of sketches of Sandy Jenkins, the character he cre-
ated in 1896. These sketches were collected into his
first book, The Black Cat Club (1902).
Most of Corrothers’s dialect poetry appeared
in newspapers and periodicals intended for white
readers, reflecting the demands of white editors
and the pervasive plantation stereotypes that white
readers preferred. As Corrothers’s literary career
gained momentum, the heyday of African-Ameri-
can dialect writing was coming to an end. Defin-
ing a new agenda for African-American poetry in
The Book of American Negro Poetry, JAMES WELDON
JOHNSON assailed dialect poetry as “an instrument
... incapable of giving the fullest interpretation of
Negro character and psychology.” In publications
intended for African-American readers, Corroth-
ers could ignore the demand for Negro dialect and
plantation stereotypes and explore the theme that
preoccupied him throughout his life—the paradox
between the American Dream and African-Ameri-
can oppression.
In 1906 Corrothers married Rosina B. Harvey,
and in 1913 he moved his wife and sons to Phila-
delphia. Corrothers devoted himself to the min-
istry, serving Baptist congregations in New Jersey,
Michigan, and Virginia, and a Presbyterian con-
gregation in Pennsylvania. During this time Cor-
rothers continued to write and publish. In Spite
of the Handicap was published in 1916, one year
before his death. As the title suggests, the handi-
cap of racial oppression figures prominently in
Corrothers’s life. It also serves as an apt metaphor
for the limitations that curtailed Corrothers’s pro-
ductivity as a writer.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barton, Rebecca Chalmers. Witnesses for Freedom:
Negro Americans in Autobiography. New York:
Harper, 1948.
Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. Black American Writing from
the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition,
1877–1915. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer-
sity Press, 1989.
———. “James Corrothers Reads a Book: Or, the
Lives of Sandy Jenkins.” African American Review
26, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 665–673.
Gaines, Kevin. “Assimilationist Minstrelsy as Racial
Uplift Ideology: James D. Corrothers’ Literary
Quest for Black Leadership.” American Quarterly
45, no. 3 (September 1993): 341–369.
Payne, James Robert. “Griggs and Corrothers: His-
torical Reality and Black Fiction.” Exploration in
Ethnic Studies 6 (January 1983): 1–9.
Veta S. TuckerCotter, Joseph Seamon, Jr. (1895–1919)
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, to poet JOSEPH
SEAMON COTTER, SR., and Maria F. Cox, Joseph
Cotter, Jr., was encouraged from a young age to
write poetry. He attended Fisk University where he
worked on the Fisk Herald, a literary magazine, be-
fore tuberculosis forced him to return home. Back
in Louisville, he worked for a local newspaper, the
Leader, and wrote poetry, steering clear of the dia-
lect tradition established by contemporary PAU L
LAURENCE DUNBAR and adopted by his father.
Considered an important forerunner to the
writers of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE, Cotter pub-
lished a collection of 25 somewhat autobiographi-
cal poems, The Band of Gideon and Other Lyrics
(1918; reissued in 1969), before his death at age
23 of tuberculosis. CRISIS magazine published his
one-act play, On the Field of France, in 1920. Be-
tween 1921 and 1922, the A.M.E. Zion Quarterly
Review published several of his poems, and Poems,
a collection of 14 poems, was also published post-
humously in 1922.
As his poetry reveals, Cotter’s models, like those
of CLAUDE MCKAY and COUNTEE CULLEN, were the
British romantics, particularly Keats. Cotter ex-
perimented with form and subject matter, rang-
ing from social commentary about World War I to
postwar race relations in America. His “Is It Be-
cause I Am Black?” discusses the latter:Why do men smile when I speak,
And call my speech
The whimpering of a babe
That cries but knows not what it wants?
Is it because I am black?Cotter, Joseph Seamon, Jr. 123