African American Literature
African American writers have led the way in the explosion of ethnic literature
since 1970 and have produced some of the most significant works of the era.
The Civil Rights Movement was instrumental in giving voice to African Amer-
ican writers whose works raised awareness of the history and culture of black
people in the United States. Debates about the black underclass, the ghettoiza-
tion of many African Americans, and what the 1965 Moynihan Report called
the deterioration of the black family, became part of the national discourse. A
new recognition of the multiplicity of identities represented within African
American culture was born.
The Black Arts Movement, led by the Harlem-based literary and politi-
cal activist Amiri Baraka (born LeRoi Jones), was fueled by the assassinations
of the civil-rights leaders Malcolm X in 1965 and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
in 1968. It was often militant in tone, unapologetically political in promoting
“Black Power” and black nationalist ideals, and insistent on the inherent good-
ness and beauty of blackness. Its primary focus, however, was the articulation of
a distinctive aesthetic derived solely from black culture and the black experience.
Often simultaneously populist and confrontational in tone, the Black Arts Move-
ment emphasized vernacular traditions and public performance. Most of the key
figures, including Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Haki Madhubuti (born
Don L. Lee), and Sonia Sanchez, were poets or dramatists. Their work continued
into the 1970s, and several remain active in the twenty-first century. In a 1995
interview Ishmael Reed pointed to the continuing importance of the Black Arts
Movement: “I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people
to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black
Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result
of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don’t have to
assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own
history, your own tradition and your own culture.” Many writers inspired by Black
Arts, however, found it overly prescriptive, and by the mid 1970s they began to
shape their art in different ways.
As the Black Arts Movement receded in the mid 1970s, African Ameri-
can women fiction writers began to appear; among them were Toni Morrison,
Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, Sherley
Anne Williams, and Gayl Jones. Their work signaled a significant shift in
African American literature. Whereas writers who came to prominence in the
1940s and 1950s, such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin,
had made African American oppression by white society a central focus, the
female writers who came on the scene in the 1970s and continued to flourish
in the 1980s and 1990s shifted their attention to the inner workings of African
American communities. While these authors did not regard white oppres-
sion as a problem of the past with which they need not concern themselves,
their primary interest was in African American culture and its concerns: they
offered personal narratives of community, and they gave voice to women and
children.