Three Writers to Revisit (or Discover) as Black History Month Ends
By: Cynthia Giles
Tags: Writing, Literature, History, Women, Essay

Three Writers to Revisit (or Discover) as Black History Month Ends

Only one is famous, but all three broke new ground

Three very different writers . . .

Poet, playwright, activist, and educator Amiri Baraka (1934–2014) was famously controversial, under more than one name. Teacher, mentor, poet, and novelist Margaret Walker (1915–1998) broke new ground for women of color and changed the way black families were depicted in fiction. Attorney, poet, and storyteller Samuel Alfred Beadle (1857–1932) captured vignettes of black life in the south at the turn of the twentieth century.

Very different. But all three made significant contributions to modern American literature — and together, they represent a span of time that runs from the Civil War to the election of Barack Obama.

I have the privilege of knowing something about both Walker and Beadle because for a long time I wrote biographies of poets for Chadwyck-Healey’s reference series Literature Online. And LION strives to include in its database not only the most famous figures from every era, but also those who may be almost invisible to history.

One project involved profiling writers chosen for the Yale Younger Poets Series, which began in 1918. On that list was Margaret Walker—the first black woman ever to win a national literary prize in America.

In fact, she was the first person of color to be included in the Yale Younger Poets Series, which selects for publication only one outstanding poet under the age of thirty each year. In 1942, Walker’s impassioned collection For My People was chosen by the Series editor Stephen Vincent Benét (then one of America’s most popular poets).

Walker went on to become a respected educator and a successful writer, whose epic novel Jubilee was among the first works of fiction to present a realistic picture of black life in the time of slavery. Written over a period of nearly three decades, Jubilee was finally published in 1966, just after Walker earned a doctoral degree from the University of Iowa. And over the next twenty years, her pathbreaking novel was translated into seven languages, and sold more than a million copies.

Jubilee tells the story of Vyry, a character closely based on Walker’s maternal great-grandmother. The first part focuses on Vyry’s life as a slave and her complicated marriage to a free black man. The second depicts the destruction and violence of the Civil War, while the third follows Vyry’s struggles to establish a home for her family after their emancipation. The book’s fifty-eight chapters are rich with details of daily life, stories drawn from folklore, and scenes from history. Through all her trials, Vyry emerges as a resilient, even heroic woman who manages to maintain a strong spirit, but refuses to limit her freedom of mind with the burden of hate.

Throughout her life, Margaret Walker was an advocate for women of color and an outspoken commentator on issues of race and gender equality. After graduating from Northwestern University when she was just twenty, Walker worked for the Federal Writers Program (a project of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration), and became part of a politically engaged Chicago writing group led by controversial novelist Richard Wright. These experiences — in conjunction with a deep Christian faith — shaped not only her poetry, but her career as a teacher and mentor.

In 1949 Walker moved to Mississippi, where she taught for more than twenty years at Jackson State University, raised a family, and founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People.

By the time Walker arrived, Mississippi was very different from the state where Samuel Alfred Beadle lived for most of his life. He was among a number of young black men who studied law and became attorneys in the late nineteenth century, hoping to improve a justice system still severely biased by racism. He was also one of eight black writers in Mississippi whose works were published in the early twentieth century, and gained some recognition outside the state.

Despite the fact that he lived in such a politically charged time, Beadle focused most of his first volume — Sketches from Life in Dixie — on traditional themes such as love and courtship, spiritual reflection, and the follies of youth. It contained seven short stories and more than fifty poems, including a long heroic fantasy reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites. But there were also commentaries on the problems faced by black citizens, portrayed most notably in the poem “LINES. Suggested by the Assaults made on the Negro Soldiers as they passed through the south on their way to and from our war with Spain.”

“LINES” describes the experience of black soldiers who endured sometimes violent racial discrimination from their own countrymen. But with the poem’s refrain, Beadle returns always to patriotism and love of country.

For three decades, Beadle maintained a successful legal practice, but only by confronting many difficult challenges — and in the preface to his second poetry collection, Lyrics of the Underworld (1912), he expressed frustration with social conditions in the south. Featured in the book were sixteen striking photographs by Beadle’s son, who went on to become one of Mississippi’s best known black photographers.

In 1930, Beadle moved to Chicago — reversing the path taken by Margaret Walker — but lived there for only a short time before his death.

By contrast to those two writers, and their journeys between the deep south and the midwest, Amiri Baraka lived for most of eighty years in or near New York City. Born in 1934 as Leroy Jones, he grew up in Newark, New Jersey in a middle-class family, and earned a scholarship to Rutgers University. But within a year, as he began what would be a long-running quest for self-realization, Jones transferred to historically black Howard University.

By the time he graduated, Jones was disillusioned with what he saw as an emphasis on upward mobility at Howard, and decided to enlist in the Air Force rather than immediately pursuing a career. Along the way, he had changed the spelling of his name from Leroy to LeRoi.

While stationed in Puerto Rico, Jones began an ambitious self-directed reading program, focusing on literature (especially poetry), politics, and economics. These studies were conspicuously outside the Air Force mainstream, however, and raised suspicions that Jones might be a communist sympathizer — leading eventually to his dishonorable discharge.

But by then, LeRoi Jones had found his direction. In the years between 1958 and 1965, he became the only black writer to carve out a place in Manhattan’s frenetic, Beat-inspired literary scene. In addition to co-founding two small but influential publications, he attracted increasing attention as both a poet and a playwright. By 1964, when his controversial, racially charged play Dutchman won a prestigious Obie Award, Jones was one of the most talked-about writers in New York.

But a year later, outraged by the assassination of Malcolm X, he rejected the mostly-white Manhattan milieu, moved to Harlem, and started a short-lived black arts program. After that he returned to his home town of Newark, converted to Islam, and changed his name several times — ending up as Amiri Baraka. For a while he was involved with the Black Nationalist movement, but following a trip to revolutionary Cuba, he became an outspoken proponent of Third World Marxism.

These years of political activism and realignment were reflected in perhaps his most important poetry collection, Hard Facts, 1973–1975. And by the end of the 1970s, Baraka had established himself as both an important writer and an impassioned advocate for black identity.

In 1980, Baraka’s complex life took yet another turn. He joined the faculty of African Studies at SUNY-Stony Brook, where he would teach for the next two decades, and soon began a period of sustained literary accomplishment. His work garnered a Poetry Award from the National Endowment for the Arts (1981); a New Jersey Council for the Arts award (1982); an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (1984); a PEN-Faulkner Award (1989); the Langston Hughes Medal for outstanding contributions to literature (1989); a Foreign Poet Award from the Ferroni Foundation (1993); and the Playwright’s Award, Winston-Salem Black Drama Festival (1997).

After retiring from Stony Brook at the end of the century, Amiri Baraka once again became a controversial figure —expressing and later recanting anti-Semitic views about the World Trade Center bombing, then refusing public pressure to relinquish his appointment as poet laureate of New Jersey. But eventually the uproar died down, and although his literary work received much less attention in later years, Baraka was revered as a public figure. He continued writing until his death in 2014, and among his late works was an impassioned appreciation of Margaret Walker, who had passed away in 1998.

Looking back at these three figures, we see a continuing pattern of courage and determination. Samuel Alfred Beadle had the courage not only to pursue justice but to write poetry in a time and place still grappling with the very issues that had led to civil war. Margaret Walker had the courage to break through racial barriers in the American literary establishment, and the determination to transform her family’s experiences into a unique work of historical fiction. Amiri Baraka had the courage to express controversial ideas, and the creative persistence to reinvent himself several times over.

Through their work, each of these writers shed light on the experience of being black in America, and for that they deserve to be not only remembered but greatly appreciated.

Especially now.