Introduction vher Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
(1773), the first known collection of poems to be
published by an enslaved black person.
Witnesses to and participants in the horrific
system of chattel slavery, early writers such as
Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Linda
Brent (Harriet Jacobs) wrote their way to freedom
with the publication of their respective works, The
Interesting Narrative... ; Narrative of Frederick
Douglass, An American Slave, Written By Himself
(1845); and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
Written by Herself (1861), all three paradigms of
a new genre: the slave narrative–black autobiogra-
phy. These now-acknowledged classic texts are clear
evidence of the way Africans and African Ameri-
cans directly affected the development of Western
literature and even intellectual history. Like the
drafters of the Declaration of Independence and
the U.S. Constitution, documents that undergird
Western thought and philosophy, Equiano and
Douglass have much to say about the true meaning
of freedom, the rights of the individual (particu-
larly in a democracy), and universal human rights.
Many of these ideas were echoed and added to by
other 19th-century African-American writers, of
fiction and nonfiction, many of whom were fierce
abolitionists, including William W. Brown, Nat
Turner, Martin Delaney, Henry H. Garnet, and
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.
African Americans entered the 20th century with
cadences of progression and precision grounded in
determination, spirituality, and literacy. In The
Souls of Black Folk (1903), which many consider the
black master text or “the African-American book of
the 20th century,” William Edward Burghardt (or
W. E. B.) DuBois, with, it seems, prophetic vision,
succinctly captures African Americans’ dogged
journey from children of emancipation to youths
“with dawning self-consciousness”:
If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no
goal, no resting place, little but flattery and
criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for
reflection and self-examination; it changed
the child of Emancipation to the youth withdawning self-consciousness, self-realization,
and self-respect. In those sombre forests of his
striving his own soul rose before him, and he
saw himself, darkly as through a veil; and yet
he saw in himself some faint revelation of his
power, of his mission. He began to have a dim
feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he
must be himself and not another. (368)The result of this “striving in the souls of black
folk” (371) was their “gift of story and of song”—
the means by which they carved a place for them-
selves in the American cultural landscape. DuBois
concluded, “And so by fateful chance the Negro
folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands
today not simply as the sole American music, but
as the most beautiful expression of human experi-
ence born this side of the seas. It still remains as
the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and
the greatest gift of the Negro people” (536–537).
DuBois’s task in The Souls of Black Folk was to
claim, validate, and celebrate the contributions
of African Americans, particularly in music, and
to place them at the heart of American culture—
indeed, at the heart of human culture.
Were he alive today, DuBois would undoubtedly
be able to assess critically the last 100 years as a his-
torical playing field on which African Americans—
not only through their music, including blues, jazz,
and particularly rap music, but also through their
oral and written texts—re-envisioned, redefined,
and re-represented themselves, not merely “darkly
as through a veil” but also in the multifaceted
spaces they created for themselves outside and
inside the black/white paradigm imposed on them
as a people, as writers, and as scholars of a more
dynamic black world and culture.
In light of the racial realities and marginalization
faced by African Americans, these accomplishments
did not come easily. In fact, from a legal perspective,
the double-conscious striving of African Americans
lasted into the middle of the 20th century. when
the Supreme Court rendered its 1954 decision in
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ostensibly
tearing down the doctrine of “separate but equal”