African American literature

The literature of civil rights

Declaring that “all art is ultimately social,” Hansberry was one of several African American writers—most prominently Baldwin and Alice Walker—to take an active part in the civil rights movement and to be energized, imaginatively and socially, by the freedom struggles of the late 1950s and the '60s. The murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager visiting Mississippi in 1955, led Gwendolyn Brooks to compose The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till, signaling her gravitation toward a more explicitly socially critical verse as featured in her volume The Bean Eaters (1960). Poets Margaret Esse Danner and Naomi Long Madgett began their careers publishing similar work in the 1950s.

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  Introduction
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  Antebellum literature
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    Slave narratives
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    Prose, drama, and poetry
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    Oral tradition
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  The Civil War and Reconstruction
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  The late 19th and early 20th centuries
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    Paul Laurence Dunbar
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    The novel as social analysis
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    Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois
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    The rise of the New Negro
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  The Harlem Renaissance
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    Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen
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    Novelists
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    Playwrights and editors
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  The advent of urban realism
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    Richard Wright
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    Chicago writers
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    The 1940s
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    Ralph Ellison
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    James Baldwin
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  African American theatre
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  The literature of civil rights
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    Amiri Baraka
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    The Black Arts movement
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  Reconceptualizing Blackness
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  Renaissance in the 1970s
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    Toni Morrison
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    Alice Walker
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  The turn of the 21st century
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    August Wilson
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    African American roots
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  Additional Reading