A Research on African-American Literature

When the Civil War ended in April 1865, it bought an end to the U.S. slave system. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands forced slave owners to pay their former slaves as laborer’s. Slave owner, Colonel P.H. Anderson wrote a letter to one of his former slaves, Jourdon Anderson, asking him to return as a free worker on the plantation. As a free man, Anderson wrote back but with specific demands. This essay will cover Anderson’s attitude towards his mater, his view of what he was owed, and his hopes for his and his family’s life in freedom.

The Harlem Renaissance was a time of revival and awakening in which the African American community produced a new form of cultural identity. After years of oppression and slavery, African Americans struggled to discover their own distinctive culture. It was through the literature and artistry of the Harlem Renaissance that the African American community began to express the suffering and resentment they truly experienced. In addition, the movement allowed them to find a way to escape their hardships. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues” address the addiction, poverty, and violence that surrounded African Americans and the triumph of life that was captured in their attempt to escape the suffering.

The book’s overall theme is, as Henri states in the preface, that "black Americans in the early decades of the century had far more of a hand in shaping their future than historians of the period tend to perceive, or at least to convey." The same can be said to some degree for almost all periods of African and African-American recorded

The second half of the eighteenth century introduced a new expression to the literary world. The new expression was a voice that belonged to the African American writers. The African American writers wrote with a flair and brought a new perspective to the realm of literature. Literature, as America had known it, consisted of works from Christopher Columbus, John Smith, William Bradford, and Mary Rowlandson; these writers captured the essence of life, through their eyes. Through their eyes, the readers were able to see what life was like for Christopher Columbus through his letters capturing details of the voyages. Another famous writing in the eighteenth century was a voice from a different perspective than voyages but, it was a voice dealing with savages, as they were called. This voice was the voice of Mary Rowlandson, one of the first female writers in American Literature. Rowlandson’s narrative was based on her captivity with the Indians and the reestablishment of her life after she was returned to her hometown. Through narration and translation, the Native Americans were able to capture their literature in their native tongue. What type of literature could the Native Americans have to contribute to the literary world? The Native Americans, like other cultures, have stories that have been passed down from generation to generation, in the form of oral expressions. The oral expressions the Native

Letter to my old Master is a letter that was wrote by Jourdon Anderson to his former master Colonel P.H. Anderson after the slaves had been freed in 1863. Jourdon received a letter stating that Col. Anderson wants him to return to him but Jourdon wrote this letter to him instead in early August 1865. The letter Jourdon sent to Col. Anderson was written in Dayton, Ohio which is also where most of the freed slaves went to live at after they were released from there owners. The focus audience for “Letter to my old Master” is the former slave owners in the late 19 century that was trying to get their former to return to them and continue to work for free. The feeling for “Letter to my old Master” for me was a very of unsure feeling, you are not sure at the middle of the letter how Jourdon really feels. Jourdon talks about how Col. Anderson was going out of his way to kill a presumably wounded prisoner, and Jourdon then talk about how Col. Anderson had already shot at him twice personally before he had left, and he is still able to tell Anderson how happy he is that he was able to survive. I think personally that he was very sincere when he said that, he really didn’t have any real reason to say it. That shows a lot about his character as a man and the strength he has as a person to forgive is

Jourdon Anderson a former slave who was freed from a Tennessee plantation, responded to Colonel P.H. Anderson his former master letter wanting him to return to his estate was eloquently written as he expresses his feeling, thoughts and memory. One would think that a slave who is assumed illiterate and having no formal education would not be able to pen such a letter.

In James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues,” the readers get a glimpse into the life of an average lower-class African American man in the 1950s. The characters in the story grow up in a town called Harlem where they are given unfair opportunities. They are surrounded by a hostile environment, filled with drugs, darkness, and anger. The protagonist, the narrator, cannot overcome the oppression Harlem places on his family and on himself. The antagonist, Sonny, desperately searches for a way to escape the harsh influence of Harlem. In “Sonny’s Blues," the protagonist and the antagonist battle both internal and external conflicts as they struggle to find freedom from their negative environment.

Written after the abolition of slavery, but before the Civil Rights Movement, “Sonny’s Blues” transpires in an uncertain era,

Reading the first letter from Jourdan Anderson, one of the meanings of freedom one can take away from the tone of Anderson’s diction is the freedom to throw shade. Seriously, Anderson is now a free man and thus free to write smugly to his former master, and eloquently so. His letter essentially tells the Colonel there is no chance in hell that he and his family will return to live with the man who previously enslaved them. Anderson also expressed he knew he was already a free man in response to the Colonel promising his freedom upon his return. Anderson states, “there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville.” That line asserts to the Colonel that going returning to Big Spring would not be advantageous because he can already live freely with his family. He does not need, nor want to return to the Colonel’s home.

As an African-American male of Nigerian descent growing up in the United States, my parents constantly talked about my heritage and invariably enforced it on me throughout my 17 years in this world. As an adolescent I often see my parents on the phone with my relatives in Nigeria discussing their daily struggles, lack of food, little or no electricity and the withering health of the old and the young due to lack of medication and treatment. This prompts my parents to constantly send money to their loved ones. This sparked my awareness of the problems that Nigerian community and the rest of the third world countries are going through. How my parents voluntarily support their relatives has made me to participate in more volunteer activities in my Maryland Community. I have joined the National English Honor Society at my school and I participated in a home makeover program with “My Girlfriend’s House” Community Program to help the less fortunate by providing them with food and new living utensils. The many charitable acts I have done resulted from my cultural background and I plan to continue doing this during and after college.

The story of “Sonny Blues”, by James Baldwin, reflects on a time in music when Harlem was at a crossroads in the cultural movements for African Americans. It was a time of poverty and of self-discovery within communities after the war. This story was about the lives and struggles of two brothers within the Harlem community that was stricken by its poverty, crime and drug abuse that plagued its city streets. Their family was haunted with the fear for the safety of their children due to the growing changes of the city, but felt trapped within confinement of its walls of poverty. Yet it was never really mentioned why until the mother explained the brutal racial killing of an uncle that haunted the boy’s father years ago.

You might wonder why I haven’t written African American writers. This is because not all black writers are African American and it is important to understand the distinction in the passages on the exam.

There were many influential African American writers in the 1900s. Amongst them being some whose legacies we still see about today such as Maya Angelou, W.E.B. Dubois, Alex Haley, and Richard Wright. Richard Wright was born in 1908 in Roxie, Mississippi. He has been highly regarded as a writer and to this day is one of the most important African American writers in history. Richard Wright stands out from the other writers because during his lifetime as a writer/journalist, he wrote over 4,000 haikus according to terebess.hu. Most Black writers focused on things that had to do with race as did Wright, however, the majority of what he wrote we’re haikus.

Modern writers learn from the past by reading works written by authors of that particular era. Contemporary African-American writers gain knowledge and insight into the horrendous and sometimes harmonious conditions that plagued Africans during slavery and the slave trade. By reading the actual words, thoughts, and feelings of these enslaved Africans, modern writers receive information from the perspective of the victimized. Lucille Clifton's "slaveship" is a vivid example of a contemporary writer borrowing from the past to depict another account of the slave trade. The fact that Clifton's father told her stories about her family's struggle and she, herself, traced her lineage back to

The role of African American literature in recent years has been to illuminate for the modern world the sophistication and beauty inherent in their culture as well as the constant struggle they experience in the oppressive American system. When writers such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois and Alice Walker present their material, they manage to convey to a future world the great depth of feeling and meaning their particular culture retained as compared with the culture of their white counterparts. Without this attempt at preservation, much of the richness of this community might have been lost or forgotten. At the same time, they illuminated some of the problems inherent within their society, including lack of education, lack of