This month I am sharing my reading of Black American poets in the nineteenth century. This reading is helping me prepare for class at The College. I received the following comment from someone on social media:
Conservatives sure do love to quote dead black people. Living ones not so much. See, for example, what they had to say about MLK before and after 1968.
There is some truth in this response. “Conservatives” of a sort did oppose MLK. There is a tendency to lionize the safely dead over the present activists. This is true of the political left and right, but is certainly true of conservatives and Black activists. There is so much to read, so much to hear, so much to learn from Black Americans. Am I reading enough?
I should reflect on the possibility I am not. There are so many treasures nobody could read enough, but here is where I have started! Here are some more of my thoughts on Black American writers I regularly use in teaching at The College at Saint Constantine (including those more contemporary) and also a selection of my thoughts on the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.* :
On Older Black Writers and Activists
Our African Roots as Educators. . . Saint Kaleb pray for us.
American Revolutionary Pastor, Patriot, Poet. . .
Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. . .
A Novel: the Hindered Hand. . .
The Poet Pricilla Jane Thompson. . .
The unfashionable Mary Weston Fordham. . .
Taking Marcus Garvey seriously. . .
Poet and thinker George Marion McClellan. . .
On Reading Well and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. . .
The Theological Wisdom of Charles Octavius Boothe: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
The Color Line at the White City
On More Modern Black Writers and Activists
Education Explained. . . bad education attacked. (Carter G. Woodson)
Between two worlds Arna Bontemps. . . with his Black Thunder. . .and hard truth about the Old South.
The courage of the child martyrs. . .
Tracey K. Smith and all the Summer Days. . .
Billie Holiday and Strange Fruit. . .
The Cross and the Lynching Tree. . .
The Cross and the Lynching Tree and the Failure of Imagination. . .
Anyabwile on African American Theology. . .
Zora Hurston and Barracoon. . .and Their Eyes Were Watching God.
My favorite American poet Langston Hughes:
The Great American Novel: Invisible Man. . .
The brilliant Athony Bradley . . .
Tayari Jones and luminous An American Marriage . . .
Mari Evans teaches us. . . to live a complete life.
The political wisdom of Brazile. . .
On Rev. Dr. King
The Garrow biography reviewed. . .
The Reflections on the Famous Sermons: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
A Complicated Legacy. . . but a tough mind and a tender heart.
Wise . . . unlike “Christian” textbooks from ABeka. . .
Bonus: A piece from 2017 on White Christian Nationalism.
One on condemning Dixon, Wilson, and the Great Lie about the CSA.
And there is Bad Lincoln. . .
*I have limited myself to a selection from the last three years. There are so many authors I learn from yearly (Booker T. Washington, Dubois. . .), but this is start.
I made this list partly to look for more of many blind spots.
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