There are many reasons why increasing diversity in publishing is important. For one, it’s just ethical to give everyone a fair chance at being published, especially if their writing has an audience. Secondly, hearing the perspective of different groups from people who have lived those experiences rewrites harmful narratives.
What’s more, stories are spiritual.
Just about every civilization ever has had an origin story. These creation myths have tied people to their land, explained their reason for living, guided them, and given them purpose. The most important thing, though, is that every group has been able to tell its own story.
When Black people were first brought to the Americas, our stories were told for us. Our origin stories, the things meant to explain our history and guide us, for the longest time were written by other people. Which is to say that they haven’t been written at all. A history-less people are not worthy of autonomy, after all.
Writing our origins back into our collective narrative is what many Black writers have done throughout the different literary eras. A young Langston Hughes, who radically wrote as the collective Negro who spoke of rivers—from the Euphrates to the Nile to the Mississippi—did so during the Harlem Renaissance of the ’20s.
But let me back up a bit.
Protest Writing and the Narratives of the Enslaved
Before Hughes was even born, there were Black folks literally risking life and limb to learn to read. Anti-literacy laws made it illegal for Black people to learn to read, and for people to teach them to read. Still, many saw how white people benefitted from being educated and knew that it was a path to a better life—one where they could make their own records of births and marriages.
One of the main reasons for the anti-literacy laws was Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831. White enslavers thought that if enslaved people could read, it would aid them in escaping bondage. And they were right. Learning to read and write allowed Black people to free themselves and others by writing things like travel passes and free papers. It helped them to imagine “a world beyond the bondage.”
And so, the first words we wrote of our origin were of freedom and resistance.
Other writings by Black Americans from around this time were concerned with disproving the white narrative of Black inferiority—like Phillis Wheatley’s book of poetry—or showing the inhumanity of slavery, as Frederick Douglass did with The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.
As America went from slavery through a civil war and then a reconstruction period, Black people were still writing to show our humanity. Then, two titans in the world of Black thought and writing emerged: Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.
Washington tried to show with his autobiography Up from Slavery that all Black people needed to do to succeed in life was lift themselves up by their bootstraps and prove their worth. Du Bois, on the other hand, stressed that the main barrier to decent living that Black folks faced was racism, and he emphasized the importance of civil rights.
The Harlem Renaissance
In 1909, Du Bois, along with other people like journalism icon Ida B. Wells, created the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A year later, the NAACP started printing a magazine called The Crisis.
Once the young, New Jersey-born writer Jessie Redmon Fauset became The Crisis’s first literary editor, she debuted writers who would go on to make history: Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Anne Spector, and Claude McKay.
These and other writers, like Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Nella Larsen, and others, contributed to the literary component of the Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937), an era of Black culture where Black art, music, and literature was in a place it’d never been before. Where many of the older creative works by Black Americans saw to prove our worthiness and adhered to respectability politics, the Harlem Renaissance wrestled with the idea of what it meant to be Black in America, outside of how white people saw it. It was queer, lively, and proudly reveled in Black culture as it was.
Works like The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, Passing by Nella Larsen, and Cane by Jean Toomer helped define the era.
The Chicago Black Renaissance
Then came the Great Depression, and the steam of the Harlem Renaissance lessened. But out of the Depression and WWII emerged another Black literary movement: the Chicago Black Renaissance. It lasted from the ’30s to the ’50s, seemed to pick up where the Harlem Renaissance left off, and made Chicago the new hub of Black expression—from jazz and theater to, of course, writing.
From this movement came literary icons Richard Wright (Native Son), Gwendolyn Brooks (who was the first Black American to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Annie Allen), and the award-winning playwright Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun). Where Harlem’s Renaissance concerned itself with writing new definitions of Blackness, Chicago’s Renaissance produced more realist works and more strongly tied Black people to activism, community, and the working class.
The activism of the Chicago Renaissance bled into civil rights writing—which James Baldwin (one of Richard Wright’s protégés) wrote about—and, in combination with the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, ushered in the Black Arts Movement.
The Black Arts Movement
Playwright and poet Amiri Baraka is said to have fathered this new movement, which called for the creation of Black art—especially theater and poetry—as a means of expressing Black pride and attaining liberation. This era produced poets like Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Gil Scott-Heron. From it also came novels like John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which came nine months after Malcolm X’s assassination and inspired Angela Davis’s autobiography, Angela Davis.
Some of the art of this time could be bold and even alienating. It sought to tell the state of Black life without a sugar coating.
Then came the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance.
The Black Women’s Literary Renaissance
By the ’70s, Black women writers had already started to carve out a distinct space in the American literary landscape. Refuting the sexism of some of the major works of the Black Arts Movement—and of the country at large, let’s be real—the women of this particular renaissance wrote about activism, reproductive justice, and queerness.
The Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning Toni Morrison led the renaissance with the release of The Bluest Eye in 1970—which centered a poor Black girl, an unusual thing for the time—followed by Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved. But even before the ’70s, Morrison had been behind the publishing of books by Black culture icons, such as Huey P. Newton, Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis, and Toni Cade Bambara, who edited The Black Woman: An Anthology, an intentionally affordable collection of essays, short stories, and poems by Black women writers of the time.
Other writers who made their mark during the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance were Maya Angelou and Alice Walker.
Afrofuturism
The popularity of Toni Morrison’s and Alice Walker’s works opened the door for even more books that critiqued gender, race, and class, and in the ’90s, a new genre of books, movies, and art emerged that incorporated Black history with technology and hope for the future: Afrofuturism. Among the most well-known Afrofuturist writers is Octavia E. Butler, whose science fiction subverted largely white male-centric science fiction narratives just as often as they were prescient (look to Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents for a frighteningly accurate portrayal of where we are now).
I wouldn’t say there is any particular Black literary movement going on now, though Black writers are still exploring many of the same themes their forebears did. Looking back through the different eras of Black writing, you could say that trends in Black writing have mirrored social movements. You could also say that Black writing wrote into those movements, giving them form and momentum.
No matter what, though, it’s clear that through the writing of resistance, self-definition, and activism, we’ve been able to write our own narrative. Our own origin story.