African American writers

music amongst the African-American community. Through the use of narration, uplifting energy, and the use of song, theatre Professor Belinda Boyd did an exceptional job telling the story of a love triangle and the growing literacy created by African-Americans during the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neal Hurston the original playwright, was a famous…

where many would go to enjoy themselves was that these men and women were not Caucasian male and females, but majestic African-American men and women who would keep their audience dancing every night they would perform. Lorraine Hansberry was born during the Harlem Renaissance to Nannie Hansberry and Carl Hansberry, who was pretty well off, yet were also activist of African-American rights. During Lorraine’s childhood, she abides to a suburb that did not accept her family because of their…

elements of African American poetry. One small sampling of college literature professors found that the most common definition of African American literature was “African American writers who wrote about black characters and the black experience” (Gibson 77). This definition does not provide an adequate delineation of the crucial properties of Black poetry. Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and folklorist, observes that the following are some of the characteristics of African American…

Black or African American? When you hear people talk about the black or African Americans’ what and whom do you think about? The “African American” portion sometimes reminds people of slavery, death, and racism. When people hear about “black” people, they think of a different kind of person; they think of a hard working person that has a family that has rebounded from tough times. However, these names can also be switched and can be known for bad things as well as any other person or certain…

regions of the world. The reception that the music achieved was in part due to its “expression of the longings and philosophical perspectives of the black working class” (Bloom 95). In fact, the blues was valued as an indigenous art form by famous writers including Sterling Brown, Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes. The blues was regarded as an antidote to bourgeois black assimilation and a secular equivalent of the…

society years after they are released. For example, ‘Strange Fruit’ written by Abel Meeropol and sung by Billie Holiday in 1939, is a song that protests the lynching of African American’s in the southern states of the US. Lynchings in the US was the organized torture, mutilation and ultimately killing by hanging of African Americans accused of crimes. These events turned into horrific public occurrences attended by hundreds sometimes thousands of watchers were photographs of the lynched were…

Since the beginning of the Civil War and the 1920’s, African American leaders and writers have shown the different perspective of what is to be Black in a society that neglected African-Americans. African-Americans have been in the middle of a battlefield of discrimination, success, and opportunity among whites. Demonstrated in Literature African-Americans have used the idea of blackness and whiteness to show that African American still suffered racial discrimination after the Civil War.…

Migration of approximately half a million African Americans from the rural south to the bustling and promising north gave way to the formation and beginning of the Harlem Renaissance-New Negro era. Within the next ten years more than 750,000 African Americans would follow which increased the black northern population by a stunning amount. This was the start of black Americans discovering and seeking new futures (Krasner). Many of these African Americans were authors, including Zora Neale Hurston…

One of the biggest book awards to receive is the Coretta Scott King Award. The Coretta Scott King Book Award is given annually to outstanding African American authors and illustrators of books for children and young adults that demonstrate an appreciation of African American culture and universal human values. The award commemorates the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and honors his wife, Mrs. Coretta Scott King, for her courage and determination to continue the work for peace and…

what is commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance influenced future generations of black writers, but it was largely ignored by the literary establishment after it waned in the 1930s. With the advent of the civil rights movement, it again acquired wider recognition. But Hughes dropped…