Category: Research Writing

Frances E. W. Harper 1825-1911

Study notes

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was one of the most prolific and popular African American writers prior to the twentieth century. Born to free parents in Baltimore. Harper received an uncommonly thorough education at her uncle’s school, where 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. Hired as the first female teacher at the Union Seminary. Here frequent encounters with fugitive slaves and her own refugee status (the result of a Maryland law that made it a crime, punishable by enslavement, for a free black person to enter the state) moved her toward more direct political involvement. Around 1853 she quit teaching and moved to Philadelphia to devote herself to the antislavery movement.
The 1853 publication of Eliza Harris, one of the many responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s vastly popular Uncle Tom’s Cabin, brought Harper national attention. She worked hard and did well. Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects includes several of the works for which Harper is most famous today, poems that are generally agreed to have ushered in the tradition of African American protest poetry. She wrote on the need to end slavery and the importance of Christian living, equal rights, and racial pride. As the repressive measures against blacks, especially slaves, increased, Harper’s writings became increasingly militant. It is also likely that she violated the Fugitive Slave Law herself by accompanying runaway slaves along the Underground Railroad. Development as “true men and true women” was a high priority. Harper emphasizes the importance of personal faith and self-discipline.
To support her family, the widowed mother returned to the lecture circuit, where she attracted large and receptive audiences. American Equal Rights Association. Equal rights advocacy was complicated by the racism of her feminist colleagues and the sexism of some of her black brothers. “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” she repeatedly admonished.
“Between the white people and the colored there is a community of interests,” she asserted,” and the sooner they find it out, the better it will be for both parties.” Emancipation had opened a new era, a time for blacks, particularly black women, to “consecrate their lives to the work of upbuilding the race.”
In 1872 Harper published Sketches of Southern Life, a significant marker in African American literature as well as in Harper’s carer. Unlike the slave narratives and much of Harper’s antebellum writings, Sketches treats slavery as a literary construct. The heart of this volume is a series of six poems, narrated by Aunt Chloe, that form at once the autobiography of a former slave and an oral history of slavery and Reconstruction. Aunt Chloe may well prove to be Harper’s most important contribution to American letters. Although she is sixty years old, Aunt Chloe learns to read, takes an active interest in politics (though she cannot vote), and does what she can to ensure that the men “voted clean.” She helps build schools and churches for the community, and she works to buy herself a cabin, which she enlarges to accommodate her children after they are reunited.
In 1896, Harper took part in founding the National Association of Colored Women, for which she served as vice president and as a consultant for several years.

Vashti (Poem 1857)

A king is hanging with his crew. He wants Queen Vashti to come to him so he can show off her beauty.
Vashti said she was Persia’s queen. She ain’t got no time to be shown off to no rusty men. Queens don’t do that sort of thing. I must be a role model for the women of my country.
The message is brought to the king. His advisors make sure he knows that if Vashti can scorn him, then what will all the other women of the land do? The advisers say to take her crown!
Vashti was like, whatever dude. You can have my crown. “And left the palace of the King, Proud of her spotless name–A woman who could bend to grief, But would not bow to shame.”

[from Wikipedia]
King Ahaseurus’s command for the appearance of Queen Vashti is interpreted by several midrashic sources as an order to appear unclothed for the attendees of the king’s banquet. Though it was common in the culture for dancers to entertain the king’s guests, the Persian custom that “the queen, even more than the wives of other men, was secluded from the public gaze” suggests that this command was highly inappropriate.
Vashti’s refusal to obey the summons of her drunken husband has been admired as heroic in many feminist interpretations of the Book of Esther. Early feminists admired Vashti’s principle and courage. Harriet Beecher Stowe called Vashti’s disobedience the “first stand for woman’s rights.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote that Vashti “added new glory to [her] day and generation…by her disobedience; for “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.”
Some more recent feminist interpreters of the Book of Esther compare Vashti’s character and actions favorably to those of her successor, Esther, who is traditionally viewed as the heroine of the Purim story. Michelle Landsberg, a Canadian Jewish feminist, writes: “Saving the Jewish people was important, but at the same time [Esther’s] whole submissive, secretive way of being was the absolute archetype of 1950s womanhood. It repelled me. I thought, ‘Hey, what’s wrong with Vashti? She had dignity. She had self-respect. She said: ‘I’m not going to dance for you and your pals.'”

Bury Me in a Free Land [poem 1864]
Bury me anywhere BUT where men are slaves. I wouldn’t be able to rest with them rambling around above me. The chains would wake me; the cries of the mothers would keep me up. The whip…the taking of babies…the baying of hunting dogs. Young innocents sold into prostitution. I don’t need a tombstone or anything to catch the eye. I will only be able to rest if I am buried in a free state.

Learning to Read [poem 1872]
The Rebels hated it when the Yankees came down and set up a school. Our masters had always kept us away from books and knowledge; they didn’t want us getting too smart. This made us want books more and we would sneak and try to learn on the sly. My Uncle Caldwell used to hide a book underneath his hat. The Yankees and all us trying to learn just kept on, even though the whites didn’t want us to be in school. I wanted to learn to read my bible. They said my learning was too late, but I was sixty so how much longer could I wait? I got myself some glasses, learned to read, then got my own little cabin so I could be my own queen.

William Wells Brown (1814-1884)

Study notes

Renowned antislavery lecturer and reformer. First African American novelist. Born into slavery on a plantation. Mother, Elizabeth, was a slave while his father was a white man. Tried to escape with his mother, but they were caught and brought back. He never saw his mother again. Brown was successful at his second escape attempt. He married a free black woman. Worked as a steamboatsman who secretly helped slaves escape to Canada. He became a reformer and president of a black temperance society. Began being paid to lecture for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. When he published Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, the book became very popular; some wanted to capture him and return him to slavery. After his novel Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter was published, Ellen Richardson, who helped Frederick Douglass become free, purchased Brown manumission papers for 300$. At this point Brown was able to return to the U.S. Brown was excellent at history and wrote in many different genres. Clotel examined the idea that a “free” country could sustain a system of slavery. Brown focused on Jefferson as a founding father who contributed to the Declaration of Independence as well as a slave owner who is the father of Clotel and her sister, Althesa. DNA testing suggests Jefferson was, indeed, the father of some of his slaves, but at the time this was only rumor. Brown used this rumor as the focus of his story. Clotel is a mixture of rumor, fact, personal experience and fiction. Other sources Brown incorporated in his novel were pro-slavery prayer books, racist medical studies, a speech by Andrew Jackson and a variety of other texts he arranged and used to show how text can obscure and create the “truth.”  “Brown’s comments on how his sources ‘made up’ Clotel point to Brown’s sense of the importance of storytelling as a form of knowledge beyond mere factuality as well as a way to construct and reconstruct one’s own identity. Therefore, as his views and purposes changed, he told different stories, publishing three revisions of Clotel, making major alterations to the plot and narrative structure (and even dropping Jefferson from the genealogical history). Brown also structured various autobiographical information that could not be said to hold together as one story. If we look at his work as a whole, he can be seen as “something of a confidence man and trickster.” He was also a serious moralist who felt writing was one of the most powerful tools to further justice in society.

From Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847)
Chapter VI Slavery’s Deceptions

Told in first person. Brown is complaining of his owner, Mr. Walker, who is gathering a gang of slaves. Brown was asked to prepare the old slaves for market. Her was in charge of blackening grey hair and shaving the whiskers of old slaves to make them look younger. Brown witnessed slaves being whipped. Tells the story of a slave wife who is sold. Her husband sneaks during the night to visit her. He is caught and put in jail where his master has to pay for the slave’s capture and keeping. Brown tells of how he obtained a scar over his right eye when he was strapped for sitting and talking in a place he should not have been.
During a slave auction “some were set to dancing, some to jumping, some to singing, and some to playing cards. This was done to make them appear cheerful and happy.” Mr. Walker made a housekeeper of one of his pretty slaves and began to negotiate sexual favors from her. “He took her back to St. Louis, established her as his mistress and housekeeper at his farm, and before I left, he had two children by her. But, mark the end! Since I have been at the North, I have been credibly informed that Walker has been married, and, as a previous measure, sold poor Cynthia and her four children (she having had two more since I came away) into hopeless bondage!” Brown witnesses children taken from their mothers. “Mr. Walker commanded her to return into the ranks with the other slaves. Women who had children were not chained, but those that had none were. As soon as her child was disposed of, she was chained in the gang.” Brown says he was to be whipped for pouring too much wine, but describes how he gets out of it. “This incident shows how it is that slavery makes its victims lying and mean; for which vices it afterwards reproaches them, and uses them as arguments to prove that they deserve no better fate. I have often, since my escape, deeply regretted the deception I practiced upon this poor fellow; and I heartily desire that it may be, at some time or other, in my power to make him amends for his vicarious sufferings on my behalf.”

From The Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown
Escape; Self-Education

This text in written in third person about himself. He speaks of escaping during January. He travels by night and forages for food. “…the fugitive began to think of an additional name” and saw this renaming as a rebirth. William becomes sick from exposure and has to ask for help. “…he still halted between two opinions, whether he should enter or take to his heels; but he soon decided after seeing the glowing face of the wife. He saw something in her that bid him welcome, something that told him he would not be betrayed…He saw nothing but kind looks, and heard nothing but tender words.” William feared the white men, but also found a savior in a white man. He wanted to shout his freedom to the world. “I was no more a chattel, but a MAN…The fact that I was a freeman—could walk, talk, eat, and sleep as a man, and no one to stand over me with the blood-clotted cow-hide—all this made me feel that I was not myself.” He befriends a Quaker who asks if he has chosen his new freeman’s name yet. William says he wants to retain “William” because it had been taken from him once before. Then he tells the Quaker that he would like him to give him a name. The Quaker names William after himself. He thus becomes “William Wells Brown.” He lives in Ohio until the spring when he wants to travel to Canada. The story of how William learns to read and write.

From Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter
Chapter 1. The Negro Sale

As the population of slaves grows, so too does the population of half-white slaves. “Society does not frown upon the man who sits with his mulatto child upon his knee, whilst its mother stands a slave behind his chair.” Slave owners are not viewed as immoral for having slave children outside of marriage. “This fact is, of itself, the best evidence of the degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the United States of America.” He gives a popular definition of “slave” then: “Where the slave is placed by law entirely under the control of the man who claims him, body and soul, as property, what else could be expected than the most depraved social condition? The marriage relation…is unknown and unrecognized…” “Marriage is, indeed, the first and most important institution of human existence…most intimate covenant of heart formed among mankind…” The union of marriage is sacred and has many far-reaching positive effects, yet they take that away from us. Taking away marriage leads to moral degradation.
Quadroons can pay to be on their own. Many half-white slave women aspire to be a kept mistress so they can have a place of their own and wear fancy clothes. This is the best to which they can aspire.
There was an announcement for a group of slaves to be sold, all from one plantation. Among them were Currer and her two daughters: Clotel and Althesa. Clotel was seen as extremely superior. Clotel is pursued at a Quadroon Ball by college-educated Horatio Green. At the party he says he will buy her and make her the mistress of her own house. Clotel’s mother and sister are sold together. When Clotel is put on the auction block it is noted that her virginity is in tact. H. Green buys her for 1,500 dollars. Clotel does get her own house and has a daughter, Mary, with Horatio. Green’s political ambitions lead him to marry the white Gertrude who is the daughter of a wealthy man. Clotel is sold South. At some point, she escapes and returns to Richmond because she wants to be reunited with her daughter.

Chapter II
Going to the South
Currer and Althesa were temporarily held in a prison where Clotel visited them every day. The trader loaded everyone up early for New Orleans so there would be no crying and fighting at their departure. The trader would send posters ahead announcing how many slaves were in his group and their ages. He would make the older slaves younger than they were and then ask his personal slave to coach them about their “new” age and how to appear younger. Due to the gambling of slave owners, “such is the uncertainty of a slave’s position. He goes to bed at night the property of the man with whom he has lived for years, and gets up in the morning the slave of some one whom he has never seen before!” Later, a man comes on board in need of a cook and cleaning woman. Currer is pointed out. She asks if she can be sold with her daughter. She is not. Althesa cries for days.

Chapter IV.
The Quadroon’s Home
Horatio Green hired a cute little cottage for Clotel way back in the woods. Clotel places a “high value…upon virtue, [which] required an outward marriage; though she well knew that a union with her proscribed race was unrecognized by law, and therefore the ceremony would give her no legal hold on Haratio’s constancy.” They were together in happiness for a while. “…the young couple lived secluded from the world, and passed their time as happily as circumstances would permit.” Their first born was named Mary. She grew lighter and prettier every day. This made Clotel feel very nervous for her beautiful daughter. Horatio began to spend more time with his friends in the city. Later, he became interested in politics. There was a powerful man who could help him who had a single daughter of marrying age. Clotel began to feel that her hold on Horatio was weakening.
Currer becomes a cook in the home of John Peck. The courtship of Peck’s antislavery daughter, Georgiana, by Mr. Carlton, a freethinker, arouses much debate about abolition among the principal white characters. Meanwhile Horatio discards Clotel and Mary for marriage to a white woman. Although initially purchased by a New Orleans bank teller, Althesa wins the love of a white man, Henry Morton, who buys, frees, and marries her.

Chapter XV
To-Day a Mistress, To-Morrow a Slave
Horatio’s wife knows all about Clotel and their daughter. Horatio’s father-in-law is put in charge of the matter and sells Clotel to Walker for sale, just like Walker had split up Clotel’s family years before. In a cruel twist, the new Mrs. Green keeps Mary, Clotel’s daughter, as her own house slave and gives her the hardest work even though she is only ten. Clotel was sold as a waiting maid to Mr. James French, a merchant in Vicksburg. Mrs. French is extremely severe to her servants and has Clotel’s long, beautiful hair cut off. Clotel was near thirty. She could not stop grieving for her lost child so she was sold at a private sale to a young man for a housekeeper. Clotel’s mother, Currer, dies of yellow fever.

Chapter XIX
Escape of Clotel
Chapter opens with tales of runaway slaves. “There are men in the Free States, and especially in the states adjacent to the Slave States, who make their living by catching the runaway slave, and returning him for the reward that may be offered.”
Clotel’s new master treated her with respectful gentleness. There was a male servant, William, who wanted to give Clotel enough money to escape. Clotel came up with a plan where she would dress as a man and William would play her servant. She assumed the name of Mr. Johnson and she and William got on a steamboat. They successfully board another boat and are now effectively free. Clotel tells William their partnership is over; he can now go on to Canada. She plans to go back into a slave state in order to find her daughter. William tries to talk her out of this dangerous plan.
A series of examples of black people, or people mistaken for black people, trying to travel and lodge.
William found that simply escaping to a free state did not free a black person from prejudice. The story ends (in this Norton edition) with the following summary:
Dying young of consumption, Georgiana Carlton frees her slaves. Disguised as a “Spanish or Italian gentleman,” Clotel goes to Richmond to find her daughter. Althesa and her husband die in a yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans. Their two daughters are sold into slavery and soon die tragically. Clotel is apprehended in Richmond and conveyed to Washington, D.C., to be sold back into slavery. When her dramatic escape attempt is thwarted, she chooses to drown herself in the Potomac River, within sight of the White House. Clotel’s daughter, Mary, ultimately marries the light-skinned George Green, a fugitive slave with whom she is providentially reunited in France after a ten-year separation.

Chapter XXIV
The Arrest

Clotel was willing to risk returning to a city where she was known in order to rescue her daughter. Three days pass with Clotel dressed as a man searching the town for her daughter. Half-white begin to feel they have or want the same rights as whites. Nat Turner stirred up a rebellion, so the town is on high alert. Clotel happened to be in town during the uprising. Authorities came to check out her room and they found female clothes in her trunk. She is arrested and taken to prison. During the rebellion, all blacks who were found off their plantation were killed. The slaves set fire to houses. Everything was crazy and slave bodies were left to rot in the streets.

Chapter XXV
Death Is Freedom

There were several slave prisons or “negro pens.” Clotel was kept in one and one night as the guard was locking the gate she ran past him as fast as she could. A small group of people began to follow, but she was running super-fast. At one point, Clotel is running across a bridge. There are three men coming from the opposite direction. They are notified and spread out in order to catch Clotel. She raises her hands up to the sky as if to pray before she makes her fateful decision: she jumps over the side of the bridge into the water where she never again rises to the surface. “Thus died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States; a man distinguished as the author of the Declaration of American Independence, and one of the first statesmen of that country.” When Clotel’s body was found she was buried right there on the side of the river. No prayers, nothing. If she had been white her life would have been so different.

Olaudah Equiano 1745-1797

Study notes

Nigerian. Wrote about his experiences during the Middle Passage. Powerful account of life under slavery. Author of one of the first slave narratives, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789) which gave shape to this autobiographic genre. Sea-going adventure, spiritual enlightenment, and economic success in England and the Americas. Espoused the highest ideals of his ear. Seventeen editions. Most influential work of English prose by an African American in the eighteenth century.
Appears to have been the first to write the story of his life himself, without the aid or direction of white ghostwriters or editors. Emphasis on the atrocities of slavery and pleads more insistently for its total and immediate abolition than any previous slave narrative. Freedom emerges as the top priority of his life in slavery. Christianity and abolitionism go hand in hand. This mating of the spiritual and the secular in the Life was prophetic of the ideological orientation of most nineteenth-century A. A. protest literature.
Use of African origins to establish his credibility as a critic of European imperialism in Africa. Although his origins have been called into question, Africa, for Equiano, is neither spiritually benighted nor socially backward.
Equiano attempted to liberate his white reader from a culturally enforced sense of superiority that prevented many whites from feeling a common bond of humanity with black people.
His book testifies in unforgettable ways to the atrocity that was the Middle Passage. Self-interested desire to master their technology and thus carve out a place for himself in the white world. Describes his successful assimilation in practically every sphere. He worked for a few different masters, learning skills along the way. By age 21, the aspiring black man was able not only to buy his freedom but also to launch his own business career. Self-emancipated, he moved to England and had quite an adventurous life. The sale of his book enabled the author to prosper as an English gentleman. Prescient and provocative example of “double-consciousness”–the African American’s fateful sense of “twoness” born of a bicultural identification with both an African heritage and a European education.

From The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself

Volume I
The volume begins with a short preface in the way of a letter written “To the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Commons of the Parliament of Great Britain.” Equiano says the chief reason for his work is to excite “a sense of compassion for the miseries which the Slave-Trade has entailed.” He has endured much, but he has also gained a religion and a nation. Basically, gentlemen…I lay this work at your feet.

Chapter 1
Born in a village called Essaka in Eboe, Africa. Must have been much inland for I had never heard of white men, Europeans or the sea. My father was an elder and had the body modification to show he was grand. Description of African culture in detail. Topics explored are laws, marriage, dress, jewelry, food, perfume, housing, money and markets, land use. “Every one contributes something to the common stock…” People, farming, war, weapons, prisoners of war and slaves.
“As to religion, the natives believe that there is one Creator of all things…” Describes god, holiday rituals, circumcision, naming. The name Olaudah means fortune, one favoured, well spoken and having a loud voice. There is no cursing. The wise men make rules, do magic and doctor people. There are snakes and poisonings.
Equiano believes there is a strong connection between the African people and the first people mentioned in the bible. He discusses skin color and closes the chapter with this:
“These instances, and a great many more which might be adduced, while they shew how the complexions of the same persons vary in different climates, it is hoped may tend also to remove the prejudice that some conceive against the natives of Africa on account of their colour. Surely the minds of the Spaniards did not change with their complexions! Are there not causes enough to which the apparent inferiority of an African may be ascribed, without limiting the goodness of God, and supposing he forbore to stamp understanding on certainly his own image, because ‘carved in ebony,’ Might it not naturally be ascribed to their situation? When they come among Europeans, they are ignorant of their language, religion, manners, and customs. Are any pains taken to teach them these? Are they treated as men? Does not slavery itself depress the mind, and extinguish all its fire and every noble sentiment? But, above all, what advantages do not a refined people possess over those who are rude and uncultivated. Let the polished and haughty European recollect that his ancestors were once, like the Africans, uncivilized, and even barbarous. Did Nature make them inferior to their sons? And should they too have been made slaves? Every rational mind answers, No. Let such reflections as these melt the pride of their superiority into sympathy for the wants and miseries of their sable brethren, and compel them to acknowledge, that understanding is not confined to feature or colour. If, when they look round the world, they feel exultation, let it be tempered with benevolence to others, and gratitude to God, ‘who hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth; and whose wisdom is not our wisdom, neither are our ways his ways.’”

Chapter II
I was the favorite of my mother and was always with her. I was trained in the art of war. At age eleven my sister and I were kidnapped. My sister was taken from me. The first place they put me to work I was treated well, but nonetheless spent my time scheming how to get home. My mom taught me never to lie and I was rarely beaten at home, so when I accidentally killed a chicken I got scared and ran away instead of sticking around for the punishment. I then learned my home was so far away that I would never be able to find it by myself. I finally had to go back to the house, but I was not punished.
I was sold again. As I traveled through Africa I learned two or three new languages. I was unexpectedly reunited with my sister. “I must acknowledge, in honour of those sable destroyers of human rights, that I never met with any ill treatment, or saw any offered to their slaves, except tying them, when necessary, to keep them from running away.” My sister was then taken from me a second time.
Sold again, this time to a merchant. “…I was washed and perfumed, and when meal-time came, I was led into the presence of my mistress, and ate and drank before her with her son. This filled me with astonishment: and I could scarce help expressing my surprise that the young gentleman should suffer me, who was bound to eat with him who was free; and not only so, but that he would not at any time either eat or drink till I had taken first, because I was the eldest, which was agreeable to our custom.” I came to like this place, but I was taken again.
I had a sense of never feeling settled or secure.
I came to live with people who did not circumcise. They would scar themselves and file their teeth into points. I continued to travel over land and sea. I observed farming and the various foods grown.
I was then taken aboard a slave ship where I saw black people of every description chained together. Black people were paid to bring me onboard. I began to lose hope. I was taken down under the decks where there was an unbearable stench and people crying together. “I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me…” I was severely flogged. “I would have jumped over the side, but I could not…” Those who refused to eat were beaten. Among the chained I found some from my own nation. The white people acted cruel, savage and brutal. “One white man in particular I saw, when we were permitted to be on deck, flogged so unmercifully with a large rope near the foremast, that he died in consequence of it; and they tossed him over the side as they would have done a brute.” I kept trying to make sense of things I’d never seen before. The whole ship’s cargo were confined together so as to become “pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate”, the crowding and suffocation. “This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration.” This brought on a sickness. The galling of the chains, the children and mothers wailing. The groans of the dying. The white men would eat the better food until they were full then throw the rest overboard rather than give it to us.
There were those who jumped overboard to their deaths. We lived on the edge of death by suffocation for want of fresh air. I saw so many unexplainable things that “I was now more persuaded than ever that I was in another world, and that every thing about me was magic.” “They told us we were not to be eaten, but to work, and were soon to go on land, where we should see many of our country people.” “We were not many days in the merchant’s custody before we were sold after their usual manner, which is this:–On a signal given, (as the beat of a drum) the buyers rush at once into the yard where the slaves are confined, and make choice of that parcel they like best. The noise and clamour with which this is attended, and the eagerness visible in the countenances of the buyers, serve not a little to increase the apprehensions of the terrified Africans…” Relations and friends were separated, never to see each other again. “O, ye nominal Christians! Might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you?”

From Chapter III
Next, some of us were shipped off to North America and were fed better on this journey with rice and pork. I was around Virginia where I was set the task of weeding and gathering stones. I was constantly grieving and pining and wishing to die. A plantation gentleman who was sick needed fanning so he could sleep and they put me to the task. In the house, I saw a black slave woman who cooked, but she had on an iron muzzle so she could not eat or drink. At this place I was called Jacob.
Later, Michael Henry Pascal came to the plantation. He was a lieutenant in the royal navy and commanded a trading ship. He gave 30 or 40 pounds sterling for me and intended to make a present of me to friends in England. On the sail there I liked laying on the sails and the food and people were good. I began to see that not all white people acted the same. My captain and master named me Gustavus Vassa. At first I did not accept this new name, but he would hit me every time I didn’t, so I eventually accepted it.
Now it was the spring of 1757 and I was about twelve. I could not comprehend the snow that fell or the god they described or the books they read.

From Chapter IV
“It was now between two and three years since I first came to England, a great part of which I had spent at sea; so that I became inured to that service…” My fear had been an effect of my ignorance which wore away as I began to know more English. I liked the countrymens’ manners and spirit and I took every opportunity to improve. I wanted to learn reading and writing, so eventually my master sent me to Miss Guerins who treated me kindly and sent me to school. “I was baptized in St. Margaret’s church, Westminster, in February 1759, by my present name.

The Literature of Slavery and Freedom: 1746 – 1865

Study Notes The Norton Anthology of African American Literature Third Edition Volume 1 pgs. 75-87

THE RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL MISSION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Impulse of African American literature is resistance to human tyranny. Sustaining spirit, human dignity.

Impetus for writing:

  1. They would articulate the spiritual and political ideals of America to inspire and justify the struggle of blacks for their birthright as American citizens.
  2. Demand fidelity to those same ideals from whites whose moral complacency and racial prejudices had blinded them to the obligations of their own heritage. The first AA writers in the US appealed to the traditional Christian gospel of the universal brotherhood of humanity as a way of initiating a discussion with whites that did not directly confront their prejudices and anxieties. Social significance.
  3. The least advantages of black Americans had feelings to voice and stories to tell to the public at large.
  4. Mastery of language, the essential sign of a civilized mind, to the European, implicitly qualified, a black writer, and by analogy, those whom he or she represented, for self-mastery and a place of respect within white civilization.
  5. Challenged the dominant culture’s attempt to segregate the religious from the political, the spirit from the flesh, insofar as racial affairs were concerned.
  6. To dignify black experience with spiritual significance and divinely ordained importance.
  7. The abolition of slavery and the promotion of the black man and woman to a status in the civil and cultural order equal to that of whites.

Exhorted their white readers like preachers, imploring a backsliding congregation to live up to the standards of their reputed religion and their professed political principles.

Explored through various forms of irony the chasm between white America’s words and its deeds, between its propaganda about freedom and its widespread practice of slavery.

Early: pointing out the inconsistencies between the Declaration of Independence and the simultaneous promotion of chattel slavery. Later: the right of AA to armed resistance to slavery was proclaimed.

SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS

Slavery as perpetrated by the European colonizers of Africa and the Americas brought man’s inhumanity to man to a level of technological efficiency unimagined by previous generations. This era in the history of international slave trading is generally dated from 1501-1867. An estimated 12.5 million captives were conveyed from Africa to Europe and the Americas. To maximize profits from the production and export of precious metals, sugar, rice, rum, tobacco, cotton, coffee, and indigo in the Americas. Africans were viewed as strong. By 1820 African slaves constituted roughly 80% of all immigrants to the Americas since 1500. Only about 8% of the Transatlantic slave trade disembarked in North America. Sugar plantations.

The first people of African descent who came to North America were explorers. The first Africans in British North America were brought to work as laborers; indentured servants. By 1700 however, the expanding plantation economy of Virginia demanded a workforce that was cheaper than free labor and more easily controlled and replenished. By establishing the institution of chattel slavery, in which a black person became not just a temporary servant, but the lifetime property of his or her master, the tobacco, cotton, and rice planters of British North America, ensured their rise to economic and political preeminence over the southern half of what would become the US. Slaves were divested of his or her culture. The system of chattel slavery was designed to prevent Africans and their descendants from building a new identity except in accordance with the dictates of their oppressors. Instead of an individual, slavery devised what Patterson calls “A social non-person”, a being, that, by legal definition, could have no family, no personal honor, no community, no past, and no future. Absolute dependence on and identification with the master’s will. They could not even possess themselves.

SLAVERY AND AMERICAN RACISM

Insistence that enslavement was the natural and proper condition for particular races of people. Visual differences equaled internal differences. A sizeable school of racists writers in the first half of the 19th century in the US followed Jefferson in arguing that the AAs physical and cultural differences amounted to an intellectual, spiritual, and moral otherness that only slavery could manage and turn to some productive account.

RESISTANCE TO SLAVERY AND RACISM

Framers of the US constitution wrote into law several measures that protected slavery. “⅗ compromise”: counted as ⅗ of a person for the purpose of apportioning representation for a given district in the congress. Slaves could not vote, the ⅗ compromise did nothing but augment the size and power of the Southern block in the US House of Representatives. Antislavery advocates issued a call for the gradual abolition of slavery in the new republic.

Newspapers, public schools, churches, mutual aid, fraternal and debating societies were all used to share abolitionist ideas.

British textile industry, farming, and cotton in the 1790’s, wedded the South more and more tightly to slavery. The slave population in the South grew rapidly, from 700,000 in 1790 to 2,000,000 in 1830.

Nat Turner crystalized the impending crisis. Executed 60 whites. The Confessions of Nat Turner the leader of the most successful slave revolt in US history was hanged on November 11, 1831. The Virginia state legislature made slavery more repressive. Suspicions were heightened. The compromise of 1850 instituted the Fugitive Slave Law and balanced the power maintained between the North and the South. Compromise only intensified the feeling in each section that the opposition was gaining an unfair share of power.

RADICAL ABOLITIONISM AND THE FUGITIVE SLAVE NARRATIVE

A new generation of reformers in the North proclaimed their absolute and uncompromising opposition to slavery. Led by the crusading white journalist William Lloyd Garrison, these abolitionists demanded the immediate end of slavery throughout the U.S. Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society mobilized on all fronts. New departure in African American lit: the fugitive slave narrative which dominated the literary landscape. A black message inside a white envelope (often with white people writing the introduction). Slavery in the South to freedom in the North. Antebellum slave narrator portrayed slavery as a condition of extreme physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual deprivation, a kind of hell on earth. It followed a familiar structure. Reaching the free states but by renaming oneself and dedicating one’s future to antislavery activism. Slave narratives qualified as America’s only indigenous literary form. In 1845 the slave narrative reached its epitome with the publication of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Immensely successful. The subtitle Written by Himself on a slave narrative bore increasing significance as an indicator of a narrator’s political and literary self-reliance. Trickster motifs, biblical allusion, and picaresque perspective. Mid-century slave narrative took on an unprecedented urgency and candor. Moral and social complexities of the American caste and class system in the North as well as the South. Jacobs’s autobiography shows how sexual exploitation made slavery especially oppressive for black women. Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman: new models of female self-expression and heroism.

THE FIRST AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE

1850s and early 1860s: the first renaissance in A. A. letters. Spur intellectual independence and expansion of literary horizons in both form and theme. Models of black manhood. Travel books, mixing fact and fiction, sentimental image of the “tragic mulatta”, testing the limits of gender conventions in fiction, plays, serialized novels, slave revolutionaries, women’s fiction, socioeconomic realities of life for a black working-class woman in the North.

FOLK TRADITIONS

Genius of the spirituals rested in their double meaning, their blending of the spiritual and the political. Only in the next world would they find justice.
Animal tales: commonsense understanding of human psychology and every-day justice in this world. How the world came to be as it is, exploits of trickster figures, Brer Rabbit, who used their wits to overcome stronger animal antagonists. Power of mind over matter.

THE CIVIL WAR AND EMANCIPATION

In 1860 the first avowedly antislavery candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln of the Republican Party, was elected in one of the bitterest campaigns ever waged in the U.S. In 1862 Lincoln finally permitted free blacks in liberated portions of Louisiana and South Carolina to form regiments. By the war’s end, more than 186,000 blacks had served in the artillery, cavalry, engineers, and infantry as well as in the U.S. Navy. More than 38,000 A.A. gave their lives for the Union cause. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in the summer of 1862, which declared all slaves in the rebellious states to be free as of January 1, 1863, blacks in the North felt that, at long last, their country had committed itself to an ideal worth dying for. When the army of the Southern slaveocracy surrendered at Appomatox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865, A. A. pressed for the enactment of laws ensuring a new era of freedom and opportunity for every black American. On Dec. 6, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished “slavery and involuntary servitude” throughout the country, was ratified by the newly united states of America.

The Role of Fate in The House Behind the Cedars

Tiffany Akin

Dr. Menson-Furr

Engl 8328

27 Jan. 2010

 

Charles Chesnutt performs extraordinary feats within the story structure in The House Behind the Cedars: he creates deep and complicated characters, he grapples with social issues of race and prejudice, and he builds suspense throughout the story that propels the reader on to the next page.  One of the most interesting ideas that Chesnutt uses to create interest and drama within the story is the idea of Fate.  During the early part of the story the idea of Fate is more faint and abstract, but as the story deepens Chesnutt begins to use the word “Fate” at certain key moments in the story, leaving no doubt that Fate plays as strong a role as any human character in the story.  Due to the brevity of this format, we will only examine a few ways in which Fate twisted the love affair between George Tryon and Rena Walden in The House Behind the Cedars.

The relationship between Rena and George is the centerpiece of Chesnutt’s story.  The hand of Fate directs their relationship as early as their first encounter.  During the chapter entitled “The Tournament” the crowd is gathered to watch chivalrous men on horseback perform a series of skills of accuracy.  The crowd is going wild and the women are waving their handkerchiefs.  As Fate would have it, Rena’s handkerchief escapes her grip and it flies up into the air.  George spots the flying cloth and scoops it up with his lance before it even touches the ground.  The rider then returns the handkerchief to Rena which, unknowingly for the couple, binds the two of them together for life.  If George had not spotted the errant cloth or some other young man had made the same gesture, things would have evolved differently in both of their lives.

A second twist of Fate occurs at the end of the chapter entitled “Doubts and Fears.”  Rena has been discussing “coming out” with her brother and they decide to surreptitiously test the waters with Tryon by asking sideways questions regarding what he may feel about the black race.  Rena and Tryon are discussing marriage when she points at her nephew’s black nurse and asks, “Would you love me if I were Albert’s nurse yonder?”  Although Rena is referring to the color of the nurse, George receives the question in a totally different light; his answer in the positive refers to the nurse’s job, not her color.  While George feels it would be perfectly fine to marry a nurse and take her away from such drudgery, Rena thinks his affirmative answer means “it would make no difference with him…” (326).   This misunderstanding, or twist of Fate, prompts Rena to answer “yes” to George’s proposal and the next set of circumstances is set into motion.

A precursor to one of the most devastating twists of Fate occurs when Rena begins to have dreams that her dear mother is ill.  Rena has been preparing for her wedding to George, but at the same time she has a series of dreams in which her mother becomes more and more sick.  Due to these fateful dreams, Rena leaves on the eve of her wedding, headed to Patesville to nurse her mother back to health.  If she had not gone Molly may have died, yet Rena’s secret would have been safe… even more secure than when Molly was alive.  Later in the story Chesnutt refers back to the dreams:  “If she had not been sick, Rena would not have dreamed the fateful dream that had brought her to Patesville…” (398).

The most excruciating twist of Fate occurs when both George and Rena are in Patesville at the same time.  Both Judge Straight and Rena’s old friend Frank understand the relevance of having the two lovers running amok in the small town at the same time.  As the two men are busy trying to find and reign in Rena, she is fatefully running around town performing errands for her mother.  They cannot find her soon enough to save her.  Dr. Green and George are together in the doctor’s cart.  As the doctor hops down to perform some task he tells George that if he wants to see a good looking woman he should look inside the drugstore.  George does not even care that much but, just to pass the time, he takes a look.  The scene painted by Chesnutt when Rena steps out of the store is crushingly heartbreaking.  “She stood a moment as if turned to stone” (360).  If the hands of Fate had placed that young woman anywhere else that day she may have gotten away with marrying George and living happily ever after.  Yet would a life of hiding her heritage been carefree?  Perhaps that is to debate in another paper.

 

 

 

Ida B. Wells Project

English 8330

23 Mar 2011

        From her humble beginnings in Holly Springs, Mississippi, no one guesses that Ida B. Wells will grow up to be a revolutionary investigative journalist.  The circumstances of her childhood do not provide a solid platform upon which Wells can leap into a life of progressive thought and action. Her parents are both slaves and Wells is the oldest in a long line of eight siblings.  It is fortuitous that the young woman’s father sees fit to educate her because Wells spends the rest of her life educating others about the plight of the newly emancipated Negro. When her parents and younger brother die of yellow fever Wells is forced to quit school and take on a paying position as a teacher and in this way supports the entire family.  According to a timeline found on the Ida B. Wells Memorial Foundation website, in 1879 “[a]n aunt invites Ida to move to Memphis, Tennessee where she quickly finds and accepts a teaching position in the Shelby County school system.” As Wells works as a teacher she also begins editing small scale church newsletters which whet her appetite for the idea of disseminating information directly into black homes.

        One incident in particular not only provides an interesting first-person narrative for The Living Way newsletter, but also sparks Wells’ imagination to focus her writing on social change.  Wells has been a victim of the Jim Crow laws while riding the train. Wells writes about the fact that she “had sued the railroad company for attempting to expel her from the ladies’ car” (Gates & McKay, 676).  The topic is prescient, personal and interesting to her audience: it gives them a stake in the lawsuit’s outcome. (In 1887 the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned Wells’ former win against the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.)  Using the pen name “Iola” (probably adopted from a Frances Harper novel entitled Iola Leroy) Wells’ train/court stories “were reprinted in newspapers throughout the country” (Gates, 676).  Given a public forum in which to tell these stories increased Wells’ appetite for publicly renouncing obvious wrongs that occur on an hourly basis to the newly emancipated black contingent of U.S. citizenry.  Her next topic of scrutiny is the one that will not only get her run out of her home base of Memphis but will forever connect her name to a cause: U.S. anti-lynching laws.

        In her preface to Southern Horrors Wells seems to take up the pen with a heavy heart and gives an overview of her purpose: “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against that sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.  The awful death-roll that Judge Lynch is calling every week is appalling, not only because of the lives it takes, the rank cruelty and outrage to the victims, but because of the prejudice it fosters and the stain it places against the good name of a weak race” (25-6).  Writing about her experience with injustice on the train opens Wells’ eyes to an even more insidious and widespread injustice taking place around her; one that is sanctioned by law: the act of lynching. During these dark days mobs regularly gather to capture and hang someone from a tree whom they feel has committed an offense or broken a societal law.  When Wells learns of the lynching of people she actually knows she begins to turn her considerable writing skills toward activism against lynching. Little does Ida B. Wells recognize that her decision to use the press in service of protecting the rights of her race and pointing the finger directly at offenders will set a groundbreaking precedent that would carry on within the ink of newspaper print for generations to come.

        In order to understand the importance of Wells’ decision to make use of the press to bring to light social injustice, we must first get our footing in the rhetorical situation of her day.  When Wells begins writing the United States has just undergone a little more than a decade of reconstruction after the Civil War. Yet simply because the blacks are no longer enslaved does not mean our nation’s troubles instantaneously disappear.  “With slavery officially outlawed, the white south moved quickly to protect its interests by codifying the very white supremacist ideology that had undergirded the chattel slave system” (Gates, 543). Wells experiences the Jim Crow laws such as blacks and whites having to travel in separate train cars.  In 1883 the U.S. Supreme Court rules that congress can regulate only state action regarding racial discrimination, not private action. In the years 1888-9 one hundred and sixty-three Negroes are lynched along with one hundred and forty-four whites. Disenfranchisement begins with the “Mississippi Plan.”  According to information found in a timeline of African American history provided by the National Humanities center, in order “[t]o minimize the number of black voters, Mississippi institutes a literacy test, a poll tax, and the ‘grandfather clause’” and during the next two decades “most Southern states pass similar laws.”  

        Thirty-five years before Wells is born the first attempt to run a black newspaper is made by Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm.  They run Freedom’s Journal for two years which then becomes The Rights of All which only lasts two more years.  About forty-two years before Wells sets up shop, Frederick Douglass resolves to launch his own newspaper, The North Star.  “In part Douglass wanted to prove that a black run newspaper could succeed; in part he needed a forum from which to express himself freely, without consulting his former mentors…”(Gates, 386).  All of these shifting circumstances are morphing the social and political landscape in the day of Ida B. Wells. It was in 1889 that “Wells becomes part owner of the black-run Memphis newspaper, The Free Speech and Headlight and continues to write under the pen name Iola” (Ida B. Wells Memorial Foundation).  Wells runs and writes for the paper for three years before an incident occurs that will change not only Wells’ life, but her legacy forever.

        According to the Wells Foundation timeline, on March 9th, 1892, “three friends of Wells—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William Steward—were lynched outside of Memphis.  The three men owned and operated a store called the People’s Grocery, a business the competed successfully with a white-owned store nearby.”  These incidents so shock and enrage Wells that she tears off an incendiary indictment, using her newspaper as a platform to strongly denounce the practice of lynching.  She recognizes that Southern people will often say lynching is used as a punishment against black men that rape white women when Wells knows this to be an outright lie. Her first anti-lynching editorial uses such sure and strong language that it sends (probably the same) white mob into frenzy and they burn the news office to the ground.  Ms. Wells is advised to never return to Memphis. A more direct form of censorship do not exist, yet the threat to life and limb do not dissuade Wells from her anti-lynching campaign. The timeline states: “Wells begins to investigate the lynching phenomenon from New York where she writes for the African-American newspaper, the New York Age.  Her findings are complied and published in the fall in a story titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.

Some of the particulars of her findings written in the above book are as follows: 

  1.  That lynching may be claimed to be a punishment for rape, but many white women use the accusation of rape in order to cover up an affair or explain giving birth to a mulatto child.
  2. That though rape is often proffered as the reason for the lynching, any numbers of reasons (or none at all) have been given as sufficient to hang a person.  Wells is fond of using lists and lines up lynching statistics for any given year. Beside the number of those lynched there is a reason given for that particular hanging.  Some of the reasons on record are: no cause, unknown cause, mistaken identity, bad reputation, giving evidence, refusing to give evidence and unpopularity.
  3. That the white press is only making things worse.
  4. That “[t]here is little difference between the Antebellum South and the New South” (47).
  5. That “[t]he white man’s dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities” (50).

        As mentioned earlier, Wells has consequences occur due to her truth-seeking.  Her business is burned to the ground and she cannot return to her adopted hometown of Memphis, Tennessee.  Yet Wells escapes with her life and from new posts up North she continues to write and rally against racism.  She protests the lack of African American participation in the Chicago World’s Fair. She helps found the National Association of Colored Women and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  In information found in the Ida B. Wells Memorial Foundation timeline, in 1913 Wells “turn[s] her reformist energies towards winning the vote for all African-Americans; particularly women. She forms the first suffrage club for black women in the state of Illinois; the Alpha Suffrage Club.“  In 1931 Wells dies in Chicago, yet her creativity in using the medium of the newspaper as a tool for social reform sets the stage for decades of media pioneers to follow.

        The activism and writing of Wells carries the country well into the Harlem Renaissance which lasted roughly from 1919-1940.  “In particular, the second half of the decade witnessed an outpouring of publications by African Americans that was unprecedented in its variety and scope” (Gates 953).  Harlem, New York appears during these years as the African American artistic capital of the world. Blacks begin to be published by the “establishment” publishers, the housing conditions are better than in the south and there is an explosion in every form of art from the writing of plays to the expansion of jazz, the celebration of dance and the emergence of new cultural and political goals.  We can see Wells’ influence on men of the Renaissance who are eager to own and run their own African American newspapers. From Charles Johnson to Marcus Garvey, the new African fully exercises the power of the pen by disseminating information, collecting stories, poetry and artwork and relishing the power of creating their own propaganda. “Of these, the most important was almost certainly the Crisis, edited by the brilliant scholar…W.E.B. Du Bois…” (Gates, 955).  Du Bois and Wells are connected through the NAACP: Wells helps found the organization and Du Bois launches the Crisis as a mouthpiece for the group.  Just as Wells is forced to migrate northward in order to carry on her work, Du Bois also suffers negative consequences due to using printed media to further his leftist politics.  The repayment for speaking his mind is “his forced retirement from Atlanta University in 1944 and his firing in 1948 by the NAACP from his position as director of special research” (Gates, 688).  Wells’ anti-lynching campaign morphed into Du Bois’ anti-nukes campaign and the U.S. government tries to indict him as a “subversive agent.” Even though the charges do not stick, Du Bois kind of becomes a man alone on a desert island although this isolation does not deter him from speaking his truth.

        There is a link connecting the times and people of the Harlem Renaissance to the age of modern African American journalism and his name is Thomas Fleming.  Mr. Fleming is “the longtime executive editor of Reporter Publishing Company, Northern California’s leading chain of African American newspapers” (Millard).  While the Harlem Renaissance proper is winding down on the east coast Mr. Fleming is gearing up for a life-long vocation in journalism in San Francisco. He is founding editor for the Reporter newspaper and for years writes, on average, three articles a week and in the spirit of Ida B. Wells, he tends to focus on human rights.  Through his work with the newspaper Fleming has the opportunity to meet other men of letters that keep African American progress foremost in the writing of their day.  Martin Luther King Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes and others are the types of prolific movers and shakers that inspire and influence the journalism of Fleming. One of his articles entitled “Marcus Garvey Comes to Harlem” provides historians with a direct link from early twentieth century newspapermen to those of more recent times.  Yet our linking connections from Ida B. Wells to the Harlem Renaissance to Fleming would not be complete without one last backward glance to African American journalism during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s.

        As Fleming is writing in San Francisco, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is writing about his experience as a pastor in the south and how he becomes a vocal advocate for the idea and practice of nonviolent resistance.  Dr. King is influenced by Gandhi and shares his philosophy that “…no individual or group need submit to any wrong, nor need they use violence to right the wrong; there is the way of nonviolent resistance. This is ultimately the way of the strong man” (102).  King brings our story full circle back to Memphis, Tennessee where he, another African American activist and writer, is being “punished” for having the guts to confront social problems in America. As Martin Luther King Jr. is being shot down at the Lorraine Motel in 1968 a newspaperman by the name of Earl Caldwell stands by his side.  Just as Ida B. Wells has been witness to the lynching of her grocery store-owning neighbors, seventy-six years later Caldwell is a journalist witnessing the racial hatred and confusion that continues into the Age of Aquarius.  

        Civil Rights activists and journalists alike know that Caldwell covers the activities of the Black Panther party and is writing his pieces for the New York Times.  According to information found through the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, Caldwell is the center of a mighty struggle between himself as a journalist keeping his sources confidential, and the federal government’s attempts to confiscate Caldwell’s personal notes and research.  The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. As Tiffany Shepard learned in her personal interview with Caldwell during her stint at Hampton University, the Supreme Court ruling “resulted in a landmark First Amendment decision on reporter’s rights to protect confidential sources. ‘The ruling was unanimous.  The court ruled that the First Amendment protected a reporter’s information, notes and confidential sources, ‘said Caldwell, ‘and it protected the reporting process.’” Unlike all of the journalists examined previously in the paper, Earl Caldwell was never run out of town or out of business. It is some relief to see that with the passage of time and America’s tentative steps toward racial equality that Caldwell is still teaching and writing about civil rights.  Bringing media all the way into the digital age, we can see from Earl Caldwell’s’ Facebook page that he “is writer-in-residence at the Robert C. Maynard Institute” mentioned earlier in this piece.  

        A Facebook page is a long way from the days of a small Negro newspaper co-owned by Ida B. Wells in 1889.  By keeping her eyes open and her mind analyzing Wells is able to bring forth the discussion of race and rights and use journalism as a tool to bring these issues to the public.  Wells set the precedent, and set it with such a high bar that her shoes are quite difficult to fill. Yet we see people step forth, people such as W.E.B. Du Bois during the Harlem Renaissance, Thomas Fleming bridging the gap and Earl Caldwell bringing us into the age of Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers during the Civil Rights era and beyond.  Newspapers and in-the-moment journalism keep the world ever-present with the changing and prescient issues of our day. Thanks to Ida B. Wells, the tradition of truth-telling through journalism has been an exciting and often terrifying journey that all Americans are privileged to experience.
Works Cited

Gates, Henry and Nellie McKay.  Introduction. A Red Record. By Ida B. Wells-Barnett.  The Norton Anthology of African American Literature.  W. W. Norton and Company, New York: 676.

King, Martin Luther.  Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.  Harper and Row Inc. 101-107.

Millard, Max.  “Thomas Fleming, ‘Good Soldier’ of San Francisco’s Black Press, Retires from Sun-Reporter at 89.” Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco.  28 July 1997.  www.sfmuseum.org/sunreporter/fleming.html.

Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. “The Caldwell Journals.” 2000. Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. Web. 23 Mar 2011. 

www.localcommunities.org. 

Shepard, Tiffany. Interview with Earl Caldwell. National Visionary Leadership Project. 2006.  http://www.visionaryproject.org/caldwellearl.

The Making of African American Identity. “Timeline: 1860-1920.” Volume II: 1865-1917. Jan 2006. National Humanities Center. 15 Mar 2011.

<nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai2/index.htm>.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Preface. Southern Horrors. By Ida Be. Wells-Barnett. On Lynchings. Humanity Books, New York: 25-6, 47, 50.

Wells, Ida B. (family). Ida B. Wells Memorial Foundation. 22 April 2010. Web. 21 Mar     2010. http://www.idabwells.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article.