Huey P. Newton

Huey Percy Newton (b. 1942–d. 1989) is a singular figure in African American history. Born in Monroe, Louisiana to Armelia Johnson and Walter Newton, he joined the Great Migration as a child when his family relocated to Oakland, California. He graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1959, but forever claimed that school failed him, notably in the fact that he graduated without learning to read. Alongside self-directed learning, he then studied at Merritt College in Oakland, one of the city’s hotbeds of political discussion and activism. After joining, and becoming disillusioned by, a sequence of campus organizations, in October 1966 he formed the Black Panther Party (BPP) with his friend and fellow student Bobby Seale, who credits Newton as the principal architect of the BPP’s political philosophy and the driving force behind its early activism. The BPP initially focused on protesting police brutality in Oakland, most importantly through a sequence of patrols of police officers, which involved armed Panthers observing police activities in Oakland, informing local citizens of their legal rights during any arrest procedure and ensuring that the police conducted their duties lawfully and respectfully; and the May 1967 protest at the California State Capitol, one of the central events of the 1960s (although Newton was absent from the latter due to probation restrictions). On 28 October 1967 he was charged with the murder of Oakland police officer John Frey. The subsequent trial transformed the BPP and Newton into international phenomena. Despite a fervent “Free Huey” campaign and a bravura defense from his attorney, Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. He served two years in prison, being released after his appeal revealed that the presiding judge of his original trial twice incorrectly instructed the jury and allowed disputed evidence to be presented to the jury. Two further retrials led to deadlocked juries. Returning in August 1970 to a transformed BPP, Newton struggled to cope with the fame and expectations placed upon him. Just as important was an extensive FBI campaign of disinformation, surveillance, infiltration, and occasional violence. Newton’s long-term use of cocaine did little to help. In 1974 he fled the United States for Cuba, fearing prosecution for the murder of a teenager, Kathleen Smith. He returned in 1977 to face the charges, which were eventually dropped. Following the collapse of the BPP amid accusations of financial impropriety, Newton essentially disappeared from public life. He was shot and killed in West Oakland by Tyrone Robinson, a local gang member, following an altercation over a drug deal.

Blackface Minstrelsy

According to most scholars whose primary focus is on this topic, minstrel shows were one of the most disgraceful yet complex chapters in the history of American musicals. Popularized during the early to mid-19th century, minstrelsy incorporated and emphasized the prevailing racism, racial stereotypes, and white supremacy mentality that had permeated almost every aspect of American society since the mid-1600s. More specifically, minstrel shows transferred and translated concepts of race and racism into a form of leisure activity in which ridiculous and obscene Black American images, such as “Sambo” or “Zip Coon,” who were slow witted “plantation darky” and ignorant free Black Americans, were used to justify racial segregation, political oppression, and at times, uncontrolled racial violence. Despite the ongoing debate within the academy, most scholars contend that the first series of minstrel shows emerged during the 1820s, reached their zenith soon after the Civil War ended, and remained relatively popular well into the early 1900s. As America’s first form of popular entertainment, during its origins minstrel shows were performed by white men, mostly of Irish descent, who blackened their faces with burnt cork, cooled ashes, or dirt and began to ridicule and depict a distorted view of African American life on southern plantations through both songs and dances. Additionally, Black Americans were normally shown as naive buffoons or uncontrollable children who danced their way through and expressed a fondness for the system of slavery. At the same, this musical genre also helped to launch the careers of many well-known entertainers of the era, both African Americans and non-African Americans, such as James Bland, Stephen Foster, Al Jolson, and Bert Williams. In the end, the culture that embraced this type of “popular entertainment” was either wholly enchanted by such racially charged images or took these images as the truth about the history and experience of all African Americans. Additional scholars such as Eric Lott and Robert Toll contend that the origins, development, and legacy of minstrelsy, especially after the mid-1840s, in some ways, was a response to the economic depression of the 1830s and early 1840s, as an attempt to reassure the dominate white society that their societal status and political dominance would continue for decades to come. In some ways, these notions are still alive today. Finally, many studies on the topic of minstrelsy can be divided into historical periods such as: (1) early writings (1930s–1950s); (2) the revisionist era (1960s and 1970s); and the contemporary era (1980s to the present).

Paul Robeson

Many intellectuals describe Paul Robeson as one of the nation’s greatest musicians, scholars, actors, athletes, and activists of the 20th century. Born on 9 April 1898, in Princeton, New Jersey, Robeson was the youngest of five children born to William Drew Robeson, a runway enslaved African American who went on to graduate from Lincoln University, a historical black college located in Pennsylvania, and Maria Louisa Bustill, a biracial Quaker who was also from Pennsylvania and came from a family of abolitionists. Without question, Robeson’s fame as an athlete on the football field, on the theater stage, in the concert hall, in films, as an activist, and as a leader for social change and justice has been documented in a variety of ways. His being blacklisted and the seizure of his passport by the US government for his anti-colonialism stance and articulation for certain forms of socialism during the 1940s and 1950s has also received much attention from scholars. But most folks do not know about his humble beginnings. For instance, in 1910 the Robeson family moved to Somerville, New Jersey, a relatively large town located between Westfield and Princeton, New Jersey. This is where Paul’s father, Reverend William Drew Robeson, served as pastor of the St. Thomas AME Zion Church until his untimely death in 1918. As a youngster, Paul was a very bright student who attended a local all-Black elementary school, where he graduated at the head of the class. Upon his graduation, his father, although very proud of him, seemed to not show any great enthusiasm. Many years later Robeson recalled, “I guess . . . it was only what he expected of me,” and that he “was never satisfied with a school mark of 95 when 100 was possible.” This attitude, Robeson, continued, was not because his “Pop” wanted perfection. It was rather a sign of his belief in the concept of “personal integrity,” which included the idea of “maximum human fulfillment.” Thus, Robeson proclaimed that “success in life was not to be measured in terms of money and personal advancement, but rather the goal must be the richest and highest development of one’s own potential.” These words embodied and directed the rest of the life of Paul Robeson until his death in 1976, at the age of seventy-seven. More importantly, Robeson’s philosophical framework and political activism can be divided into four main areas: Religion; Anti-colonialism and Pan-Africanism; Music and Theater Performances; and Human Rights.

“Soul!” (Famous!) TV Program with Ellis Haizlip

Soul! was a publicly funded cultural affairs television program that aired for five seasons on Public Broadcasting Service affiliates in the United States from 1968 to 1973. Its first season aired on New York public television, and after that it was distributed nationally via the Public Broadcasting Service. A showcase for Black arts, culture, and politics, Soul! was closely associated with the producer and host Ellis Haizlip, a Black gay man, who emphasized a vision of “soul” culture that was eclectic, inclusive, and aligned with the radical political energies of the Black Power movement. Soul! provided a powerful platform for Black musicians and other artists and public figures at a time when their access to national TV was severely constrained. It also employed Black women in significant on- and off-camera roles and helped vault the poet Nikki Giovanni to national prominence. Filmed live in a small New York studio, Soul! included an in-studio audience within its representational frame, giving viewers an opportunity to see audiences reacting to guests. These guests ranged from the gospel singer Marion Williams to the soul singer Al Green; from the dancer George Faison to the spoken-word group The Last Poets; and from the activist and entertainer Harry Belafonte to Black Panthers leader Kathleen Cleaver. Other notable Soul! guests included Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, writer and activist James Baldwin, singer-actor Novella Nelson, and musicians including Labelle, Earth, Wind and Fire, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Horace Silver, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Valerie Ashford and Nick Simpson. As a Black-produced TV show aimed explicitly at Black audiences, Soul!’s trajectory was always precarious. Early funding for the show came from New York public broadcasting and the Ford Foundation, liberal institutions eager to support Black media in the wake of uprisings following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. However, backlash to the Black Power movement—as represented by the election of “law and order” candidate Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential election—translated into attempts to silence Black public media. Despite evidence that it resonated powerfully with Black viewers, the show was cancelled in 1973. Soul! inspired innumerable writers, performers, and technicians to seek opportunities in television. It set a mark for television that sought to entertain and educate, keeping an eye on diversity within the Black collective.

Audley Moore

Audley Moore (b. 1898–d. 1997) was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, to St. Cyr and Ella Moore and had a relatively happy girlhood in New Orleans until the death of both parents left her and her sisters, Eloise and Loretta, orphaned. Her activist life began shortly after when she joined Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in New Orleans in 1922. Moore’s fervor for Black Nationalism led her to migrate to Harlem—the location of UNIA headquarters—in the late 1920s. When she arrived, the UNIA had dissipated, but the Communist Party had taken its place as a group successfully organizing the local Black community. Moore joined the Communist Party and worked within it to organize the Black working class. By 1935, she was a lead recruiter and organizer for the Upper Harlem Branch of the Party. Her work at the grassroots level led to citywide, Party-backed appointments including managing communist candidate Ben Davis’s successful campaign for a New York City Council seat in 1944. During and after World War II, she worked with a range of Black leftist organizations including the National Negro Congress, the Civil Rights Congress, and the National Council of Negro Women. When 1950s anticommunist hysteria targeted communists and progressives alike, Moore left the Party and struck out on her own. In the second half of the 20th century Moore sowed the seeds of Black Nationalism across the United States. Moore fostered gender-conscious Black Nationalism and started the modern reparations movement through her New Orleans–based group, the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women (UAEW). She also nurtured Black Nationalism and reparations activity through Black Power–era organizations such as the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Republic of New Africa, and the Black Panther Party. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Moore served as a mother and mentor of the radical Black liberation movement, taking on the honorific “Queen Mother.” She was a sought-after teacher and theoretician who traveled globally. For example, Moore was the keynote speaker at the All-Africa Women’s Conference in Tanzania 1972 and a personal guest of Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere and Guinean President Sekou Touré in subsequent years. She was also member of other Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist groups such as the All-African People’s Party and the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations (N’COBRA), among others. She passed away in Brooklyn, New York, on 2 May 1997.

Tricksters in African, African American, and Caribbean Folktales and Cultures

The trickster is one of the most complex and widespread archetypes of Pan-African literatures and cultures, such as those from Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean. It is a folk character who invokes a multiplicity of meanings, including transcendence of boundaries between good and bad, morality and immorality, truth and lie, and many other entities. Dwelling on third, sacred, innocuous, and marginalized spaces, the trickster is a universal figure whose location in crossroads or other unusual spaces epitomizes the forced or voluntary alienation of individuals and communities from around the world. Therefore, the trickster is more than the childlike character who enjoys duping other pranksters and being “naughty.” In Pan-African traditions, the trickster is an animal or human character whose situation and movements symbolize the harsh conditions of millions of people of African descent due to brutal historical forces such as slavery, colonialism, and other oppressions. In the Americas, Europe, and other locations where they were brought, enslaved Africans carried knowledge of the trickster persona from their folktales and cultures, and later blended this tradition with lore and customs of Europeans and Native Americans in the New World. Thus, although it was one of the most brutal human experiences, the transatlantic slave trade led to the formation of hybridity, or cultural mixing, embodied in the rich spoken and written Pan-African narratives in which trickster figures deploy various strategies to resist oppression, assert their humanity, and gain freedom. The works mentioned in this study reflect the historical, social, political, and cultural backgrounds out of which trickster icons of selected Pan-African folktales came. Such works reveal the hybridism and survival strategies that enslaved Africans developed in the United States and the Caribbean by mixing their African traditions with Native American, European, and other customs. Understanding such cultural diversity will enable scholars and students of Pan-African folklore to have the open-mindedness that is necessary to study the vast traditions that influenced such customs. To guide readers, this bibliography gives a comprehensive list of major collections of African, African American, and Caribbean folktales, tale-types, motifs, and scholarly studies of such narratives published since the early 20th century. The bibliography shows that enslaved Africans did not come to the New World as blank slates. Instead, these populations had folklore, knowledge, memories, and practices that helped them to resist oppression and affirm their humanity.

Frederick Douglass

Born enslaved on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Frederick Douglass (b. February 1818–d. 20 February 1895) became the most prominent African American of the 19th century. Although he escaped slavery under his own volition at the age of twenty, he has been often remembered as the nation’s most famous former slave. This is partly due to the sustained popularity of his first autobiography (of three), which became a “best seller” when it was first published in 1845. Even today it remains the most widely read narrative of enslavement. Douglass lived and strove for justice for fifty-seven years after reaching freedom. Just over two years after escaping to the North, he began his career as an antislavery lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. By 1847, he was widely recognized as an internationally known orator, abolitionist, and advocate for black freedom in America. That same year, Douglass began publishing his own weekly abolitionist paper and soon after moved his family to Rochester, New York, where he resided until 1872. By 1851 he parted ways with the radical Garrisonians, adopting the belief that the US Constitution was indeed an antislavery document. During the Civil War and after, he formed a staunch attachment to the Republican Party, while maintaining an active lecture and editing career pushing for African American suffrage and civil rights. He met with several presidents and held minor Republican posts. Eventually he served as US minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891. Famous in his own time, Douglass was an exceptional American who remains representative of his 19th-century world and helps modern historians and ordinary citizens see the past more clearly. He was the most photographed American of the 19th century, and certainly he remains today the most quoted African American. Because of his outstanding record of achievements obtained in his lifetime, and the timeless resonance of his life and his words, Douglass remains one of the most studied figures in American history and culture.

Nat Turner’s Rebellion

In Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner and six other men launched the deadliest slave revolt in the history of the United States. The revolt began in the middle of the night, August 21–22, 1831, and by the middle of the day on August 22 the rebels had killed nearly five dozen whites, including many women and children. Whites responded in many ways. Many panicked, and some rallied to oppose the rebels. Some of these irregular white forces stumbled upon Turner and his men at James Parker’s farm, not far from Jerusalem, Southampton’s county seat. The encounter ended quickly and indecisively, but the whites had stopped the rebel advance. Following this first battle, Turner tried to rally his men, something that became increasingly hard to do as more and more whites from nearby counties in Virginia and North Carolina came to Southampton. By the morning of August 23, the rebels were defeated at a series of engagements and the organized phase of the revolt ended. Whites quickly and brutally reasserted their control over Southampton, torturing many of the accused and killing roughly three dozen black suspects without trials. Worried about the possibility of a more extensive bloodbath, white leaders in Southampton, who knew that owners were compensated for the value of their slaves who had been condemned by the state, soon clamped down on the extralegal massacre of suspected rebels. On August 31, 1831, trials of suspect rebels began. By the time that the trials were finished the following spring, thirty slaves and one free black had been condemned to death. Of these people, nineteen were executed in Southampton, and twelve had their sentences commuted to transportation from the state of Virginia. Turner himself, one of the condemned, was hanged on November 11, 1831, although not before Thomas R. Gray, a lawyer who was defense council for other slave rebels, interviewed the jailed rebel leader. Gray published this transcript as The Confessions of Nat Turner, which presented Turner’s religious motivations. Immediately after the revolt, several southern state legislatures took up laws regulating slavery; the Virginia legislature also considered and rejected a gradual emancipation scheme. Since the revolt, Nat Turner and his legacy have been contested by many, including scholars, novelists, artists, and filmmakers.

Theater and Performance in the 19th Century

Theater and performance of the long 19th century (1789–1914) is one of the most dynamic fields in African American studies today. Scholars have turned to these embodied practices to understand the achievements, hardships, and imaginaries of black life in this period because enslaved and free African Americans were often denied access to, or the wherewithal to use, the archivable materials we traditionally use for historical research. The field has devised innovative methodologies and reading practices to reimagine and theorize the aesthetics, affects, labor demands, and politics of African American theater and performance in this period. These critical strategies have helped to offset some of the challenges that hinder the study of all live performance. In spite of these limitations, generative observations of theatrical and performance cultures of the enslaved and free African Americans are available, albeit often beneath layers of condemnation, mockery, and scorn. This article focuses on primary works that document, and criticism that analyzes, the origins and evolution of African American theater culture from the late 18th century up to but not including the New Negro (or Harlem) Renaissance (c. 1920). It also offers representative studies of contemporaneous dance and music that help to contextualize black theatrical practice, but it leaves the bulk of that scholarship to other bibliographies. Major archival collections, canonical play texts, and a broad range of criticism clustered in major scholarly categories of African American theater and performance of the era are included here.

Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden (b. 1911–d. 1988) is an artist best known for his inventive collage methods, evident in his production from the mid-1950s to the time of his death. Influenced by synthetic cubism, fauvism, and German expressionism, Bearden created intimate collages of cut-out magazine and book images—figures and forms of everyday life and of canonical art from around the world as well. The collages served as the basis of other projects in which Bearden photographed, photocopied, and enlarged them to produce matte, black-and-white prints. Bearden also made unique mixed media work, bringing together a variety of papers and materials and reworking the bas-relief surfaces additively with paint, ink, and graphite and subtractively by abrading them. His mature production included watercolor drawings, oil monoprints, sculpture, limited edition prints (etchings, lithographs, and serigraphs), fabric and textile work, and commissioned public murals and stage design as well. A student of George Grosz during the 1930s, Bearden started out as a social realist painter who admired Mexican muralism of the period that heroicized the poor and working classes and satirized the rich and powerful. Early in his career, Bearden was a political cartoonist and illustrator for student publications at Boston University and New York University as well as for African American newspapers and magazines. In search of universal themes, Bearden, in an expressionist mode, interpreted ancient Greek myths, biblical narratives, and Federico Garcia Lorca’s poems during the 1940s, a decade during which he enjoyed some success. His work was included in the annuals of major museums and in African American art surveys, and it was the subject of monographic exhibitions organized by galleries in New York and Washington, DC, even during World War II when he served in the US Army. The Museum of Modern Art and Bryn Mawr College acquired his paintings. When support for Bearden’s art dwindled, he traveled in Europe for several months, and, once back in the United States, he returned to his job as a New York City social worker. He also took up songwriting, penning lyrics for jazzy tunes and romantic ballads that won popular acclaim. Encouraged by friends, among them Hannah Arendt and Henrich Blucher, Bearden returned to visual art making in the mid-1950s. He made abstract paintings and Dada-influenced collages. The latter mostly featured people of African descent as totemic forms and as dramatis personae in diverse narrative traditions. The iconic figures of his compositions included working-class African Americans whom he knew from spending summers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his grandmother, Harlem’s Big Band leaders, and black healers, conjurers, and musicians from the rural US South and from the Caribbean island of St. Martin. An artist, curator, writer, and community organizer, Bearden often worked collaboratively: he co-wrote books on art theory and art history and he co-founded artists’ groups and art exhibitions spaces. A humanist and anti-racist activist, Bearden was a vocal advocate for the arts, for African Americans, and for greater opportunities for artists of all races and backgrounds.