Go There To Know There

"We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity" (Harper). Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was born in Baltimore, MD, a slave state at the time of her birth. Harper, like her parents, was free. Orphaned at the age of three, she went to live with her mother's sister and her husband, William Watkins, an early civil rights activist. It was alongside her uncle that Harper commenced her devotion to civil rights causes by aiding him as a conductor on the Underground Railroad--thus defying the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Watkins was a minister and ran a school for African American youth. There, young Frances received an "uncommonly thorough education...she showed promise in writing and elocution, a strong interest in radical politics and religion, and a special sense of responsibility and devotion to lofty ideals" (Gates, et al. 491). By the age of twenty, Harper had published her first volume of poetry. Though she gained popularity and h...

By the 1940s, the once bustling metropolis of African American creative energy that had been Harlem had been harshly impacted by a series of events that followed its cultural heyday. A second wave of the Great Migration brought migrants from other areas of the United States and the Caribbean, which led to overcrowding and racial tension among Harlemites; and the economic depression rendered Harlem largely a ghettoized area that rife with crime and racial injustice. The Harlem Race Riot of 1943 increased the growing tension in Harlem. The event signaled a growing assertiveness among blacks in Harlem to challenge white authority and to interrogate the systems of white power structures. Described as "graceful and articulate" Ann Petry was born in October 1911 and raised in Old Saybrook, Connecticut ( 1 ). She attended Pharmacy school there, perhaps following the example of her father, who owned a drugstore. In the 1930s she traveled to Harlem where she was an apprentice w...

Commonwealth Magazine One of the most celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay was not originally from the United States. He was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica. Known for his nostalgic poetic remembrances of his home in Jamaica, McKay's work evolved to include poetry that challenged the racism he encountered in the United States. Such poems as "If We Must Die" came as a direct outcry against the bloodshed from a series of race riots known as the Red Summer of 1919 (McBryde). If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,  While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot.  If we must die, O let us nobly die,  So that our precious blood may not be shed  In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor use though dead! O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,  And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though...