vi Encyclopedia of African-American Literature
inherent in segregationist Jim Crow laws. Black
writers, particularly Richard Wright, considered
it their responsibility to fight the same battle for
equality, as exhibited in their work.
The dilemma African-American writers faced
throughout much of the 20th century is concisely
outlined by Hoyt Fuller, a black scholar/critic and
the editor of the Negro Digest / Black World, in
his essay “Contemporary Negro Fiction” (1965),
in which he responds to John W. Aldridge’s con-
tention that “the writing of novels is basically a
process of assigning value to human experience”
(322). Were all things equal, Fuller maintains,
there would be no problem. However, a conflicting
line is drawn, he concludes, because “in practice,
if not in principle, the two major races in America
often have different values, or at least different
ways of interpreting the same values” (322). Fuller
further argues, “... the reading public, which is
white, must be cognizant first of the nature and
purpose of literature in general before taking the
further step toward the appreciation of that litera-
ture produced by Negroes. The failure or refusal
of both critics and public to do this in the past has
resulted in the attachment of stigma to the des-
ignation, ‘Negro literature,’ making it easy, when
desirable, to dismiss much of this literature as
inconsequential” (323). Fuller claims that “Negro
literature” is often derided as “protest literature,”
because “if it deals honestly with Negro life, it will
be accusatory toward white people, and nobody
likes to be accused, especially of crimes against the
human spirit” (324). Fuller concludes:
The reading public must realize, then, that
while it is the duty of any serious writer to
look critically and truthfully at the society of
which he is a part, and to reveal that society
to itself, the Negro writer, by virtue of his
identification with a group deliberately held
on the outer edges of that society, will, if he is
honest, call attention to that specia1 aspect of
the society’s failure. (324)Throughout the 20th century, the question
for black writers, from James Weldon Johnson
(“Preface,” The Book of American Negro Poetry)
and Langston Hughes (“The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain”) to Richard Wright (“Blueprint
for Negro Writing”), James Baldwin (“Everybody’s
Protest Novel”), Ralph Ellison (“The Art of Fic-
tion: An Interview”), and LeRoi Jones (Imamu
Amiri Baraka), became the relationship between
art and propaganda or polemics. While Elli-
son maintained that “The understanding of art
depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend
one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human
life” (175), Baraka and the architects of the Black
Arts Movement argued that “Black Art is the
aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power
Concept. As such it envisions an art that speaks
directly to the needs of and aspirations of Black
America” (Neal, 257).
Even a cursory review of the 20th-century
debate over the existence, much less the value,
of an African-American literary tradition—often
engaged in by white critics and scholars, includ-
ing Robert Bone, C. W. E. Bigsby, Warren French,
and Alfred Kazin—reveals that African-American
writers occupied both sides of the debate. It fell to
Bone to define with clarity not only what white
Western scholars saw as the problem but also what
the dilemma was for the African-American writer.
Bone wrote in his now-classic text, The Negro
Novel in America (1958):The Negro must still structure his life in
terms of a culture to which he is denied full
access. He is at once a part of and apart from
the wider community in which he lives. His
adjustment to the dominant culture is marked
by a conflicting pattern of identification and
rejection. His deepest psychological impulses
alternate between magnetic poles of assimila-
tion and Negro nationalism. (3–4)Black scholars, particularly Darwin T. Turner and
Hoyt Fuller, rushed to respond to Bone’s partially
correct but, they vehemently argued, flawed con-
tention. On the one hand, although Fuller noted
Bone’s understanding of the central issues, he
also conceded that generations of black writers