Go There To Know There

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1969, writer Edwidge Dandicat moved to the United States to join her parents who had emigrated to the U.S. when she was young. The early separation from her parents would have a lasting effect on young Dandicat as would her arrival in the U.S. in 1981. Finding it difficult to adjust to American dress and manners, the newly arrived girl found solace in books. The separation she felt would become a theme in her later works. The 1994 novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory was developed from her Master's thesis at Brown University and is excerpted in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. As pointed out by Gates and his fellow scholars, Dandicat's novel reflects the discomfiture at living between cultures, of feeling separation from one's homeland and the reticence at accepting the new and strange environment. He writes, "Written in imagistic and lyrical prose, Breath, Eyes, Memory follows its protagonist as she moves between her Ha...

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, known to most as Malcolm X, was born Malcolm Little in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. His father was an outspoken Garveyite, who supported Marcus Garvey's views on separatism and racial politics. When his father was murdered by members of the KKK in Omaha, his mother was left to raise multiple children on her own--a task that led to her nervous breakdown and hospitalization. In his formative years, young Malcolm spent time in foster homes, moving from one family to another, before becoming involved in criminal activity. As your text reports, he was arrested and incarcerated for burglary in Massachusetts and it was there, in the Charlestown State Penitentiary, where Malcolm Little underwent a transformation. Embracing the teachings of Elijah Mohammad, Little began writing to the leader of the Nation of Islam from his prison cell. He would embark on his own, self-styled education, which enlightened him to the fact that the black man had largely been written out of...

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was the creative arm of the Black Power Movement. The term "Black Power" originated in part from a Richard Wright work by the same name, and was further coined by Stokely Carmichael, co-founder of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (or "SNCC"). A philosophical movement that urged the need for African American autonomy through political and economic independence, the Black Power Movement gave rise to organizations such as the Black Panther Party. Huey P. Newton Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton Largely inspired by the writings of Malcolm X and Mao Tse-tung, the Black Panther Party advocated, in accordance with the philosophies of its co-founder Huey P. Newton, a policy of armed aggression against an oppressive, and corrupt white governmental infrastructure in the U.S. *From Huey P. Newton Website Photo taken by student, Christina Hill, March 2019 El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, or Malcolm X, whose ideology and ...

Alain Locke The first African American Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of Harvard University, and one of the major anthologists of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke edited and published The New Negro in 1925. This anthology, which reflects the social and political contexts of the Harlem Renaissance, also distills the spirit and varied talents of Harlem Renaissance poets, dramatists, essayists, and short story writers. Considered one of the preeminent texts of its time, The New Negro conceived of black America as linked not only to other African-based cultural movements around the world but also to other movements, such as the Irish or Czech, that fused ethnic pride or nationalism with a desire for a fresh achievement and independence in art, culture, and politics" (Gates 957). Charlotte Osgood Mason Charlotte Osgood Mason was one of many white patrons who subsidized the careers of such artists as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Alain Locke. Co...

*photograph sourced from this site Born in Holly Springs,  Mississippi "just six months before Emancipation," Ida B. Wells would become one of the earliest and most outspoken advocates of human rights (Gates, et al.). Her father was politically-minded and considered himself a 'race man'; her mother, Elizabeth, who worked as a cook, strongly encouraged her children's educations. Ida would attend one of the Freedman Schools in Holly Springs until she was sixteen. After losing her parents to the Yellow Fever epidemic of the 1870s, young Ida was determined to keep what remained of her family together and supported her siblings on her meager teacher's salary. Her interest in racial politics in the South began with her outrage at the disparity between the salaries earned by white teachers (eighty dollars a month) compared to those of African American teachers (about thirty dollars a month). This concern, together with a determination to improve the education...

Abbeville Institute A slave cabin in Barbour County, Alabama (researchgate.net) In the slave-holding states of North and South Carolina and Virginia, there was a distinct hierarchy in place that was constructed along the lines of property ownership--either that of slaves or of  real  property. In the South Carolina low country before the Civil War, it was not uncommon for planters to own hundreds of slaves. The more property a planter controlled--real or human--the higher he ranked in society. This social tier controlled much of the economy and politics of the Old South, as most politicians were, in fact, slave owners. The Old South became known as a 'slavocracy,' a system controlled and structured around the exploitation of slave labor. Defendants of the slavocracy in Congress often referred to the economic system of the Old South as 'the peculiar institution,' referring to its uniqueness to the South, and to the South's reliance on slave labor. In fact, ...