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Carter G. Woodson 1875-1950 Often referred to as "the father of black history," writer, journalist, and historian Carter G. Woodson was one of the first African American intellects to study black history and to challenge the widely held assumption that African Americans had no history. It is to Woodson we owe the tradition of African American History Month.  Born to former slaves in New Canton, Virginia, Woodson was self-taught, having mastered a rudimentary education by the age of seventeen. At the age of twenty, Woodson earned a high school diploma in the span of two years at Fayette High School (1) . According to the website, African American History Month: Profiles, Carter G. Woodson, "In 1915, Woodson and Jesse E. Moorland co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). The organization was the platform that launched Woodson's mission to raise awareness and recognize the importance of Black history. He believed that pub...

As we have discussed so far in African American Literature, one of the chief concerns of African American writers of the Renaissance was the positioning of the folk within the literary heritage. That is, whether one should consider dialect poetry and the acknowledgment of the folk aesthetic as part of an evolving African American art form. Gates points out that during the Harlem Renaissance, that critics relegated dialect poetry to the "expression of humor and pathos" . Poets like Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar, to relative effect, insisted dialect verse as a vital art form, and elevated the spoken word of African American 'folk' as a recognized and legitimate artistic expression. Perhaps to even greater extent, poet Sterling A. Brown, has been heralded as the master of dialect poetry--particularly in the estimation of James Weldon Johnson(1248). Howard University's website informs us that "Professor Brown devoted his life to the development of...

Ida B. Wells Symposium @ Rhodes Posted on September 24, 2012 by midsouthstudies To celebrate the 150th Anniversary of Ida B. Wells’ birth, Rhodes College is holding a symposium to celebrate her activism in Memphis. Wells (1862-1931) came of age in Memphis, moving to the city in 1880. She was forced to flee Memphis for her anti-lynching journalism in 1892. Monday, October 29 ■Memphis Center Public Christening 5:00 pm Memphis Center ■Paula Giddings, keynote lecture, “A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching,” BCLC 6:30 pm Tuesday, October 30 ■Amy Wood, “Lynching and Spectacle: Ida B. Wells, Anti-Lynching Activism, and the Use of Photography as Testimony” 4:00 pm in Blount Auditorium ■Reception in Buckman Hall Lobby ■Theatrical Performance of Iola: A One-act Reflection on Wells’ Memphis Years, 6:00 pm in Hardie Auditorium. Co-written by Dave Mason and Rychetta Watkins

"The Old Negro, we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy. He has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism. The Negro himself has contributed his share to this through a sort of protective social mimicry forced upon him by the adverse circumstances of dependence" (Locke 985). "Through having had to appeal from the unjust stereotypes of his oppressors and traducers to those of his liberators, friends and benefactors he has had to subscribe to the traditional positions from which his case has been viewed. Little true social or self-understanding has or could come from such a situation" (985). "Similarly the mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority. By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving so...

Some Background on Slavery's Abolition in the North The official ban on importing slaves into the United States came in 1808; however this edict did not control the trafficking of slaves within the U.S. borders. At the end of the eighteenth century following the Revolutionary War, many individual instances of manumission took place. Slave-holders freed slaves by dint of the growing philosophies of freedom and independence; however, others freed their bondsmen due to changing economic climates, in which many farmers moved from single-crop (tobacco) farming to variegated crops and therefore needed fewer hands to work the fields. The mass reformation movements that eventually ended slavery in the nation did not come until the Second Great Awakening, which occurred during the 1820's and 1830's. Religious groups such as the Quakers, Moravians, and Methodists argued that the holding of slaves was sinful in the eyes of God, thus turning the tide on the long-standing biblical...

Below are some of the terms, historical periods, and figures we will be referring to in the first portion of our semester. We will refer to these terms and figures regularly as we consider some of the key literary works in African American Literature: The Vernacular Tradition Eye Dialect: Literary text written to mimic the language of the folk. Vernacular : “belongin g to, developed in, and spoken or used by the people of a particular place, region, or country: native; indigenous” (qtd. in Gates 6 ) The Folk : Demographic characterized by rural living and conventional values. Performativity : Used to describe a method of communication: performative as opposed to literary. Oral Tradition : Tradition among folk cultures of transmitting narrative orally as opposed to writing. Conjure : Folk magic and healing practices that have evolved from West African religious traditions. So called in the Delta, Carolinas, and Middle South. Hoodoo : Conjure as evolved in Ne...

"Negro spirituals are the religious songs sung by African Americans since the earliest days of slavery and first gathered in a book in 1801 by the black church leader Richard Allen. As scholars have observed, this term, whether abbreviated as spirituals or not, is somewhat misleading: for many black slaves, and for their offspring, the divisions between secular and sacred were not as definite as the designation spirituals would suggest. Certainly these religious songs were not sung only in churches or in religious ritual settings. Travelers in the Old South and slaves themselves reported that music about God and the Bible was sung during work time, play time, and rest time as well as on Sundays at praise meetings. As historian Lawrence Levine observed, for slaves, the concept of the sacred signified a strong will to incorporate 'within this world all the elements of the divine'" (Gates 8). Gates' depiction of the relationship between slaves and religiosity and b...