If you have stumbled onto this webpage as an outsider, please keep in mind this is a webpage for a literature class. The purpose of this class is to look at how the framework of entertainment perpetuated racist stereotypes and how literature, both fiction and non-fiction, about and by African-Americans, worked to counterbalance the inundation of negative media portrayals. This page is intended for educational purposes and is used as a classroom tool. As such, some of what you may find here, used in class to provoke discussion and provide examples of the insidiousness of racial stereotypes, taken out of context, may be offensive.
The Importance of African-American Literature
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Theme for English B,
by Langston Hughes The instructor said, Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you-- Then, it will be true. I wonder if it’s that simple? I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem. I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college on the hill above Harlem. I am the only colored student in my class. The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem, through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas, Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y, the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator up to my room, sit down, and write this page: It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you. hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page. (I hear New York, too.) Me—who? Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life. I like a pipe for a Christmas present, or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach. I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like the same things other folks like who are other races. 
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African American literature is important because it often portrays what is a quintessential American story: the fight to hold Americans to the ideals of our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence.
"The nation could not survive being deprived of their presence because, by the irony implicit in the dynamics of American democracy, they symbolize both its most stringent testing and the possibility of its greatest human freedom." Ralph Ellison 
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white. But it will be a part of you, instructor. You are white-- yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. That’s American. Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. But we are, that’s true! As I learn from you, I guess you learn from me-- although you’re older—and white-- and somewhat more free. This is my page for English B. |
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The N Word
It's in the books and articles we're going to read. We need to set some guidelines in the class regarding its usage.
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Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Slave Narratives
The Slave Voyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest enslaved peoples trades in history. Search these records to learn about the broad origins and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas. Explore where they were taken, the numerous rebellions that occurred, the horrific loss of life during the voyages, the identities and nationalities of the perpetrators, and much more. This site is one of the few that enables African-Americans who have descended from enslaved people to trace their ancestral record beyond the 1870s census. The "Oceans of Kinfolk" database records 63,000 enslaved people who were transported from other parts of the US to New Orleans to be re-sold. Unlike the Trans-Atlantic manifests, which just records biological basics, the manifests from the forced relocation to New Orleans often recorded first and last names of the people being trafficked.
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Video containing footage of Redoshi, the last survivor of the trans-atlantic slave trade in the U.S. according to some historians
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Kindred, by Octavia Butler
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Jim Crow
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Racial Passing
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The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
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The Harlem Renaissance
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Looking at Media Portrayals of African-Americans
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William M. Trotter and The Guardian
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