was a porter in a clothing store? 10. What happened to him when he failed to say sir to a white man? 11. How did the police act towards him when he found him in a white neighborhood after dark? 12. How was he expected to act in a hotel when he saw a naked prostitute? 13. What happened to one of the maids in the hotel? 14. Why did the police make one of the bell boys marry her? 15. Where did he work fo r th e o p tic a l company a second.time? 16. What did he discover about prejudice in this c ity ? 17. How did he get library books?

18. What subjects could be discussed with the white men in the office?

19. What happened one time when he was caught with his hat on in the elevator?

20. What do Negroes think about the way that they have to live? 129

Culminating Activity This exercise is designed to give the student an opportunity to use the knowledge he has gained from the reading selections and activities. Quiz—Oral or Written 1. Where was Richard Wright born? 2. What is h is most famous novel? 3. What is an expatriate? 4. What is the man's name in "The Man Who Killed a Shadow"? 5. What was his present job in Washington, D. C.? 6. What did he fin d made th e shadows go away? 7. Who bothered him at work? 8. Why is he afraid of the lady’s screaming? 9. What does he do to make h er stop? 10. What does he find out during his trial? 11. D efine Jim Crow. 12. Define ethics. 13. What is the first lesson that he learns as a child? 14. How does his knowledge of Jim Crow help him to keep his second job at the optical company? How had he lost his first? 15. What subjects could Negroes discuss with white men?

Ralph Ellison

Skill Building Activities 1. To improve reading skills by oral and written exercises. 2. To take an active part in group discussions. 130

3. To improve oral language skills. 4. To improve cooperation in group study and oral communication as well as comprehension. 5. To instill cultural pride in the students. 6. To stimulate an interest in further reading.

7. To be able to evaluate ideas and opinions on problems that affect the Black community.

Developmental Activities

1. Have students compare experiences of Todd with the expe­ riences of someone they know in their community. 2. Read aloud th e essay "King of th e Bingo Game.” Explain the significance of the bingo game as a symbol of the Black- American’s stru g g le fo r freedom and human d ig n ity . 3. Show how the struggle of characters in the works of Ellison are similar to the struggle for todayfs Black Americans. 4. Have students write an essay on Ralph Ellison. 5. Introduce new vocabulary words which are found in the works of Ellison. 6. Always d isp la y books and p ic tu re s of Blacks in a respon­ sible position in society.

Spelling- and Vocabulary Building

This activity is designed to build the student's oral lan­ guage skills by presenting him with new and expressive vocabulary items. Since the items will be presented in context, the students w ill not experience great difficulty in comprehending their meaning.

In this exercise, the teacher will always present the new vo- 131 cabulary before the reading exercise is approached. The student will have had ample contact with the words before they see them in the reading selection. It is the goal of the teacher to make these words a part of each student’s speaking and writing vocab­ ulary. The words are listed below.

in v is ib le void in n ate e x u lta tio n flu id drone a lig n purge irony p re stig e symbolism pensive fan tasy nuisance f r u itio n i r r i t a b l e s u rre a l re c u r f re n tic detachment p erv erse tra n s f ix Gothic obscenity odyssey hysteria pander anguish hibernate shudder stricken trestle grotesque pomade idealism defiance in s is te n t pry infinity fate ta u n t Tolstoy gnats Stendhal fuselage Flaubert condescending commune tim id S ib e ria Dostoievsky

A c tiv itie s

1. Present vocabulary model words from each reading selection before the reading selection is assigned to the students. 2. Give comprehensible meanings of each word even before the

word is presented within the context of the reading assignment. 3. Use the words in communicative situations of which the

students are familiar. 4. Write the words on the chalkboard along with meaningful

s ent enc e patt erns. 132

5. Present the words within context. 6. After the reading exercise is completed, a spelling bee will notivate the students to study the words for spelling purposes. 7. Each student will be rewarded for his efforts. There will be no dummy. The purpose of the exercise is to build a sense of achievement and self-esteem into each student.

Study Questions

These questions are to be used in the preparation of class discussions by the teacher. Copies may be passed out to the students after they have been thoroughly discussed by the teacher in a lecture-discussion format.

’’F lying Home.” 1. What was th e p i l o t ’s name? 2. What had happened to his plane? 3. How badly had he been hurt? 4. What was unusual about Todd being a p ilo t? 5. What did his girl friend think about it? 6. Whose land had Todd crashed on to? 7. How did Todd regard the old man? 8. What question did the old man ask that was the question all other Negroes ask? 9. What story does the old man tell about his buzzard? 10. What does the old man tell about the time that he went to heaven? 11. Why is he made to leave heaven?

12. When was the first time that Todd had ever seen a plane? 133

13. How had he hurt himself as a child? 14. What does Jefferson te ll him about Grave’s relationship with Negroes? 15. What kind of fantasies does Todd have in the heat and with all of his pain? 16. Who do they think that the men in the white coats are at first? 17. Who are they really? 18. What is Mr. Graves like in person? 19. What does Jefferson do for him at the end of the story?

’’King of th e Bingo Game.” 1. Where is th is sto ry se t? 2. Why is he broke? 3. What is the matter with his wife? 4. Why is he playing the bingo game? 5. Why does he scream? 6. What does he think as he borrows his whiskey? 7. What happens when he wins? 8. How does he get to win th e b ig p riz e money? 9. Where is th e man from o rig in a lly ? 10. What did the man think as he held the button? 11. What were the people yelling at him? 12. What does he do when th e man t e l l s him to l e t go of th e button? 13. What did he think about the other Negroes as he held on to the wheel?

14. What does he shout as he is making the wheel go around? 134

15. Why does he scream again? 16. What does the management do to get him off th e stage? 17. What happens when he le ts go of th e wheel?

"Hidden Name and Complex F a te ." 1. What is primary to an artist? 2. What is h is purpose in d isc u ssin g Hemingway’s personal suffering?

3. What kind of perspective does he want to establish for his audience?

4. Does he think this is involved in the artistic process? 5. Who does he say gives us our names? 6. What must we do with them? 7. What is difficult for Negroes with their names? 8. What does the Negro community do in terms of nicknames? 9. What is h is hidden name? 10. Who was he named a fte r? 11. Why was he named a f te r th is person? 12. How does he describe his father? 13. What was unusual about J. D. Randolph? 14. What was his relationship with Ellison? 15. Where did a rich oral literature exist in Oklahoma? 16. Where did he go to co lleg e?

17. What did he study? 135

Culminating Activity

This exercise is designed to give the student an opportunity to use the knowledge he has gained from the reading selections and activities.

Quiz--Written or Oral 1. What is symbolism? 2. Explain one symbol in "Flying Home." Tell what the symbol: is and what it stands for. 3. What is irony? Give an example from the story. 4. What is fan tasy ? 5. Explain one of Jefferson’s fantasies. 5. Explain the pilot’s main fantasy. 7. What is th e p i l o t ’s name? 8. What is Ellison’s main theme in the story? 9. Why does his pilot’s attitude towards the old man change during the story? 10. What is Ellison’s most famous book? 11. Where was he born? 12. What is the setting of ’’King of the Bingo Game"? 13. What is the bingo symbolic of to the main ch aracter? 14. What is Ellison’s hidden name?

James Baldwin

Skill Building Activities 1. To improve reading skills by oral and written exercises, 2. To take an active part in group discussions.

3. To improve oral language skills. 136

4. To improve cooperation in group study and oral comprehension. 5. To instill cultural pride in the students. 6. To stimulate an interest in further reading. 7. To be able to evaluate ideas and opinions on problems that affect the Black community.

Developmental Activities

1. Have students compare experiences of Sonny with the experiences of someone they know in their community.

2. Read aloud the essay ’’Sonny's Blues." Explain the significance of Sonny’s continued search for a job and the constant denial by white employers as symbolic of the Black man’s struggle for equal job opportunities in this land of plenty. 3. Show how the struggle of characters in the works of Baldwin are similar to the struggle of today’s Black Americans. 4. Have students write an essay on James Baldwin. 5. Introduce new vocabulary words which are found in works of Baldwin.

6. Always d isp la y books and p ic tu re s of Blacks in a responsible position in society.

Spelling and Vocabulary Building

This activity is designed to build the student’s oral language skills by presenting him with new and expressive vocabulary items. Since the items w ill be presented in context, the students will not experience great difficulty in comprehending their meaning. In this exercise, the teacher will always present the new 137 vocabulary before the reading exercise is approached. The students will have had ample contact with the words before they see them in the reading selection. It is the goal of the teacher to make these words a part of each student’s speaking and writing vocabulary. authoritative naturalistic polemics transcendental id e a lity legacy cogent existential b ig o try ax ion dominate frailty authoritarian p a th e tic immense anarchy a e s th e tic d ev ise formative dissonant expatriation coda tendentious apocalypse h o rta to ry contemptuous evangelical Sodom persistent Gomorrah orthodoxy maneuver urgency memento inexorable undescribably bombast tremendous prophetic menace convolute fret sinuous unabating rendition emanate cadence p araly ze lu c id grope in im ita b le im probable theological intolerable essence morality play

A c tiv itie s 1. Present vocabulary words from each reading selection before the reading selection is assigned to the students. 2. Give comprehensible meanings of each word even before the word is presented within the context of the reading assignment.

3. Use the words in communicative situations of which the

students are familiar. 138

4. Write the words on the chalkboard along with meaningful sentence patterns. 5. Present the words within context. 6. After the reading exercise is completed, a spelling bee will motivate the students to study the words for spelling pur- pos e s . 7. Each student will be rewarded for his efforts. There will be no dummy. The purpose of the exercise is to build a sense of achievement and self-esteem into each student.

Study Questions

These questions are to be used in the preparation of class discussions by the teacher. Copies may be passed out to the students after they have been thoroughly discussed by the teacher in a lecture-discussion format.

"Notes of a Native Son." 1. On what day did his father die? On what day was his baby sister born? 2. What happened on the day of his fatherTs fu n eral? 3. What does Baldwin compare the condition of Harlem on the day of his father’s funeral to?

4. How had he gotten on with his father?

5. Where had h is fa th e r been born? 6. Who did his father look like to him? 7. How long had he been away from home when his father died? 8. What did his father die of? 139

9 . How did his father feel towards the people th a t he knew? 1 0 . How did he feel about the white teacher that Baldwin had in grade school?

11 . What did this teacher try to do for him?

1 2 . What had Baldwin discovered while living in New Jersey that his father had tried to protect him from?

13. What did he do on his last night in New Jersey?

14. Why was Harlem waiting for racial tension to erupt? 15. How were people acting towards one another? 16. What happened to Baldwin when he v is ite d h is father for the last time? 17. How did he dress for his father's funeral? 18 . What kind of condition does he go to his father's funeral in? 19. What did he think about the funeral?

2 0 . What did he remember about his childhood while at the funeral?

2 1 . What happened to cause the riot?

2 2 . Where did th e people rio t? 23. What does he discover about Harlem? 24. What does he say that hate does in his conclusion? 25. What is the philosophy that he expresses at the end of th e essay?

’’Sonny ’ s B lues” 1. Who tells the story?

2 . Where does he find out about Sonny's arrest? 3. What did he teach? 140

4. What does he learn from Sonny's old friend? 5. Why does he write to Sonny? 6. What does Sonny think about hearing from his brother? 7. How does he feel towards Sonny when he comes back and lives with him? 8 . What is h is w ife 's name? 9. What does he remember about the story that his mother told him about their father and his brother? 10. What had his mother told him to do? 11. Who does Sonny stay with after their mother dies? 12. What does his brother discover that Sonny wants to be? 13. Why does Sonny run away and join the navy? 14. What is his brother always wondering about Sonny? 15. What does Sonny invite his brother to do with him one Sunday? 16. Who is a Creole? 17. What happens when Sonny s ta r t s to play? 18. What does his brother discover as Sonny is playing? 19. How does Sonny play? 20. How does the man feel at the end towards Sonny? Culminating Activities

This exercise is designed to give the student an opportunity to use the knowledge he has gained from the reading selections and activities. Quiz—Written or Oral 1. Where was Baldwin born?

2. What was his father's occupation? 141

3. What is his most famous novel? 4. Where did he liv e a f te r he l e f t America? 5. Besides fiction, what other types of writing is Baldwin famous for? 6. What is the title of his essay that describes the death and funeral of his father? 7. Where had h is fa th e r been born? 8. How does Baldwin describe his father? 9. What does Baldwin compare the results of the riot to? 10. How did his father get on with his children? 11. How long had Baldwin lived away from home before his father died? 12. Where had he liv ed ? 13. What does he discover when he goes into restaurants? 14. What caused his father's death? 15. What other family event occurred on the day of his father's death? 16. What caused the riot in Harlem? 17. How did he dress for his father's funeral? 18. Who tells the story in "Sonny's Blues"? 19. Why was Sonny arrested? 20. What did Sonny do. fo r a liv in g ? 21. Why had the narrator's mother told him to watch over Sonny? 22. Who was the Narrator's wife? 23. Where was th e sto ry set?

24. What was the narrator always afraid of after Sonny was released from the hospital? 25. What happens when the narrator goes at Sonny's request to hear him play? UNIT I I I Cultural Approach: Creating Black Awareness

through the Poetry of the Blues

General Statement

The folk tradition has always served as a teaching device in the Black community. Since music is such an integral part of their daily lives, it is understandable that much of their sorrows, pro­ tests, despair, fears, love and hopes are expressed in the blues and other folk expressions. Since the purpose of this Unit and Chapter III as a whole is to teach language arts skills to black students, all the while in­ stilling within them a new sense of racial identity and cultural pride, the poetry of the blues has been chosen to present Black creativity, strength and hope. The selections presented are within the student’s grasp and realm of understanding. In choosing the selections, the age level and experiences of the learners were considered. The writer was careful to select those works which are easy to read and can be related to present-day experiences in the Black community.

Theme: The Poetry of th e Blues General Goals: 1. To guide the students in discovering the poetic qualities of the "blues.”

142 143

2. To make the poetry relevant to today * s problems. Specific Goals: 1. To discuss various artists and listen to recordings. 2. To write "blues" songs. 3. To delve into the history of the "blues" by studying "blues" as it relates to various sections of the co u n try . Procedures 1. Have a copy of the poem (song) mimeographed for each student. 2. Discuss the poem by stanzas. 3. Discuss the social and racial implications of the work.

a. Whose poor? b. What are hard times? c . Explain th e lin e , "you*11 make an honest man to think that you know is wrong." 4. Discuss the attitudes of the writer concerning race and war. 5. 3sk if there is a similar problem going on in the United States today. Student Activities 1. Divide the class into groups. (Find out who plays guitar. Try to find at least two members in each c la s s .) 2. Have each group set the poetry to music. 3. Compare th e rhythm and mood of each group. (The class will do the comparing.) 4. Try to decide on what the author’s version would be.

Composition Require each student to write a song and present it to the class. It may be done in groups if the class wishes. By using 144 the educational television filming camera, each class can hear and see what the other has done. A booklet should be compiled of the songs giving prizes and consideration for the publication and recording of the best ones.

Theme: The Cultural Implications of the Blues Literary M aterials: The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes Supplementary M aterials:

"ITm a-troubled in de Mind” ”1 Don't Be Weary, Traveler” From Slaves Songs of the United States New York, New York. A. Simpson Co., 1867. Bessie Smith (records) "Any Woman Blues" "Empty Bad Blues" General Goals: 1. To create an awareness in students the black experience in America.

2. To challenge students to analyze folklore for its cultural implications.

Specific Goals: 1. To read poems 2. To listen to recordings and give oral and written interpretations.

3. To point out examples of figurative language. 4. To analyze the author's sentence structure and choice of words.

Procedure: Students will listen to the recording "Try a Little Tender­ ness" by Otis Redding and "Stormy Monday Blues" by Bobby Blue Bland 145 ; and write interpretations.

Students will read the poems, "The Weary Blues," "Blues Fantasy" and "Lenox Avenue: Midnight." Students should be prepared to discuss poems, placing emphasis on the following q u e stio n s: 1. What is the author's aim in each poem? 2. From reading these works what type of person would you say the author is? 3. Hughes wrote basically concerning who and what? 4. What is the rhyme scheme of the poems? 5. Point out figures of speech in poems.

6. Why do you suppose the author wrote as he did?

How would you interpret the following? 1. "He made th e poor piano moan w ith melody." 2. "Ain't got nobody but ma self."

3. "Now the crying blues haunts me night and day." 4. "God a railroad ticket pack my trunk and ride. And when I get on the train, I 'll cast my blues aside." 5. "The gods are laughing at us."

Composition to follow the I style: Introduction, Body, Conclusion. 1. "Blues" is an often used word in the author's poems. Write a composition attempting to arrive at the author’s definition of the "blues". 2. Write an essay examining Hughes' position in light of today’s events and the reaction of these events to Blacks.

3. Assuming that when an author writes he expresses his viewpoints always concerning the happenings during his times, write a paragraph examining the history of Hughes’ time. 146

Theme: Black Awareness through Urban Blues

Selected Discography "A Black Man's Soul" "Cursin’ Carryin on” "River Deep-Mountain High" "Ike, Tina, Blue Thumb" "In Person - Ike and Tina Turner" General Goals 1. To create an involvement between the students about the awareness of people’s feelings. 2. To listen for ideas which can be developed into compo­ sition themes. 3. To compare and contrast various musical concepts about black music and black musicians. 4. To grasp an understanding of black life revealed through the messages on the records. Specific Goals

1. To listen to each record attentively. 2. To seek out the messages found in each record. 3. To discuss the messages and develop various racial con­ cepts derived from the record's messages. 4. To discuss other concepts of the records not connected with racial criticism. 5. To write down individual concepts of Black awareness. 6. To organize these concepts into written and oral composition. Procedure

In preparing students for this unit activity, the teacher may devise skits which bring out various emotional feelings of people centered around black life and experiences. Some students will act these skits through, while others will try to identify these emotions and see if they can identify some part of themselves with 147 these emotions. When the skits have been finished, the teacher w ill introduce the records and give some general concepts of black urban blues After discussing these concepts, the teacher may then give some details about the life of the artists, Ike and Tina Turner. Afterwards, the record "A Black ManTs Soul" will be played. Students will be asked to listen to the record and write thoughts they received while listening. This exercise can be continued through several recordings.

After students have completed the written exercise, they will be asked to give their concepts orally.

Note to the Teacher—These are some of the ideas you may express to the students, about urban blues and rhythm and blues singers like Ike and Tina Turner. 1. The music played by Ike and Tina Turner is classified as hard rock and earthy soul. 2. Urban blues is based on a double beat that sends out double vibrations, which accounts for a difference be­ tween urban blues and rhythm and blues. 3. Ike's band plays eights rather than four’s which send out a hard driving beat. 4. The music is directly patterned to elicit vocal responses from the audiences baptist style for example with shouts like "right on," "that’s right," "go ahead, man," and "sin g i t . "

Facts about Ike and Tina Turner

The roots of both Ike and Tina are southern. The son of a minister, Ike was born in Clarksdale, M ississippi, where he began playing an old piano "in a church lady’s house". 148

Tina was born in Brownsville, Tennessee where she lived until her family moved to Knoxville three years later. "There," she says, "I attended a Sanctified Church and did their dances but was too young to understand their religion. Ike and Tina, whose real name is Annie Mae, first met in 1956 when Ike played with a group called Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm and Tina lived with her sister and worked at a St. Louis Hospital. Later she joined the group. Their first break came in 1959 when Ike wrote a tune titled, "Fool in Love" for a singer who failed to show up for a record session. The Ike and Tina Revue got its first big exposure in 1966 when it toured Europe with the Rolling Stones. The audience response is not new to Ike and Tina but the place is ten years ago they heard shouts in all the little clubs on the "Chitlin1 Circuit" throughout the South, but now they're working at top drawer places. After appearing with pop and longhair groups, Tina says, "the underground picked us up" and the group no longer was stu ck with th e blues la b e l th a t had hammered i t s su c c e ss. Ask Ike today what musical bag the group is in and he insists, "Don’t label us, we just play music."

Theme; The Sound of Soul—A Blues from the Delta

General Goals; 1. To acquire knowledge of the origin of the blues in

M ississippi. 2. To become familiar with the aesthetic form of the Black man’s music found in the Delta region of the M ississippi. 149 Specific Goal: 1. To show the experience of the Delta Blues as a foundation for the popular music today. Note to the Teacher: In teaching a unit on the blues, one should begin with its origin. Students—Black and White—w ill be sur­ prised to know the beginning of the "blue note”.

Procedure: Pass out slips of paper in an envelope to each student to arrange the song ( a blues) the way they think it should be. Then get different opinions to see if they knew this particular song. From this point., play the recording, "Big Boss Man” by Jimmy Reed. I have chosen this early 1960 record because most "Soul" radio stations use it. Pass out handouts of the recording.

BIG BOSS MAN, Jimmy Reed Big Boss, donrt you hear me when I call? Big boss man, don’t you hear me when I c a ll? Yes, you ain't all that tall, you just big, that's all. You long-legged, you just make a fuss. You just funking round, trying to be someone. Big boss man, d o n 't you hear me when I c a ll? Yes you long and tall, you ain’t gittin nowhere. Now you try to take my woman, you ain’t no good. Running round here talking, trying to be someone. Now, b ig boss man, don’t you hear me when I c a ll? Now you ain’t that strong, you just big, that's all.

(Originally sung as Big Boss Man (VJ 380) by Jimmy Reed, who recorded it in Chicago, March 29, 1960. Supplementary M aterial: Ferris, William—Blues from the Delta 150

Discussion Questions 1. What is the blues? 2. Where did th e blues get i t s o rig in ? 3. From a Mississippi map, who can find the Delta region? From i t s lo c a tio n on th e map, name some of th e D elta towns, some of our most famous blues singers come from these towns. 4. Who is considered, "Father of the Blues"? Why? Where did he get his beginning in singing the blues? 5. Name some popular blues s in g e rs .

Composition 1. Each student is asked to write an essay with the aid of reference materials, "The Origin of the Delta Blues." 2. The second essay will ask for their opinions about the blues. They might include the emotional approach that a blues is usually based.

Language Development

From the handouts of "Big Boss Man," we can ask these ques­ tions for teaching purposes: 1. What is the sentence pattern of this song? 2. Can we find irregular verbs in this structure? If so, l i s t them. 3. Do we accept "ain't" in our everyday speech or in this composition only? 4. How many noun phrases are in the song? 5. How many verb phrases are in the song? 6. Each student is required to make kernel sentences from each stanza of the song. 151

7. What can we say for the order or context of the following words? ■ Big Boss, Long-legged, Fuss P Literary M aterials: Blues from the Delta. William Ferris, Jr. The Sound of Soul. Fhyl Garland

Summary

This chapter has presented instructional units prepared from the literature and folk expressions of Black Americans. These units are designed to teach language arts skills to Black junior high school students through ’’black expression.” In the preparation of the units presented in this chapter, three approaches were used: interdisciplinary, literary, and cultural. By using these three approaches all areas of the black experience (The diverse listings of works on Black drama, poetry, novels, history which were presented in Chapter II) were used in

preparing the units. It has been the experience of this writer that black students will experience a significantly high level of achievement in the language arts skills if they are taught these skills from literary

works by Black authors. Chapter IV will present reactions from the students and teachers of Franklin Junior High School where I am Assistant Principal, a summary of the project and the conclu­

sio n . CHAPTER IV

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Summary

The purpose of this project was to investigate literature written by Black American authors which could be adapted in the language arts programs of predominantly black junior high schools. There have been some references made to the relationship between the significance of cultural and linguistic patterns in reading materials used in predominantly black schools but the actual ap­ plication of these patterns has never been realized in the teaching materials now available. This project sought to apply all genres of black expression: drama, short story, novel, blues, history, and folklore in the preparation of instructional units. More specifically, the pro- ject sought to show that: 1. Literature by Black American authors can be used suc­ cessfully in preparing instructional units on the junior high school level. 2. By including this literature in the curriculum, the stu­ dents will acquire a renewed sense of racial pride and identity. 3. The students will develop a keener understanding of the diversity of American society. 4. Because the students can easily identify with the cultural implications presented in the reading assignment, they will achieve 152 153 a higher level of reading comprehension. 5. The students will be motivated to read other books out­ side the classroom. 6. The units prepared from literature by Black Americans will develop the student’s oral and written language.

Methods

The writer sought to implement the previously stated as­ sumptions by preparing three instructional units with Black lit­ erature as the source of the instructional material. The units were prepared around three approaches: an interdisciplinary approach to include Black history and culture; a Literary approach to include works by major Black authors; and a Cultural approach to include the oral tradition, blues,spirituals, and folklore. After all of the instructional units were prepared, three ninth grade teachers cooperated at Franklin Junior High School to test the effectiveness of the units. Each teacher was given an instructional unit and was asked to include it in her teaching plans without any prior notice to the students. They were asked to do this, because the writer wanted to determine if the teacher would notice any change in attitudes and motivation. After the teachers finished with the units, the writer inter­ viewed each participating teacher and several students from each class. (The interview questions are included in the Appendix). 154

Findings

The major findings of the project were: 1. That Black students are more motivated when they are learning about thems elves. 2. The teachers noticed a significant change in the students1 attitudes concerning school and the teachers themselves. 3. The students identified most with the instructional ma­ terials used in the interdisciplinary approach. 4. There was a significant change in student participation in class discussion. 5. The teachers did not notice any significant changes in their writing ability, but all three believed that changes would occur within two six-week periods. 6. The teachers saw a very significant change in classroom discipline. 7. All students interviewed wanted more black oriented courses in the school’s overall instructional curriculum. 8. All students interviewed felt that the instructional units had helped them understand themselves more. 9. All the students preferred the instructional units to the materials presently being used in their language arts classes. 10. All three teachers preferred the project units also.

Conclusions

The findings of this project support the following conclusions:

1. Black Literature is very significant in language arts curriculum in predominantly black junior high schools. 155

2. Instructional units prepared from Black literature foster a sense of racial pride and self-esteem in the students as well as higher levels of reading competency. 4. Discipline problems will diminish and a trust in the teacher and function of the school will develop when Black stu­ dents can realize a sense of achievement.

Limitations

1. The overall effects of the instructional units on the total development of the studentsT reading and writing skills were not determined, because this was not the specific purpose of the pro j e c t . 2. The three instructional units were used in only three ninth grade classes and neither class experienced all three units. 3. Most of the interview questions were centered around oral language development and cultural implications of the materials used in the instructional units. 4. Writing skills received very little attention in the inter­ view sessions. Implications

The significant findings of this project involved culture and the interaction between culture and achievement. As was stated in the prospectus for this project, it is essential that language arts teachers understand that a student, in the course of his education, acquire more than skill and knowledge. The student, especially a Black student, also finds and continues to modify his image of himself, and he shapes his attitudes towards others. Since the 156 school programs do not exert the influence necessary to shape these attitudes, it is essential that the materials prepared foster for the students a self-image deeply rooted in a sense of personal dignity. The way in which the teacher views the culture of the black student is a vital factor, and if, as the anthropologist does, she views it as a student rather than as a judge, she is likely to have a greater understanding of the student’s background., A child may have adapted very well to his native environment, but reading may not be highly interesting to him, and it may not be considered a prestigious activity by his social group and by his peers. The teacher who is unaware of cultural differences and the significance of these differences may attempt to teach the student reading in a manner challenging or even contradictory to the way he has adapted to his life and environment. Because the child’s motivation and attitude are so important, it is essential that the teacher know something about the social structure and cultural patterns of the student. The student’s self-concept which may be a determining factor in his total educa­ tional achievement must be looked at in terms of his environment.

Recommendations

1. Concerted efforts must be made to retrain teachers who work with Black students so that these teachers will know the value of cultural and language patterns in the learning process.

2. Teachers should be encouraged to build language skills regardless of oral language style of students. 157

3. A more specific investigation should be made to determine the significance of dialect usage in words by Black authors. 4. Teacher awareness of black dialect as a worthy language should be promoted. 5. Administrators should make an effort to include within the language arts curriculum instructional units using Black Lit­ erature as the text materials. 6. Reading instruction using black dialectal reading materi­ als should be given a trial. The selection of pupils to receive such instruction and the black dialectal materials to use would have to be carefully determined. Transition to standard materi­ als should be built into such a program and occur after a limited time with dialectal material. APPENDICES

.158 159

APPENDIX A Facsimile of Personal Data Card

School Teacher Date

Name of Pupil Sex Age Grade

B irth d ate B irth p lace Race

Address Phone No.

Name O ccupation B irth p lace

(F ath e r)

(M other)

(G uardian)

Other Children in Child’s Home:

(Please list) Boys ____ Ages

G irls ___ Ages APPENDIX B

Interview Questions for Student Participants

Did you like the lessons on Black Literature and culture?

Did you learn much from the activities?

Did you enjoy the activities?

Had you ever studied Black culture in your language arts classes before?

Do you think these activities helped you to understand yourself b e tte r?

Did the information make you more proud of yourself and your people?

Would you like to have lessons like these in other classes?

Would lessons like these make you like school better?

Were you always interested in the information and activities presented?

Were you inspired to want to read other books about famous black people? 161

Appendix C Interview Questions for Teacher Participants

1. Did the students show interest in the information and ac­ t i v i t i e s ? 2. Were you able to detect a marked difference in their moti­ vation and interest levels? 3. Were there more student participation in the class discus­ sion period? 4. Did you see any attitudinal changes in the students so far as the school environment was concerned? 5. Did discipline problems diminish? 6. Did you detect a new sense of self-esteem and cultural pride? 7. Were the lessons and activities attainable? 8. Were the students inspired to want to read other books about famous black people and black culture as a whole? 9. Do you recommend the inclusion of instructional units such as these within the language arts curriculum? 10. Did you detect any difference in the students’ oral and written language? BIBLIOGRAPHY

162 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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