Tag Archives: African American

Banned Books That Shaped America: Native Son

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The Library of Congress created an exhibit, “Books that Shaped America,” that explores books that “have had a profound effect on American life.” Many of the books in the exhibit have been banned/challenged.  Give yourself the gift of a beautiful story and read one and them imagine what your life would be like if you were never given that gift.

Fight censorship.

Native Son, Richard Wright, 1940

Richard Wright’s landmark work of literary naturalism follows the life of young Bigger Thomas, a poor Black man living on the South Side of Chicago. Bigger is faced with numerous awkward and frustrating situations when he begins working for a rich white family as their chauffer. After he unintentionally kills a member of the family, he flees but is eventually caught, tried and sentenced to death. The book has been challenged or removed in at least eight different states because of objections to “violent and sexually graphic” content.

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Richard Wright was born on September 4, 1908, on a farm in Mississippi. He was the first of two sons born to Nathan Wright, an illiterate sharecropper, and Ella Wilson Wright, a schoolteacher. When Wright was a small child, his father abandoned the family to live with another woman. Wright’s mother subsequently became chronically ill, and the family was forced to live with various relatives. During one particularly tumultuous period, Wright and his brother spent a month in an orphanage. The family eventually settled with Wright’s grandmother. Though Wright attended a Seventh-Day Adventist school where his aunt taught, he rebelled against religious discipline, much like the character of Bigger Thomas in Native Son.

The illnesses suffered by Wright’s mother drained the family financially, forcing Wright to work a number of jobs during his childhood and adolescence. Despite sporadic schooling, he became an avid reader and graduated as valedictorian of his junior high school. Financial troubles worsened, however, and Wright was forced to drop out of high school after only a few weeks to find work. Shortly before the beginning of the Great Depression, the family moved to Chicago, where Wright devoted himself seriously to writing.

In 1934, Wright became a member of the Communist Party and began publishing articles and poetry in numerous left-wing publications. Still his family’s sole financial support, Wright took a job with the Federal Writers’ Project helping research the history of blacks in Chicago. In 1937, he moved to New York, where he was Harlem editor for the Daily Worker, a communist newspaper. Around this time, he wrote and published Uncle Tom’s Children, a collection of short stories that addresses the social realities faced by American black men. The novel—like its namesake, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—was banned or censored in parts of the United States.

However, it was Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son, that stirred up real controversy by shocking the sensibilities of both black and white America. The reaction to Uncle Tom’s Children had disappointed Wright—though he had worked hard to describe racism as he saw it, he still felt he had written a novel “which even bankers’ daughters could read and feel good about.” With his next work, Native Son, he was determined to make his readers feel the reality of race relations by writing something “so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.” The protagonist of the novel, Bigger Thomas, hails from the lowest rung of society, and Wright does not infuse him with any of the romantic aspects or traits common to literary heroes. Rather, given the social conditions in which he must live, Bigger is what one might expect him to be—sullen, frightened, violent, hateful, and resentful.

In his essay “How Bigger Was Born,” Wright explains that Bigger is a fusion of men he had himself known while growing up in the South. Confronted by racism and oppression and left with very few options in their lives, these men displayed increasingly antisocial and violent behavior, and were, in effect, disasters waiting to happen. In Chicago, removed from the terrible oppression of the South, Wright discovered that Bigger was not exclusively a black phenomenon. Wright saw, just as Bigger does in Native Son that millions of whites suffered as well, and he believed that the direct cause of this suffering was the structure of American society itself. Native Son thus represents Wright’s urgent warning that if American social and economic realities did not change, the oppressed masses would soon rise up in fury against those in power.

Disenchanted over the Communist Party’s attempts to control the content of his writing, Wright quietly split with the Party in 1942. He continued to be active in left-wing politics, however, and was the subject of intense FBI scrutiny throughout his life. In the late 1940s, Wright moved to Paris with his wife and daughter. He became deeply interested in the philosophical movement of existentialism, often socializing with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, two of the movement’s leading figures.

Though Wright continued writing, his career never again reached the heights it attained when Native Son and Black Boy—his popular autobiographical novel—were published in the early and mid-1940s. Wright died of a heart attack in 1960. Today he is honored as one of the finest writers in African-American literature, a tremendous influence on such eminent contemporaries and followers as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, among many others.

Fight all forms of censorship.

Fight all forms of censorship.

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Banned Books That Shaped America: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

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The Library of Congress created an exhibit, “Books that Shaped America,” that explores books that “have had a profound effect on American life.” Many of the books in the exhibit have been banned/challenged.  Give yourself the gift of a beautiful story and read one and them imagine what your life would be like if you were never given that gift.

Fight censorship.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X and Alex Haley, 1965 (Grove Press)

Objectors have called this seminal work a “how-to-manual” for crime and decried because of “anti-white statements” present in the book. The book presents the life story of Malcolm Little, also known as Malcolm X, who was a human rights activist and who has been called one of the most influential Americans in recent history.

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Malcolm x was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925, and spent much of his life fighting for equal rights for African Americans. Freedom for African Americans was supposed to have come with the end of the Civil War in 1865, but their struggle to attain equality persisted well into the next century, and continues today. Despite freed slaves’ legal and political gains during the period just after the Civil War, known as Reconstruction, they and their children suffered blows to their rights in the last decades of the nineteenth century. For example, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation, in the form of “separate but equal” public facilities, was constitutional. Legalized racism across America, especially in the South, continued through the first half of the twentieth century.

Suffering from discrimination, economic oppression, and violence at the hands of whites, African-American communities rallied around several different political leaders. Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) encouraged blacks to gain political power by earning the respect of white people through hard work and humble conduct. W.E.B. DuBois (1868–1963) demanded political empowerment and spiritual rebirth. Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) urged a return to Africa, contending that black people should rely upon their own unity and create their own means of empowerment. Garvey’s fiercely nationalist ideas influenced many African Americans, among them Earl Little, Malcolm X’s father, a preacher who spread Garvey’s ideas in his small Michigan community.

During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Malcolm X gained national and international prominence. Often distancing himself from the movement’s leaders, he was perhaps the most controversial leader of the period. Malcolm X’s separatism and militancy contrasted with the desegregation efforts and nonviolent tactics of Martin Luther King, Jr. Historians credit Malcolm X as the spiritual father of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s. At the time of Malcolm X’s murder in 1965, his views and commitments were undergoing a great change. He was demanding unity and self-determination for black people, whose struggle he viewed in the context of oppressed peoples all over the world. He was also abandoning the hard-line anti–white prejudice of his early years.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X is the result of a collaboration between Malcolm X and journalist Alex Haley. Over a period of several years, Malcolm X told Haley his life story in a series of lengthy interviews. Haley wrote down and arranged the material in the first person, and Malcolm X edited and approved every chapter. Thus, though Haley actually did the writing, it is reasonable to consider the work an autobiography. The work is one of the most important nonfiction books of the twentieth century, as it offers valuable insight into the mind of a key figure on a core issue of twentieth-century America. In 1965, a New York reviewer wrote of Malcolm X, “No man has better expressed his people’s trapped anguish.” The autobiography continues to be relevant to efforts to combat racism. Equal rights activists fighting against oppression of African Americans revived Malcolm X’s philosophy in the 1980s, and Spike Lee released the movie Malcolm X in 1992, shortly after the infamous beating of black motorist Rodney King by white police officers.

Fight all forms of censorship.

Fight all forms of censorship.

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Banned Books That Shaped America: Their Eyes Were Watching God

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The Library of Congress created an exhibit, “Books that Shaped America,” that explores books that “have had a profound effect on American life.” Many of the books in the exhibit have been banned/challenged.  Give yourself the gift of a beautiful story and read one and them imagine what your life would be like if you were never given that gift.

Fight censorship.

I have not read this book, and like with all the other books on the banned book list, it has been added to my must-read list.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, 1937

Parents of students in Advanced English classes in a Virginia high school objected to language and sexual content in this book, which made TIME magazine’s list of top 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

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Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, to John Hurston, a carpenter and Baptist preacher, and Lucy Potts Hurston, a former schoolteacher. Hurston was the fifth of eight children, and while she was still a toddler, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black incorporated town in the United States, where John Hurston served several terms as mayor. In 1917, Hurston enrolled in Morgan Academy in Baltimore, where she completed her high school education.

Three years later, she enrolled at Howard University and began her writing career. She took classes there intermittently for several years and eventually earned an associate degree. The university’s literary magazine published her first story in 1921. In 1925, she moved to New York and became a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance. A year later, she, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman organized the journal Fire!, considered one of the defining publications of the era. Meanwhile, she enrolled in Barnard College and studied anthropology with arguably the greatest anthropologist of the twentieth century, Franz Boas. Hurston’s life in Eatonville and her extensive anthropological research on rural black folklore greatly influenced her writing.

Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937, long after the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. The literature of the 1920s, a period of postwar prosperity, was marked by a sense of freedom and experimentation, but the 1930s brought the Depression and an end to the cultural openness that had allowed the Harlem Renaissance to flourish. As the Depression worsened, political tension increased within the United States; cultural production came to be dominated by “social realism,” a gritty, political style associated with left-wing radicalism. The movement’s proponents felt that art should be primarily political and expose social injustice in the world. This new crop of writers and artists dismissed much of the Harlem Renaissance as bourgeois, devoid of important political content and thus devoid of any artistic merit. The influential and highly political black novelist Richard Wright, then an ardent Communist, wrote a scathing review of Their Eyes Were Watching God upon its publication, claiming that it was not “serious fiction” and that it “carries no theme, no message, no thought.”

Hurston was also criticized for her comportment: she refused to bow to gender conventions, and her behavior often seemed shocking if not outrageous. Although she won a Guggenheim Fellowship and had published prolifically (both works of fiction and anthropological works), Hurston fell into obscurity for a number of years. By the late 1940s, she began to have increasing difficulty getting her work published. By the early 1950s, she was forced to work as a maid. In the 1960s, the counterculture revolution continued to show disdain for any literature that was not overtly political, and Zora Neale Hurston’s writing was further ignored.

A stroke in the late 1950s forced Hurston to enter a welfare home in Florida. After she died penniless on January 28, 1960, she was buried in an unmarked grave. Alice Walker, another prominent African-American writer, rediscovered her work in the late 1960s. In 1973, Walker traveled to Florida to place a marker on Hurston’s grave containing the phrase, “A Genius of the South.” Walker’s 1975 essay, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” published in Ms. magazine, propelled Hurston’s work back into vogue. Since then, Hurston’s opus has been published and republished many times; it has even been adapted for the cinema: Spike Lee’s first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It, parallels Their Eyes Were Watching God and can be viewed as an interesting modern adaptation of the novel.

One of the strengths of Hurston’s work is that it can be studied in the context of a number of different American literary traditions. Most often, Their Eyes Were Watching God is associated with Harlem Renaissance literature, even though it was published in a later era, because of Hurston’s connection to that scene. Certain aspects of the book, though, make it possible to discuss it in other literary contexts. For example, some critics argue that the novel should be read in the context of American Southern literature: with its rural Southern setting and its focus on the relationship between man and nature, the dynamics of human relationships, and a hero’s quest for independence, Their Eyes Were Watching God fits well into the tradition that includes such works as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. The novel is also important in the continuum of American feminist literature, comparing well to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. More specifically, and due in large part to Alice Walker’s essay, Zora Neale Hurston is often viewed as the first in a succession of great American black women writers that includes Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor. But Their Eyes Were Watching God resists reduction to a single movement, either literary or political. Wright’s criticism from 1937 is, to a certain extent, true: the book is not a political treatise—it carries no single, overwhelming message or moral. Far from being a weakness, however, this resistance is the secret of the novel’s strength: it is a profoundly rich, multifaceted work that can be read in a number of ways.

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An African-American Woman Being Carried by the Police During a Civil Rights Protest: A Proud Heritage: Photos From the Civil Rights Movement

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In 1964, during a Civil Rights Demonstration in Brooklyn, New York, this African-American woman had to be carried by the police to the police patrol wagon.

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