In the 19th century, abolitionist and African-American periodicals printed thousands of poems by black men and women on such topics as bondage and freedom, hatred and discrimination, racial identity and racial solidarity, along with dialect verse that mythologized the Southern past. Early in the 20th century, black poets celebrated race consciousness in propagandistic and protest poetry, while World War I helped engender the outpouring of African-American creativity known as the "Harlem Renaissance." The present volume spans this wealth of material, ranging from the religious and moral...
In the 19th century, abolitionist and African-American periodicals printed thousands of poems by black men and women on such topics as bondage and ...
For his humanistic religious verse, his poignant and deeply personal antislavery poems, and, above all, his lifelong enthusiasm for liberty, nature, and the art of poetry, George Moses Horton merits a place of distinction among nineteenth-century African American poets. Enslaved from birth until the close of the Civil War, the self-taught Horton was the first American slave to protest his bondage in published verse and the first black man to publish a book in the South. As a man and as a poet, his achievements were extraordinary.
In this volume, Joan Sherman collects sixty-two of...
For his humanistic religious verse, his poignant and deeply personal antislavery poems, and, above all, his lifelong enthusiasm for liberty, nature, a...
