The Civil Rights Movement Represented in Literature
The Civil Rights Movement, a pivotal period in American history, is significantly represented in literature, reflecting the struggles and aspirations of African Americans for equality and justice. Beginning with the 1955 act of defiance by Rosa Parks, the movement encompassed a variety of approaches, from nonviolent resistance led by figures like Martin Luther King Jr. to the more militant actions of groups like the Black Panther Party. Literature from this era, especially by African American authors, served not only as a voice for the movement but also as an exploration of cultural identity and social justice. Notable writers such as Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, and James Baldwin conveyed the emotional and political nuances of the time through poetry, plays, and novels, highlighting themes of empowerment and resistance.
As the movement evolved, so did the literature, with the emergence of the Black Arts movement, which sought to redefine African American art and connect it to the community's struggles. This literature often had a dual purpose—reflecting the immediate experiences of African Americans while also aspiring to broader social change. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement continued to inspire new works, including historical fiction and graphic narratives, ensuring that the dialogue around race and equality remains vibrant and relevant today. Through these varied literary expressions, the complexities and victories of the Civil Rights Movement are preserved and examined, providing insight into ongoing issues of racial justice in the United States.
The Civil Rights Movement Represented in Literature
Background
The moment in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, is widely considered a starting point of the civil rights movement in the United States. Behind leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., African Americans began to demand their rights as American citizens. The African American struggle for civil rights followed a variety of approaches, including the nonviolent tactics of King, the more aggressive methods of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and the direct militancy of the Black Panther Party (which favored a self-defense agenda). Groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (founded in 1960) initially subscribed to peaceful methods but gradually espoused more combative techniques. As slogans such as Black Is Beautiful and Black Power became prevalent, African American literature became more attuned to the events of the decade, demonstrating theoretical approaches that, resembling the disparity in political ideology, were either conciliatory and encouraged dialogue or were bitterly irate and sought vengeance and revolutionary change.
Literature
Poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for Annie Allen (1949), Margaret Danner, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Melvin B. Tolson, Sterling Brown, and Mary Elizabeth Vroman expressed their feelings and concerns about the civil rights conflict in their poetry. Others expressed themselves in short stories, plays, novels, and essays. They include Ralph Ellison, author of the celebrated novel Invisible Man (1952); James Baldwin, author of Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953); Paule Marshall, author of Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959); Lorraine HansberryMari Evans; and Ernest J. Gaines. Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), which addresses segregated housing policies of the time, was the first play by an African American woman to reach Broadway. Considered by some as integrationist drama, much like the drama of Loften Mitchell and Alice Childress, the play also earned Hansberry the honor of being the youngest American to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959.
In a cultural outburst rivaled only by the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, black writers of the 1960s explored the beauty and uniqueness of African American culture. African American writers such as Hansberry, Hughes, and Amiri Baraka openly celebrated and incorporated into their lives and their writings the stories, rituals, songs, and customs of their African and African American ancestry. In addition to reclaiming and tapping from lost or disregarded black aesthetic and social values, these and other writers insisted that black literature be functional, express positive black images, cater primarily to the well-being of blacks, and connect with the goals of the civil rights agenda and with the black power ideology.
After riots in urban ghettoes in the 1960s, African American poetry was often used as a political weapon. Poets such as Hayden, Lucille Clifton, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, Baraka, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, and Dudley Randall employed their poetry for communal purposes, as a dramatic voice primarily for all African Americans and sometimes expressing universal themes. Effects of the Black Power movement on the novelist are evident in the works of William Melvin Kelley (dem, 1967), Ishmael Reed (The Free-Lance Pallbearers, 1967), and Gaines (Of Love and Dust, 1967). Marshall, Gaines, Charlie Cobb, and Julia Fields also expressed the movement in short stories. Autobiographies and biographies of the time were also powerful and insightful in regard to the civil rights movement. Malcolm X's The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1968), and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) became classic works on African American experience. In the field of theater, Baraka's play Dutchman (1964) launched him into theatrical prominence. Charles Gordone and his celebrated No Place to Be Somebody: A Black Comedy (1967) and Ed Bullins, acclaimed for his In the Wine Time (1968), brought the new political awareness to the stage.
Some of the writers of this era were more radical than others, moving away decisively from the integrationist themes of the 1950s. Having abandoned deliberation and nonviolent methods that had proven insufficient, they sought more antagonistic styles and themes, dictating immediate and severe steps toward handling the crisis. Baraka and Larry Neal published Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing in 1968, a collection of essays, poetry, fiction, and drama. The editors, describing African American writers as warriors in the foreword, declare the arrival of a new era for black art. Their anthology marks the birth of the Black Arts movement, which, Neal notes, condemns any principle that separates African American writers from their communities. African American art is to be considered an instrument for self-determination, justice, self-pride, and the revival of aesthetic and cultural values that derive from the black heritage. Many African Americans upheld and advanced the proposals of the movement, but other more conservative black critics faulted it, claiming that it was creatively restrictive. The Black Arts movement undoubtedly promoted black literature, however, and attracted a lot of attention to the ongoing civil rights movement.
The success of writers intimately tied to the civil rights movement, as well as the general successes of the movement itself, paved they way for greater recognition of African American authors in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. More and more independent publishers, black and white, began to explore and publish literature by African American writers. With the increased availability of this literature, its readership— black, white, and beyond—grew. Perhaps no other figure saw as much critical and commercial success during this time than Toni Morrison, who often included central themes of the civil rights movement in her acclaimed novels.
By the early twenty-first century the heyday of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s remained a touchstone for African American literature, but it had also receded far enough into the past for it to receive new types of attention. Along with scholarly works unpacking the significance of the era (such as the Pulitzer Prize–winning 2001 work Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Movement by Diane McWhorter), works of historical fiction set during the period began to emerge. Alternative formats also grew in popularity, including graphic works such as the Martin Luther King Jr. biography King (2005) by Ho Che Anderson; the memoir Darkroom (2012) by Lila Quintero Weaver; and The Silence of Our Friends (2012) by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell. In this way new generations of writers continued to engage with its legacy and the ongoing struggle for true equality in the United States.
Bibliography
Armstrong, Julie Buckner, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature. Cambridge UP, 2015.
Baraka, Imamu Amiri, and Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. New York: William Morrow, 1968.
Davis, Arthur P., J. Saunders Redding, and Joyce Ann Joyce, eds. The New Cavalcade: African American Writing from 1760 to the Present. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1991-1992.
Dubek, Laura, ed. Living Legacies: Literary Responses to the Civil Rights Movement. Routledge, 2018.
Emanuel, James A., and Theodore L. Gross, eds. Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America. New York: Free Press, 1968.
Minzesheimer, Bob. "Books Played a Role in the Civil Rights Movement." USA Today, 25 Feb. 2014,www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2014/02/25/books-and-the-civil-rights-movement/4343605/. Accessed 30 Aug. 2019.
Rico, Patricia San José. Creating Memory and Cultural Identity in African American Trauma Fiction. Brill, 2019.
Santos, Jorge. Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History in Comics. U of Texas P, 2019.
Smith, Valerie, et al., eds. African American Writers. New York: Macmillan, 1991.
Walker, Melissa. Down From the Mountaintop: Black Women's Novels in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement, 1966–1989. Yale UP, 1993.