Even as a child, Thelma Lucille Sayles, or Lucille Clifton, realized how notable African Americans were. However, throughout her lifetime, Clifton has encountered discrimination against her race on multiple occasions, but her poetry, for both adults and children, show resilience against any racist remarks made. With a heavy influence from growing up in an African-American household and experiencing the Civil Rights Movement, Lucille Clifton’s writings focus on the importance of African Americans, especially women, in communities (Hine 1-3). It would be simply inappropriate to explore Clifton’s childhood without first looking at her great-great-grandmother, Caroline Donald, or Mammy Ca’line, a slave brought from Africa to Virginia. Clifton’s great-grandmother “was the first African American woman legally hanged in Virginia for killing the white father of her son” (Pettis 1). Many tales about Mammy Ca’line and Clifton’s great-grandmother were told throughout Clifton’s lifetime and influenced her as well. Thelma Lucille Sayles was born in Depew, New York, on June 27th, 1936 (Hine 1). Her mother, Thelma Moore Sayles, and Samuel Louis Clifton Senior, her father, suffered economically since their economic condition was in a pinch. Clifton grew up in Depew, “a small steel mill town with a heavy concentration of Polish residents” (Pettis 1). At the age of seventeen, Lucille Clifton enrolled into Howard University on a full scholarship and majored in drama from 1953 to 1955 (Hine 1). There, she came face to face with many “color-conscious” young women and felt the wrath of racism (Pettis 1). In 1969, Lucille Clifton was thirty-three years old with six children, who would eventually influence Clifton’s writings too. That same year, her ... ... middle of paper ... ...ing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1998-2000. Comp. Clifton. Rochester: BOA Editions, 2000. 20. Print. - - -. "Slave Ships." 1996. Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1998-2000. Comp. Clifton. Rochester: BOA Editions, 2000. 121. Print. - - -. "Won't You Celebrate With Me." 1993. The Book of Light. Comp. Clifton. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 1993. 25. Print. Hine, Darlene Clark, ed. “Clifton, Lucille.” American Women’s History Online. Facts on File, 1997. 1-3. Web. 13 Mar. 2014. “Lucille Clifton.” Poets.org. The Academy of American Poets, 1997-2014. Web. 12 Mar. 2014. http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/79 . Pettis, Joyce. “Lucille Clifton.” American Mosaic: The African American Experience. ABC-CLIO, n.d. 1-2. Web. 12 Mar. 2014. Smith, Robert C. “Civil Rights Movement.” African-American History Online. Facts On File, 2014. 1-3. Web. 13 Mar. 2014.
James, Edward, Janet James, and Paul Boyer. Notable American Women, 1607-1950. Volume III: P-Z. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Print.
In Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore’s book Gender & Jim Crow, Gilmore illustrates the relations between African Americans and white in North Caroline from 1896 to 1920, as well as relations between the men and women of the time. She looks at the influences each group had on the Progressive Era, both politically and socially. Gilmore’s arguments concern African American male political participation, middle-class New South men, and African American female political influences. The book follows a narrative progression of African American progress and relapse.
This piece of auto biographical works is one of the greatest pieces of literature and will continue to inspire young and old black Americans to this day be cause of her hard and racially tense background is what produced an eloquent piece of work that feels at times more fiction than non fiction
The life of Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) affords rich opportunities for studying the developments in African-American and Ameri can life during the century following emancipation. Like W.E.B. DuBois, Cooper's life is framed by especially momentous years in U.S. history: the final years of slavery and the climactic years of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's. Cooper's eclect ic and influential career mirrored the times. Although her life was privileged in relation to those of the majority of African-Americans, Cooper shared in the experiences of wrenching change, elevating promise, and heart-breaking disappointment. She was accordingly able to be an organic and committed intellectual whose eloquent speech was ensnarled in her concern for the future of African-Americans.
Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship A Human History. New York, New York: Penguin Group, 2007. Print.
The poems, inspired by Clifton’s family of six young children, show the beginnings of Clifton’s spare, unadorned style and center around the facts of African-American urban life. Clifton's second volume of poetry, Good News about the Earth: New Poems (1972), was written in the midst of the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s and 70s, and its poems reflect those changes, including a middle sequence that pays homage to black political leaders. Writing in Poetry, Ralph J. Mills, Jr., said that Clifton's poetic scope transcends the black experience "to embrace the entire world, human and non-human, in the deep affirmation she makes in the teeth of negative evidence." However, An Ordinary Woman (1974), Clifton's third collection of poems, largely abandoned the examination of racial issues that had marked her previous books, looking instead at the writer's roles as woman and poet. Helen Vendler declared in the New York Times Book
As Lucille wrote many children’s books,” Clifton wrote more than twenty children’s books centered on the African American experience.” (Obituaries 1). Although Lucille cared about people seeing viewpoints on African Americans, she also believed in seeing the viewpoints of whites during the slavery times as well. She wanted to understand history throughout all viewpoints of all Americans. “Many children’s books were written expressly for an African American audience in mind.” (Beckles 2). Lucille’s children’s books would be based on how African Americans lived throughout slavery and how women would be treated. She would write poems that described the everyday life of an at home wife that only cooks or cleans for a master that does not care for them. After writing many poems base on slavery and viewpoints, Lucille won many, many titles and received many awards for her
The poem “Negro” was written by Langston Hughes in 1958 where it was a time of African American development and the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. Langston Hughes, as a first person narrator tells a story of what he has been through as a Negro, and the life he is proud to have had. He expresses his emotional experiences and makes the reader think about what exactly it was like to live his life during this time. By using specific words, this allows the reader to envision the different situations he has been put through. Starting off the poem with the statement “I am a Negro:” lets people know who he is, Hughes continues by saying, “ Black as the night is black, /Black like the depths of my Africa.” He identifies Africa as being his and is proud to be as dark as night, and as black as the depths of the heart of his country. Being proud of him self, heritage and culture is clearly shown in this first stanza.
Levy, Peter B., The Civil RIghts Movement, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1998. Web. 24 June 2015.
Moore, Marianne. “Poetry” 1921. Approaching Literature: Reading + Thinking + Writing. Ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013. 843-844. Print.
In this poem about seeing from the shadows, the speaker?s revelations are invariably ironic. What could be a more unpromising object of poetic eloquence than mayflies, those leggy, flimsy, short-lived bugs that one often finds floating in the hulls of rowboats? Yet for Wilbur...
In 1942, Margaret Walker won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her poem For My People. This accomplishment heralded the beginning of Margaret Walker’s literary career which spanned from the brink of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s to the cusp of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s (Gates and McKay 1619). Through her fiction and poetry, Walker became a prominent voice in the African-American community. Her writing, especially her signature novel, Jubilee, exposes her readers to the plight of her race by accounting the struggles of African Americans from the pre-Civil War period to the present and ultimately keeps this awareness relevant to contemporary American society.
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.
Gloria Naylor, a celebrated African-American novelist, was born in New York City on January 25, 1950. She has authored six novels, namely The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), Bailey’s Cafe (1992), The Men of Brewster Place (1998), and 1996 (2005). Her fiction depicts how black men and women struggle to survive and succeed in the oppressive world of racism. Her fictional world generally contains portions of her own life and looks more convincing as she is the part of what she writes “that outline did not say that black was beautiful, it did not say that black was ugly. It said simply: You are. You exist. It reverberated enough to give me courage to pick up the pen. And it’s what finally validated me” (Naylor 171). With a great confidence and authority she writes about the places and the people she is well acquainted with. Naylor’s fictional world is singularly a world of black community, and she selects her characters from its all layers--working to upper class one, and urban North to rural South. The uniqueness of her characters is that they are individuals, capable of controlling, to a certain extent, their own destinies. Her novels bear the literary influence of the
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple takes place in Georgia from 1910 to 1940. During this time racism was easily visible and apparent in society. Black people were seen as lesser beings in contrast to their white counterparts. However, not only are all of the colored characters within The Color Purple forced, by means of oppression, into their social positions because they are not white, but also because some of them are women, lesbian, and lower class. As Crenshaw explains, “[b]ecause of their intersectional identity as both women and of color within discourses that are shaped to respond to one or the other, women of color are marginalized within both” (Crenshaw 5). Celie, the main character in the novel, is given enormous adult responsibility from a young age. After the death of her mother, she is pulled out of school in order to...