The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Shirley Chisholm, by Thomas J. O’Halloran, January 25, 1972. Photograph. Library of Congress.

  One year later, in 1985, Oprah Winfrey (b. 1954) launched The Oprah Winfrey Show, which would dominate daytime television for the next quarter of a century, broadcast in more than 100 countries and garnering a legion of Emmy Awards and fiercely dedicated fans. According to Forbes, Winfrey is currently the only African American billionaire. In 1989, the Reverend Barbara Harris (b. 1930) was elected the first female bishop of the Episcopal Church; more than a decade would pass before the Reverend Vashti Murphy McKenzie (b. 1947) became the first female bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, in 2000. In 1991, Sharon Pratt Kelly (b. 1944) won election as mayor of Washington, D.C., the first African American woman to do so in any large U.S. city; and in 1992, Carol Moseley Braun was elected to the Senate. To this day, she remains the only African American woman ever to hold that seat. Just a year later, the astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison (b. 1956) became the first African American woman in space on the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour.

  Oprah Winfrey, Los Angeles, August 19, 1986. Photograph. Associated Press, Association Images.

  Condoleezza Rice with President George W. Bush, Crawford, Texas, August 16, 2008. Photograph. Saul Leob/AFP, Getty Images.

  There is no field in this period, it seems, that women haven’t dominated. In 2002, Serena Williams (b. 1981) won the first of five ladies’ singles titles at Wimbledon, and she and her sister Venus (b. 1980) won the ladies’ doubles. That same year, Halle Berry (b. 1966) became the first African American woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress. In 2005, Condoleezza Rice (b. 1954) succeeded Colin Powell as the United States secretary of state (two African American secretaries of state back to back!). Four years later, Susan Rice (b. 1964)—no relation—was confirmed as the United States ambassador to the United Nations, like Condoleezza Rice, the first African American female to hold that position. But perhaps the most symbolic event of all in this long (and partial) list of honors accorded to African American women was the awarding in 1999 of the Congressional Gold Medal to Rosa Parks, and the issuing in 2013 of a United States postage stamp in her honor.

  Toni Morrison, Paris, November 8, 2006. Photograph. Francois Guillot/AFP, Getty Images.

  While African American female accomplishments in electoral politics, entertainment, and sports would be quite impressive, it would be in the production of literature that African American women would fundamentally re-define the canon. Indeed, some scholars characterize the last four decades as “Woman’s Era” in the African American literary tradition, echoing the title of a periodical published earlier in the history of black feminism. The period commenced with the publication in 1969 of Maya Angelou’s (b. 1928) classic autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which became an instant bestseller and has remained extraordinarily popular over these last four decades. The next year saw the publication of the stunningly brilliant debut novels of Toni Morrison (b. 1931) and Alice Walker (b. 1944), The Bluest Eye and The Third Life of Grange Copeland respectively, as well as the authoritative anthology The Black Woman, edited by Toni Cade Bambara (1939–1995). Octavia Butler (1947–2006) joined the chorus a year later with the publication of her boldly experimental science fiction neo-slave narrative Kindred. Morrison’s publication of Sula in 1973—the same year in which the National Black Feminist Organization was founded—signaled that a major new talent was evolving. A year later, Morrison, who was working as an editor at Random House, published Angela Davis’s Autobiography, followed in 1975 by Gayl Jones’s (b. 1949) searching novel about slavery and rape, Corregidora.

  In many ways, 1975 was a hallmark year in the history of black women’s writing, not only because Corregidora broke new formal ground in the ways in which black women narrate fictional versions of their history, but also because the first formal dramatic critique of black male chauvinism and misogyny took Broadway by storm under the curious title For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, by Ntozake Shange (b. 1948). In 1979, Michele Wallace (b. 1952), in what has been thought of as a sort of companion piece to Shange’s play, published a probing critique of the history of black sexism and misogyny, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, which generated a firestorm of angry reaction from many black male writers and critics, including a special issue of The Black Scholar magazine. But a subject that had long been treated as a taboo—intraracial sexism, especially in the civil rights movement and the Black Power era—had been opened to debate and would continue to be debated throughout the remainder of the century and beyond.

  In one of the most important contributions to African American canon formation, Alice Walker redefined the concept of African American women’s literary ancestry by tracing her line of formal descent from Zora Neale Hurston in two essays published in Ms. magazine, the seminal “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” in 1974, and “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in 1975. Walker would go on in 1983 to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her strikingly original novel The Color Purple, which was a formal signifying riff upon Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which Walker and Hurston’s biographer, Robert Hemenway, resurrected from obscurity. Their Eyes would become one of the most widely taught novels in American, African American, and women’s literature classes over the course of the rest of the century, as would novels by Morrison and Walker herself. Even Spike Lee’s (b. 1957) first major film, She’s Gotta Have It, which won the Best New Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986, reflected the force of the black women’s literary and artistic movement, just as Julie Dash’s (b. 1962) Daughters of the Dust—the first nationally released feature film by an African American woman—would as well.

  But 1993 stands as the banner year in the history of black women’s writing. On January 20, Maya Angelou gave an affecting reading of her poem “On the Pulse of the Morning” at the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton; poet Rita Dove (b. 1952) became the first African American woman and the youngest ever United States poet laureate; and on October 7, Toni Morrison became the first African American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Nine years later, Suzan-Lori Parks (b. 1963) would become the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for Topdog/Underdog.

  This era of black women’s writing, characterized by a remarkable degree of both creativity and productivity, amounted to a literary renaissance, one with perhaps more lasting implications than even the Harlem Renaissance of the ’20s. It was capped, most recently, by Elizabeth Alexander’s (b. 1962) reading of her superb poem “Praise Song for the Day,” at the first inauguration of President Barack Obama.

  Spike Lee, 1994. Photograph. Fotos International/Getty Images.

  AT THIS POINT IN OUR HISTORY, IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE EVEN THE MOST CONSERVATIVE AFRICAN AMERICAN’S home without some black cultural artifacts on display and some form of black music on its sound system. These are radical changes since 1968, the beginning of the time period of this chapter. And Barack Obama’s election most certainly would have been impossible had not the African American community voted overwhelmingly in his favor in both of his presidential contests, a reflection of what we might think of as a black cultural nationalist identification at its most fundamental level. These might not have been the forms of the naturalization or Americanization of African American culture on the minds of the Black Power and Black Arts advocates of the ’60s and ’70s, but the “blackening” or the Africanization of American culture is certainly a triumph that the founders of these movements can claim, if indeed they would not find these forms of broad acceptance a form of co-optation.

  While no one could argue that we still have a very long way to go in terms of the full recognition of African American history and culture, it would be difficult to argue that American society has not made dramatic progress in this direction since the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And of course the ele
ction—and maybe more important, the reelection—of a black president speaks volumes about the growth of (lowercase) black power.

  Yet there remain deep social and economic inequalities that still need to be resolved, that divide black Americans from white, and black middle-class Americans from their working-class brothers and sisters. Perhaps building the bridge that will reach across those divides is the ultimate challenge of the next chapter in the history of the African American people.

  _____________________________

  1 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington, (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 52. This is one of many instances in which Dr. King used this phrase.

  2 Joyce A. Martin, et al., National Center for Health Statistics, “Births: Final Data for 2007,” National Vital Statistics Reports 58, no. 24, August 9, 2010; Table 15, 76.

  3 Michael Lomax, “Education Is the 21st-Century Liberator,” The Root, January 16, 2013, http://www.theroot.com/views/education-21st-century-liberator.

  4 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  5 Pew Center on the States, One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections (Washington, D.C.: The Pew Charitable Trusts, March 2009), 5.

  6 Pew Center on the States, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 (Washington, D.C.: The Pew Charitable Trusts, February 2008), 3, 7.

  7 Lawrence Bobo, e-mail message to the authors, January 30, 2013.

  8 Becky Pettit, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012), 18; see also Sam Roberts, “How Prisoners Make Us Look Good,” The New York Times Sunday Review, October 27, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/sunday-review/how-prisoners-make-data-look-good.html?_r=0.

  9 Eldridge Cleaver, “The Death of Martin Luther King: Requiem for Nonviolence,” Post-Prison Writings and Speeches, ed. Robert Scheer (New York: Random House, 1969), 75.

  10 Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots,” in The Portable Malcolm X Reader, eds. Manning Marable and Garrett Felber (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 267–68.

  11 Miriam Schneir, Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1994), 173–74.

  12 Dean E. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 67.

  13 Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 26.

  14 “Brand New Bag: Questlove on Don Cornelius,” Okayplayer (February 1, 2012), http://www.okayplayer.com/news/brand-new-bag-questlove-on-don-cornlius.html.

  15 Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 87.

  16 Thomas C. Holt, Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 344.

  17 Robin D. G. Kelley, Into the Fire: African Americans since 1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 48.

  18 Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!, 6.

  19 Amiri Baraka, “The Gary Declaration: Black Politics at the Crossroads,” National Black Political Convention, 1972, BlackPast.org: Remembered and Reclaimed, http://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/gary-declaration-national-black-political-convention-1972.

  20 “Black Power Comes of Age,” Washington Post, June 29, 1972.

  21 James Brown and Bruce Tucker, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul (New York: Thunder Mouth’s Press, 1986, 1997), 232.

  22 Kelley, Into the Fire, 48.

  23 Kelley, Into the Fire, 48.

  24 Kelley, Into the Fire, 65.

  25 Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 92.

  26 Stephen Tuck, We Ain’t What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 374.

  27 “Faces of FAMM: Reynolds Wintersmith,” FAMM: Sentences That Fit, Justice That Works, http://www.famm.org/facesofFAMM/FederalProfiles/ReynoldsWintersmith.aspx.

  28 McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0481_0279_ZO.html.

  29 Christina Swarns and Eva Paterson, “Twenty-Five Years Later, McCleskey Decision Still Fosters Racism by Ignoring It,” ACSblog (American Constitution Society), http://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/25-years-later-mccleskey-decision-still-fosters-racism-by-ignoring-it.

  30 Adam Liptak, “New Look at Death Sentences and Race,” New York Times, April 29, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/us/29bar.html.

  31 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Kickin’ Reality, Kickin’ Ballistics: Gangsta Rap and Postindustrial Los Angeles,” Droppin’ Science: Critical Perspectives on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture, ed. William Eric Perkins (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 118.

  32 “Barbara Bush Calls Evacuees Better Off,”? New York Times, September 7, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/nationalnationalspecial/07barbara.html.

  33 Tuck, We Ain’t What We Ought to Be, 409.

  34 Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 138–39.

  35 Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen, 11.

  36 “Rapper Blasts Bush Over Katrina,” CBSNews.com, 2009, http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500487_162-814636.html.

  37 Madison Gray, “The Press, Race and Katrina,” Time, August 30, 2006, http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1471224,00.html.

  38 Adam Nossiter, “New Orleans Population Is Reduced Nearly 60%,” New York Times, October 7, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/07/us/07population.html?_r=0.

  39 Barack Obama, Keynote speech, Democratic National Convention, July 27, 2004, Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19751-2004Jul27.html.

  40 Jeff Zeleny and Patrick Healy, “Black Leader, a Clinton Ally, Tilts to Obama,” New York Times, February 15, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/us/politics/15clinton.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

  41 A link to the video and full transcript of the Reverend Wright’s speech are available at the Dallas Morning News’ “Texas Faith” blog, http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/2008/03/listen-and-read-to-the-whole-g.html/.

  42 The full transcript of Barack Obama’s “race speech” is available at The New York Times, March 18, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html?pagewanted=all.

  43 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 138.

  44 United States Census Bureau, January 10, 2013, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html.

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