Literature of the United States

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) in his major work The Philadelphia Negro, that expressed the steady stream of important studies of African American life. Dedicated to the rigorous, scholarly examination of the so-called Negro Problem, Du Bois had to face up to the violent realities of the lives he proposed to study. He first came to national attention with the publication of «The Souls of Black Folk» (1903), characterized by scholar Eric J. Sundquist as «the preeminent text of African American cultural consciousness».
Several chapters explore the implications of this extraordinary book’s dramatic and prophetic announcement in its «Forethought» that «the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line». In the first chapter, «Of Our Spiritual Strivings», Du Bois introduces another concept that would inform his thinking for the rest of his career-the notion of the «twoness» of African Americans: «One ever feels his twoness», Du Bois asserts, «an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder». This foundational observation hit on what Du Bois named «double-consciousness». In his essay «The Negro Problem» (1903), he meant college-educated African Americans who could provide leadership for African Americans after Reconstruction. Du Bois offers a concise overview of the Negro in America cast in the highly charged rhetoric of the orator who wishes to move as well as inform his audience. Du Bois became a leader in the Niagara Movement (1905), a movement aggressively demanding for African Americans the same civil rights enjoyed by white Americans.
In 1910 Du Bois served as an editor of Crisis, the official publication of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization he helped to create. Through this publication Du Bois reached an increasingly large audience-one hundred thousand by 1919-with powerful messages that argued the need for black development and white social enlightenment. From 1920 Du Bois shifted his attention from the reform of race relations in America through research and political legislation to the search for longer-range worldwide economic solutions to the international problems of inequity among the races. He began a steady movement toward Pan-African and socialist perspectives that led to his joining the US Communist Party in 1961 and, in the year of his death, becoming a citizen of Ghana. He was extremely active as a politician, organizer, and diplomat, and he continued as a powerful writer of poetry, fiction, autobiography, essays, and scholarly works. Martin Luther King spoke of Du Bois as «one of the most remarkable men of our time».
A distinguished and most popular writer Langston Hughes (1902–1967) captured the dominant and improvisatory traditions of black culture in written form. Eleven of his poems were published in Alain Locke’s pioneering anthology, The New Negro (1925), and he also well represented in Countee Gullen’s 1927 anthology, Caroling Dusk. Carl Van Vechten, one of the white patrons of African American writing, helped get The Weary Blues, Hughe’s first volume of poems, published in 1926.
In this year, his important essay «The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain» appeared in the Nation, he described the immense challenges to be faced by the serious black artist «who would produce a racial art» but insisted on the need for courageous artists to make the attempt. The publication of his novel Not without Laughter in 1930 glorified his reputation and sales, enabling him to support himself. By the 1930’s he was being called «the bard of Harlem».
Hughes and other blacks were drawn by the American Communist Party, which made racial justice an important plank in its platform, promoting an image of working-class solidarity that nullified racial boundaries. He visited the Soviet Union in 1932 and produced a significant amount of radical boundaries. He visited the Soviet Union in 1932 and produced a significant amount of radical writing up to the eve of World War II. He covered the Spanish civil war for the Baltimore Afro-American in 1937.
In the 1950s and 1960s Hughes published a variety of anthologies for children and adults, including The First Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1955), and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). In 1953 he was called to testify before the Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee on subversive activities in connection with his 1930 radicalism. The FBI listed him as a security risk until 1959; and during these years, when he could not travel outside the United States because he would not have been allowed to re-enter the country. Hughes worked to rehabilitate his reputation as a good American by producing patriotic poetry. From 1960 to the end of his life he was again on the international circuit.
Within the spectrum of artistic possibilities open to writers of the Harlem Renaissance-drawing on African American folk forms; on literary traditions and forms that entered the United States from Europe and Great Britain; or on the new cultural forms of blacks in American cities-Hughes chose to focus his work on modern, urban black life. He modeled his stanza forms on the improvisatory rhythms of jazz music and adapted the vocabulary of everyday black speech to poetry. He also acknowledged finding inspiration for his writing in the work of whit American poets who preceded him. Like Walt Whitman he heard America singing, he asserted his right to sing America back; he also learned from Carl Sandburg’s earlier attempts to work jazz into poetry. Hughes did not confuse his pride in African American culture with complacency toward the material deprivations of black life in the United States. He was keenly aware that the modernist «vogue in things Negro» among white Americans was potentially exploitative and voyeuristic; he confronted such racial tourists with the misery as well as the jazz of Chicago’s South Side. Early and late, Hughes poems demanded that African Americans be acknowledged as owners of the culture they gave to the United States and as fully enfranchised American citizens.


I, Too
I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, and grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
«Eat in the kitchen»,
Then.
Besides,
Thy’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed-
I, too, am America. (Hughes, 2028)