African American Lit

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Griot

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Poet Historian

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Preaching

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The only acceptable form of public utterance allowed to slaves if they wished to emerge as literate spokespersons for their people

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Binary thinking

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An attempt to create a sense of order by reducing human experience to oppositional poles

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Slave-codes

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Strict laws passed by American slave holders designed to augment their rights as owners of human property and to more severely restrict any rights and freedoms remaining to the African slaves

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African Tales

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Used for several purposes: to impart moral values, to instill codes of conduct, to explain natural phenomena, and to entertain

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orator-poets

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Bards whose strong sense of orality and vivid and dramatic sense of the present carried over from African culture

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African Methodist Episcopal (AME)

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Founded by Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and Peters Williams in 1794 in Philadelphia in protest to the treatment of black parishioners. Thus, the black church and has continues to the present as not only a place of worship but also as the sociopolitical center of African American life.

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Epic-hero

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A human being with certain supernatural characteristics who has had to overcome major obstacles and eventually has triumphed, both spiritually and physically, for the sake of his people

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Nya

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protective life force

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Itan

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(Nigerian Yoruba) the formal history of the people

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Oriki

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(Nigerian Yoruba) praise poems are sung by the women in the marketplace as well as priests performing religious functions or by professional singers at nonsacred functions

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Orisha

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(Nigeria Yoruba) a spirit that reflects one of the manifestations of god

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Improvisation

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Much like the African griot, bard, or praise singer, the slave lead singer would extemporize the words of a spiritual or secular song as he or she sang, reflecting the African musical idiom theme and variation, namely, that the songs become altered versions of other songs

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African antiphony

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overlapping call and response, when slave singers would begin the singing of the choral refrain before the leader concluded his or lines and the leader might begin his or her next verse lines before the refrain had been sung

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Syncopation

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the shifting of melodic accents from stronger to weaker beats

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Polyrhythmic and polymetered

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the melodies move in different rhythmic motions from that of the time line

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Hoodoo

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(Changed to voodoo outside the US) A system of belief in Dahomey and Haiti, but reduced to a system of magic when it entered the United States through New Orleans in 1809, used by African Americans as a means of equalizing the imbalance of power in their world; it contained elaborate processes by which one could be conjured, the ways in which such conjuring could be divined, and the means by which the conjured person could be cured.

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Jupiter Hammon

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The first to publish formal African American literature with his poetic publication "An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries" (1760)

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Phillis Wheatley

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Her literary achievements were a catalyst for the colony's fledgling antislavery movement and her presence and writings were an inspiration to colonial slaves

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Richard Allen

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Left St. George's Methodist Episcopalian Church in 1816 and eventually became the founder of the African Methodist Episcopalian denomination, which in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries formed fulcrums of antislavery protest; provided the nucleus of charitable care for indigent Africans in the American colonies; and occasioned hundreds of political statements, legal petitions, newspaper editorials, and other forms of antislavery protest - including anticolonzation campaigns against the resettlement of blacks to Africa.

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Denmark Vesey

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Led an insurrection in 1822 in South Carolina. Forty-seven slaves were condemned to death and 139 of them were arrested, the state passed a law requiring the incarceration of all African Americans seamen during their stay in port

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Nat Turner

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led an insurrection in 1831 in Southampton County, VA in which sixty to eighty slaves killed fity-five whites. Over one hundred slaves, who had not taken part in the rebellion, were brutally slaughtered as panic spread throughout Virginia and other southern states.

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The African Grove

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NY City drama company was the first professional black theatre in America

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Ira Aldridge

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the earliest known black playwright

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American Colonization Society

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founded in 1816, this organizaion was responsible for establishing the Liberian colony six years later with the migration of approximately twelve thousand African Americans, most of whom were from the slave-holding states

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African Womanism

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black feminism centered around family rather than female-centered and which places race and class empowerment before gender empowerment

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Seneca Falls

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1848 Women's Rights Concention held in NY generally regarded as the beginning of the American Women's Rights movement

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Cult of True Womanhood

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referenced commonly by mid-nineteenth century writers to address the ideal of domesticity and piety to which women should aspire

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Fugitive Slave Law

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Passed in 1850, the provisions of which required northern whites to help slave owners recover even alleged runaway slaves

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Freedom's Journal

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The first black newspaper, which appeared in print March 16th, 1827, in America founded by a group of leading New York blacks who responded to a campaign in the white press arguing that blacks were unfit and unworthy to be citizens in New York state.

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Neo-slave narratives

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novels written by authors following the pattern of fugitive slave narratives such as Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), Tony Morrison's Beloved (1987), and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990).

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Dred Scott Decision of 1857

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Supreme Court Decision denied the freedom of a black man who had lived with his master for years in the free state of Illinois, stating that a man once defined as property could not become free merely be residing in "free territory;" instead, the person had to return to the original owner.

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Contraband Slaves

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Slaves who escaped to the Union Army were not returned to their owners under the war provision that seized any property which might be used against them

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Reconstruction Act of 1867

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Federally imposed policy aimed at re-ordering southern society in order to equalize, as much as possible in thos times, the discrepancies between African Americans and whites, to give formerly enslaved people access to American democracy

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Fisk Jubilee Singers

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Organized by George L. White who served as the choral director at Fisk Univeristy, a historically black institution in Nashville, TN, to perform throughout the US and Europe in the 1880s to raise funds

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The Blues

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The sentiment of "laughing to keep from crying" is formalized through a three-line stanza, call and response pattern sung in minor notes reached classical development in the "race records" of the 1920s and the 1930s with sungers such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Bille Holiday

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Ragtime

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The first instrumental music of African americans in which instruments were not used merely as accompaniment - developed sometime during the early post-Civil War era.

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Joel Chandler Harris

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a newpaperman from Georgia, published Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings in 1880. Harris documented the tradition of tales told by African Americans near his neighborhood and he created an archetypal pattern for the interaction of audiences with the African American narrative tradition. The expectation soon emerged that the natural exchange of cultural forms was for a congenial old black man, Uncle Remus, in Harris' many volumes, to share the tales of this folk culture with a willing white audience, a little boy in Harris' volumes.

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Preacher Tales

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Both stories about the black preacher when not in the pulpit and those told by him in the pulpit, took root in the South and became a vital part of the southern black folk heritage. These stories provided comic relief in the midst of tragic lives.

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Lies

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frequent exaggerations within the black folk tradition.

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Fourteenth Amendment

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Adopted in 1868, granted African Americans citizenship

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Freedman's Bureau

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Established as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March of 1865 under the direction of General O.O. Howard. This group organized schools, provided medical services, negotiated contracts between newly freed blacks and their employers, leased and sold abandoned lands to blacks, relocated displaced persons, and helped blacks find their way through the red tape necessary for them to claim a space in society.

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Jim Crow laws

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Instituted in the 1870s to regulate public transportation and facilities to prevent African Americans and whites from sharing the same space on trains, in depots, or on wharves. Eventually this was extended to hotels, barber shops, restaurants, and theaters.