1902–
Literature collections of the writings of numerous authors
Starting with the March 16, 1827, issue of Freedom’s Journal, readers have been able to find collections of nonfiction writings by African Americans in newspapers and other periodicals. It was nearly a century before a true anthology of such writings appeared, however, with the publication of Twentieth Century Negro Literature (1902), edited by D. W. Culp, and including 100 nineteenth-century essays. A quarter-century later, a more scholarly collection could be found in Negro Orators and Their Orations (1925), edited by esteemed historian Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, often called the “father of black history.”
After another long lapse, things started revving up for nonfiction anthologies, starting with essays of resistance and protest in The Angry Black (1962), edited by John A. Williams, who followed up with his Beyond the Angry Black (1966/1969). After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., (4/4/1968) and its aftermath in American urban unrest, many European Americans awakened to the potential problems of continuing to ignore Americans of African descent. Colleges started offering African-American studies courses and establishing African-American studies departments. These new courses needed new reading materials, and publishers realized they could make money publishing for this new target market.
Among the many anthologies that appeared by 1972 were Black on Black (1968), edited by Arnold Adoff; Rhetoric of Black Revolution (1969), edited by Arthur L. Smith; Black American Literature: Essays (1969), edited by Darwin T. Turner, which includes works by 15 essayists—from William Wells Brown to Eldridge Cleaver; Viewpoints from Black America (1970), edited by Gladys J. Curry; From a Black Perspective: Contemporary Black Essays (1970), edited by Douglas A. Hughes; The Black Aesthetic (1971), edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., including key contributors such as Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (see also Black Aesthetic and Black Arts Movement); and Bondage, Freedom, and Beyond: The Prose of Black Americans (1971), edited by Addison Gayle, Jr.
Anthologies of speeches and essays also offer fundamental insight into the thinking of the most stimulating African Americans, starting with Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence: The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the Days of Slavery to the Present Time (1914; multiple other editions published by 2007), edited by Alice Moore Dunbar (later Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson). Later examples include Historic Speeches of African Americans (1993, 192 pp.), edited by Warren J. Halliburton; The Voice of Black Rhetoric: Selections (1971, 318 pp.), edited by Arthur L. Smith and Stephen Robb; and The Voice of Black America: Major Speeches by Negroes in the United States, 1797-1971 (1972), edited by Philip S. Foner, who also edited Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787-1900 (1998, with Robert J. Branham, 925 pp.). An outstanding example of such an anthology is Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and Its Cultural Content, from Polemics to Pulpit (1992, more than 900 pp.), edited by esteemed essayist Gerald (Lyn) Early, encompassing more than 100 essays by most of the major writers of the 20th century, among others. Early is also the series editor for Best African American Essays; Debra J. Dickerson is the guest editor for Best African American Essays: 2009 (2009), which includes about 30 authors sorted into several general categories, entertainment, sports, the arts, sciences, technology, education, activism, and political thought; Amazon.com is already touting the next edition, Best African American Essays 2010, to be edited by Early. Although somewhat more specialized than the foregoing, Benjamin Quarles’s Black Mosaic: Essays in Afro-American History and Historiography (1988) deserves special mention.
An area of interest to readers of this volume is anthologies of literary criticism and history, including Black Is the Color of the Cosmos: Essays on Afro-American Literature and Culture, 1942-1981 (1982/1989, 376 pp.), edited by Charles T. (Twitchell) Davis, published for Howard University Press’s series “Critical Studies on Black Life and Culture”; Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (1994, 532 pp.), edited by Angelyn Mitchell, which includes Barbara Smith’s 1977 landmark essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism”; and Black Literature Criticisms: Excerpts from Criticism of the Most Significant Works of Black Authors Over the Past 200 Years (1999, 489 pp.), edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter and Jerry (Gerald Eugene) Moore.
Because of the unique experiences of Americans of African descent, slave narratives, as well as other autobiographies and memoirs, have played a distinctive role in African-American literature. For information on anthologies on writers of the antebellum period, see anthologies of African-American literature, writers from the antebellum era. More contemporary autobiographies and memoirs abound, as well, such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Bearing Witness (1991), with the 20th-century writings of 28 authors. A different type of memoir may be found in Farah J. Griffin and Cheryl J. Fish’s A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing (1998, 366 pp.) and in Alasdair Pettinger’s Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic (1998, 300 pp.).
Of course, African-American authors have written on a wide array of topics, and nonfiction anthologies can focus on nearly any topic. Just a few possibilities include protest literature, such as Roy L. Hill’s Rhetoric of Racial Revolt (1964, 378 pp.); C. Peter Ripley’s Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation (1993, 306 pp.); and Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsansky’s Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790-1860 (2001, 326 pp.); and black-nationalist anthologies, such as Wilson Jeremiah Moses’s Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (1996, 257 pp.); Sterling Stuckey’s The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (1972, 265 pp.); and William L. Van Deburg’s Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (1997), 381 pp.).
Anthologies particular to the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement include Albert P. Blaustein and Robert L. Zangrando’s Civil Rights and the American Negro; A Documentary History (1968, 671 pp.); Peter B. Levy’s Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement (1992, 275 pp.); Sondra Kathryn Wilson’s In Search of Democracy: The NAACP Writings of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins (1920-1977) (1999, 524 pp.); Manning Marable and Leith Mullings’s Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal: An African American Anthology (1999, 643 pp.); and Jon Meacham’s Voices in Our Blood: America’s Best on the Civil Rights Movement (2001, 561 pp.).
History anthologies are also abundant. Regarding authors who wrote prior to the Civil War, see anthologies of African-American literature, writers from the antebellum era. Additional anthologies of nonfiction by and about African Americans could fill volumes. The aforementioned anthologies merely indicate a sample of the breadth and depth of anthologies now available and continuing to be released. If one considers also computer databases and Internet resources, the possibilities are truly limitless.