This chapter analyzes Black writing from the leadup to the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century, works that shored up the literate voice long denied to enslaved people, and explores how the pre-emancipation essay served to determine freedom. The century’s standout Black orator, Frederick Douglass, became a print phenomenon, advancing a strong first-person voice that spoke for the conscience of the nation. However, it was left to younger writers to tackle the meaning of freedom at a time when emancipation seemed like a hollow promise. The works of activist journalist Ida B. Wells highlight the synergy between investigative reporting and essay writing during the period. The chapter concludes by comparing the prose works of two towering figures: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. The ideological split in their views on civil rights is registered in their different writing styles, with Washington stressing action and advocacy and Du Bois embracing introspection and contemplation. Between them, these figures register the suite of oratorical, journalistic, and literary resources that will be bequeathed to twentieth-century practitioners of the African American essay.

Margaret Bonds’s Credo sets the nine articles of W. E. B. Du Bois’s iconic manifesto for global equality – first penned in 1904, revised in 1920, and modeled on the sacred symbol of the arch – as a symmetrical set of seven movements for soloists, chorus, and piano (1965) or orchestra (1965–67). This chapter offers a close reading of Du Bois’s anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, pacifist text and examines the means by which Bonds translated it into a musical structure all her own that reflects diverse influences ranging from gospel song through the cantatas of J. S. Bach (whom she called “the father of all good music”), also emphasizing womanist themes that are at best minimally present in Du Bois’s text.

The chapter explores efforts to answer how a community premised on a dislocation from the past, but comprised of people who bring with them their own pasts, locates itself in time. How does a community constituted by other pasts not simply blur into those pasts? I argue that in both Rome and the United States a particular type of Stranger, the corrosive Stranger, is constructed in response to this question. The corrosive Stranger is not defined against some preexistent purity, but is used to construct an imagined purity that gives a community a genealogy that distinguishes it from other communities and also posits a notion of true belonging that is different from juridical membership. I look at the different efforts by Cato the Elder, Cicero, and Varro for the Romans and then by Noah Webster for the United States to craft a genealogy of national identity that is defined against the threats of the corrosive Stranger. I then look at attempts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington to confront the burden of memory reflected in the Stranger marked by race who carries America’s own memory.

Watch Night began when enslaved and free African Americans kept vigil, to sing and pray, on December 31, 1862, as they awaited news in the morning of the Emancipation Proclamation. Their optimism gave way to the nominal freedoms and rights of citizenship that African American families and communities experienced in the wake of emancipation and during Reconstruction. African American writers of these decades introduce descriptions of African landscapes, customs, values, and histories as metaphors for the uncertain status and tentative futures their people confronted after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. They associate the African continent with a variety of meanings: the brutal history of slavery; the erasure or dismissal of influential cultures and intellects; a persistent legacy of resistance to oppression and rebellion against bondage; the fugitive status of African Americans in their own country and as exiles abroad; and the precarity of racial progress even as Black schools, churches, and other self-sufficient institutions are established by formerly enslaved Black southern communities.

This chapter explores Black masculinity and celebrity at the turn of the century through the lives of American statesman Frederick Douglass, educator Booker T. Washington, scholar/activist W. E. B. DuBois, fiction writer Charles W. Chesnutt, and boxer Jack Johnson, the first African American world heavyweight champion. Johnson’s athletic accomplishments and diverse cultural interests, along with his uncompromisingly bold personality, set a new tone for Black masculinity in the first decade of the twentieth century. His celebrity status, mediated by his status as a Black man, provided him a public platform unprecedented for an African American man. On that platform, he embraced his Black working-class heritage, critiqued the dubious history and practice of colonialism, and unapologetically revealed his preference for socializing with white women. Johnson presented, in both his actions and his physical dominance of white men in the ring, the major issues, aspirations, and concerns in the lives and work of this quartet of Black men.

This chapter looks closely at 1906, an exceptional year in which the first half celebrated the achievements and progress in educational matters and race relations, while the second half was dominated by an increasing wave of racial discrimination, injustice, and unrest. In many ways 1906 can be seen as a pivotal year in the decade 1900–10, with the first half of it marked by African American achievements in literary production and expanded educational opportunities, while the second part saw the dramatic reentrenchment of racial antagonisms – as displayed in the Atlanta race riots and critical challenges within the ranks of Black leadership. Examining the Colored American Magazine, a New York–based Black monthly controlled, in 1906, by Booker T. Washington, and the Voice of the Negro, the more radical, Atlanta-based Black paper, as well as other Black newspapers and magazines, this chapter explores how a framework of blessings and disasters sheds light on turn-of-the-century developments in three critical, interrelated areas: literary production, education and school policy, and racial unrest.