Walkin' the Talk: An Anthology of African American Studies / Edition 1

by Bill Lyne, Vernon Damani Johnson

Overview

With a wide selection of literary, political, historical, and critical texts from the eighteenth century to the present, Walkin' The Talk provides a deep and multifaceted view of African American life and culture. Both the familiar and the sometimes neglected authors collected in this anthology create the richest possible context for the study of the experience of Africans in America. An ideal book for courses in African American Literature, History, Ethics of Race, and Black Studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780130420169
Publisher:	Pearson
Publication date:	07/28/2002
Pages:	832
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.96(h) x 0.93(d)

Table of Contents

	Preface	xiii
	Introduction	xv
	Foreword	xxi
Part 1	New World Slavery	1
	from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)	2
	Chapter 1	2
	Chapter 9	12
	from Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787)	24
	On Being Brought from Africa to America (1773)	37
	To the University of Cambridge, in New-England (1776)	37
	To His Excellency General Washington (1773)	38
	Letter to Thomas Jefferson (1791)	40
	from Notes on the State of Virginia (1789)	43
	Of National Characters (1754)	49
	On National Characteristics (1764)	52
	Varieties of the Human Species (1797)	54
	from The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975)	58
	from The Black Jacobins (1963)	66
	from The Other American Revolution (1980)	75
Part 2	Black Resistance and Abolition	79
	The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831)	80
	David Walker's Appeal To the Colored Citizens Of The World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of The United States Of America (1831)	96
Article I96
Article II103
	An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America (1843)	115
	from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845)	121
	Chapter II	121
	Chapter VI	124
	Chapter VII	126
	Chapter X	130
	from My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)	151
	Chapter III	151
	Chapter XVII	156
	Address to the Ohio Women's Rights Convention (1851)	164
	from The Condition, Elevation, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (1852)	165
	Chapter II	165
	Chapter VI	172
	Chapter VII	173
	from Our Nig (1859)	182
	Chapter I, "Mag Smith, My Mother"	182
	from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)	186
	Chapter V, "The Trials of Girlhood"	186
	Chapter VI, "The Jealous Mistress"	188
	Chapter XII, "Fear of Insurrection"	193
	from The Negro in the American Rebellion (1866)	197
	Chapter VI, "The John Brown Raid"	197
	The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Birth of Women's Rights (1981)	200
	Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom (1995)	210
Part 3	Reconstruction	219
	13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States	220
	from Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868)	222
	Chapter IX, "Behind the Scenes"	222
	from Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935)	226
	Chapter VIII, "Transubstantiation of a Poor White"	226
Part 4	The Jim Crow Era	241
	Bury Me in a Free Land (1864)	242
	Aunt Chloe's Politics (1872)	243
	Songs for the People (1895)	243
	Woman's Political Future (1893)	244
	from A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892)	248
	"Has America a Race Problem; If So, How Can It Best Be Solved?"	248
	From A Red Record (1895)	258
	Chapter I, "The Case Stated"	258
	Chapter VI, "History of Some Cases of Rape"	264
	The Barbarous Decision of the Supreme Court (1889)	274
	from Up From Slavery (1901)	281
	Chapter XIV, "The Atlanta Exposition Address"	281
	from The Sport of the Gods (1902)	290
	Chapter VII, "In New York"	290
	from The Souls of Black Folk (1903)	295
	Chapter I, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings"	295
	Chapter III, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others"	301
	A New Crowd--A New Negro (1919)	311
	The Caucasian Storms Harlem (1927)	314
	The Future As I See It (1923)	322
	Goodbye Christ (1932)	326
	The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921)	327
	The Weary Blues (1925)	327
	Harlem [1] (1951)	328
	Ballad of the Landlord (1940)	329
	The Backlash Blues (1967)	330
	Bombings in Dixie (1967)	331
	If We Must Die (1919)	332
	The White House (1922)	332
	To the White Fiends (1919)	333
	America (1921)	333
	White Things (1923)	334
	Common Dust (1922)	335
	The Proletariat Speaks (1929)	336
	Class Room (1929)	338
	The Lynching (1928)	339
	Bottled (1923)	340
	Heritage (1923)	342
	El Beso (1923)	343
	from The Black Worker (1931)	344
	Chapter XVIII, "The 'New' Negro and Post-War Unrest"	344
	The Gilded Six-Bits (1933)	356
	Insatiate (1936)	365
	Lines to a Sophisticate (1936)	366
Part 5	Civil Rights and Black Power	367
	from If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945)	368
	Chapter II	368
	Chapter III	372
	from White Man Listen! (1957)	378
	Chapter 2, "Tradition and Industrialization"	378
	American Negroes and Africa's Rise to Freedom (1958)	395
	Letter From Birmingham Jail (1964)	399
	Not just an American problem, but a world problem (1965)	412
	The Slave (1964)	431
	from The Fire Next Time (1963)	456
	from No Name in the Street (1972)	467
	from The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967)	478
	"The Intellectuals and Force and Violence"	478
	from Soul on Ice (1968)	504
	"On Becoming"	504
	"The Black Man's Stake in Vietnam"	512
	Riot (1969)	517
	I Am a Black Woman (1969)	518
	from The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1967)	519
	Chapter 12	519
	from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970)	526
	Chapter 19	526
	from Seize the Time (1970)	529
	"The Panther Program"	529
	"Why We Are Not Racists"	535
	from The Black Aesthetic (1971)	538
	"Cultural Strangulation: Black Literature and the White Aesthetic"	538
	the lost baby poem (1972)	544
	Derrick Morrison
	Black Liberation and the Coming American Revolution (1974)	546
	and when the revolution came (1975)	562
Part 6	The Post-Industrial, Post-Civil Rights Era	565
	Power (1978)	566
	from The Declining Significance of Race (1978)	568
	Chapter 6, "Protests, Politics, and the Changing Black Class Structure"	568
	from Sister Outsider (1984)	583
	"Poetry Is Not a Luxury"	583
	"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House"	585
	from homegirls and handgrenades (1984)	589
	"Reflections After the June 12th March for Disarmament"	589
	"MIA's"	591
	from Afrocentricity (1988)	596
	Chapter 2, "The Constituents of Power"	596
	move (1993)	607
	from Beyond Black and White (1995)	609
	from Monster (1993)	616
	from Keeping Faith (1993)	623
	Chapter 5, "The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual"	623
	from Dilemmas of Black Politics (1993)	636
	"Black Mayoralties and the New Black Politics: From Insurgency to Racial Reconciliation"	636
	from Black Noise (1994)	663
	Chapter 1, "Voices From the Margins: Rap Music and Contemporary Black Cultural Production"	663
	History and Black Consciousness (1995)	678
	from Yo Mama's Disfunktional! (1997)	690
	"Looking for the 'Real' Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto"	690
	Race and Criminalization (1997)	708
	Demobilization in the New Black Political Regime (1997)	720
	African American Intercollegiate Athletes (2001)	743
	from Dumping in Dixie (2000)	757
	Chapter 1, "Environmentalism and Social Justice"	757
	A New Reality Is Better Than a New Movie! (1972)	776
	Black People & Jesse Jackson II (1984)	777
	Wise 10 (1995)	796
	Wise 11 (1995)	797
	Wise 12 (1995)	797
	Wise 13 (1995)	798
	Credits	799
	Index	803

Preface

The aim of this anthology is to provide a single affordable textbook that can be used for a variety of courses in African American Studies. It was invented out of necessity. In 1999, we found ourselves team teaching an introductory African American Studies course. In order to provide our students with all of the material that we wanted them to read, we had to order several expensive books and provide a packet of (mostly legal) copies. Despite the availability of an excellent array of single author introductory texts, mammoth literature anthologies, and all sorts of topical collections, we could find no single book that attempted to collect a sweep of primary texts and critical commentary that would allow us to survey the experience of Africans in~America from the eighteenth century to the present. Once the class had ended, and at the suggestion of Carrie Brandon at Prentice Hall, we set out to create the anthology that would allow us to teach our course without having to cobble together bits and pieces from a variety of disciplines and centuries. The result is Walkin' the Talk.

The book is grounded in the idea that African American history, politics, and culture are inseparable. As much as possible, we have tried to blur disciplinary boundaries, making no attempts to categorize our selections. We hope that this allows an instructor, rather than a book, to shape the direction and scope of a course. Our primary goal has been to create a book that can provide a rich context for each of its texts. We do not attempt to present Frederick Douglass as strictly a literary author, Angela Davis as strictly a political thinker, or Langston Hughes as only a poet. Rather, we tryto show how all of the writers in this anthology are contributors to the large and ongoing discussion that is African American discourse. And we hope that the book always encourages both students and instructors to recognize that this discourse doesn't end at the parlor or the classroom door, that the talk is never far from the walk. At the same time, we have tried to include a variety of discourses (such as the series of white supremacist tracts by eighteenth century philosophers) that help to illuminate the world context from which African American experiences emerge.

In selecting the texts for this anthology, we have also set out to correct what we see as a glaring omission in African American Studies. We have tried to represent and highlight the vibrant and rich tradition of African American radicalism. The dominant discourses of liberal integrationism and conservative nationalism are accounted for in most African American Studies textbooks, but African American radical and socialist thought rarely receive more than a brief mention. This attempt to be inclusive and to represent what is in fact a major tradition has led us to collect both texts by authors not usually anthologized, and not usually anthologized texts by always anthologized authors. In Walkin' the Talk readers will encounter the usually neglected voices of Nat Turner, A. Philip Randolph, Angela Davis, and Manning Marable. They will also find texts by W. E. B. Du Bois beyond The Souls of Black Folk, Langston Hughes's radical poetry, portions of Richard Wright's White Man, Listen!, and Amiri Baraka's extremely important but usually neglected work since 1975.

Our claims and goals are large ones, but if we have come even close to meeting them, we think this book will be useful in a variety of contexts. Walkin' the Talk should be ideal for interdisciplinary and introductory African American studies courses. It should also be a useful text for African American literature, history, and politics courses, especially those courses that want to create a larger context for their disciplinary discussions.

A lot of people have contributed to the making of this and deserve more than just the thanks we can offer here. We should begin by thanking the students in American Cultural Studies 204, especially Kim Morrison and Emily Thuma. The Bureau for Faculty Research at Western Washington University delivered timely funds. Christian Lee provided invaluable assistance along the way. The original readers of the proposal, Terry Kershaw, Virginia Tech; Kasey Morrison; University of Missouri-Columbia; Earl Smith, Wake Forest University; and Peter Ukpokodu, University of Kansas, all came through with important advice. We are extremely grateful for the counsel and insight of our friends and colleagues: Doug Park, Carol Guess, Donna Qualley, Adolph Reed, Jr., Bill Smith, Rick Emmerson, Christine Park, Mona Lyne, Hans von Rautenfeld, Jim Giffen, David Giffen, and June Hopkins. John Purdy and Laura Laffrado deserve special mention for their wonderful support. Ed Bereal's artistic insight and general grace have sustained us at key moments. The extremely patient and intelligent editing of Carrie Brandon is evident throughout the book. Tom DeMarco, Patty Donovan, and Karen Berry were both kind and helpful.

All thanks must always go to our families: Allison Giffen, Nicholas Lyne, Rebecca Johnson, Cedric Johnson, and Elizabeth Johnson.

Editorial Reviews

From the experience of slaves brought to 1789 America to considerations of the place of race in contemporary American society, the editors have compiled readings from the African American experience together in a volume designed to serve in an introductory African American studies course. Essays, analysis, literature, primary documents and polemics from a range of intellectuals and other writers help to show the variety of experience of African Americans throughout history. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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