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Activist for African American Literature

© Walter Benefield

I am not an activist but if I had to choose, one agenda to champion my choice would be reading African American literature and Poetry.

William Raspberry, Washington Post columnist wrote an article entitled "Teacher for a Day." In this article Raspberry posed a question to his readers, what would you do if you were a teacher in an American Public school for a day? Raspberry answers his own question in the article in essence he said he would teach younger children how to speak the English language properly as a precursor to improve reading skills. I want to build on this idea and ask the question.

Why read African American Literature and Poetry?

Rita Dove, former poet laureate of the United States says, “reading the best books can kindle and keep alive an incredible joy for making words”, Dove was speaking of children reading.

Novelist Ishmael Reed, said of African American Literature it “is food for a deep life-time of study, not something to be squeezed into a quarter or semester.”

Up front, I want to say this is not a call to burn all books except those written by African Americans or about African Americans. I will be the first to say I love and appreciate all good literature regardless of the color of the author's skin.

If I were an activist, my agenda would be simple and stems from growing up African American in the 70's and 80's with no awareness of the creativity of African Americans outside of the realm of sports and the entertainment media. In place of going off on a long diatribe about the lack of African American Literature and its ill effects, Instead, I present a few examples to illustrate my point. The typical African American is more than likely familiar with Maya Angelou's autobiographic work "Why the Caged Bird sings", used extensively in high school literature classes and Richard Wright's "Native Son, the consummate African American protest novel or even Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”, an American classic. They may even know whom Langston Hughes or Gwendolyn Brooks are but how many African Americans are familiar with the work of poet Phillis Wheatley the first African American to have her work published. The typical African American if ask would not know that author Toni Morrison won both the Nobel prize for Literature in 1993 and the Pulitzer prize for her novel "Beloved." The contributions of African American in Literature and Poetry are too immense to list here, which further validates a need for the availability of African American literature in public and school libraries and homes.

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